Books: Bright Young Man

TOLSTOY As I KNEW HIM (439 pp.)—Tatyana A. Kuzminskaya—Macmillan ($5).

"The powerful means for achieving true happiness," noted candid young Leo Tolstoy in his diary, "[is] to spread out from oneself, in every direction, like a spider, a whole spider's web of love, and to catch in it everything that comes along—whether it is an old woman or a child, a girl or a policeman."

Tatyana Bers Kuzminskaya, who was born in 1846 and died in 1925, was no more than a child when she and her elder sisters, Liza and Sonya, were caught in...