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Susan Hitch joins an audience at the Royal College of Music to mark one hundred years since the death of
Leo Tolstoy, author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina - a writer whose works regularly appear in the top ten of the greatest novels of all time.

Susan's guests on stage are James Meek, former Moscow correspondent and prize-winning author of "The People's Act of Love" set in turn of the century Russia, and Anthony Briggs, translator of a recent edition of War and Peace and a biographer of Tolstoy.

We know Tolstoy is a great writer - but what about the man himself? James Meek and Anthony Briggs debate his personal influence. Why did he become such an international philosphical celebrity - with hordes of reporters despatched to his deathbed, logging Tolstoy's last hours and morsels consumed in minute detail? Do we need to remember him more as a spiritual teacher who counted Ghandhi amongst his followers, rather than a novelist? And do James and Anthony believe his books give signs of an author who embraced the diversity of human experience - or reveal what he believed to be his misanthropy and pessimism?

Part of a series of debates at this year's Proms Literary Festival celebrating the three Russian authors whose anniversaries fall this year: Chekhov, Pasternak and Tolstoy himself.

Producer: Natalie Steed.