A young prince in the imperial guard of Nicholas I suddenly leaves everything to go in search of holiness. And there begins for him an adventurous, overwhelming confrontation with an unknown God who dwells within him and at the same time in the whole universe. The long life of the prince-monk turns into a theological parable, in which every certainty is gradually destroyed and nothing remains, in the end, but an immense freedom, won through storms of pride, doubt, sensuality. Tolstoy wrote this short novel between 1890 and 1898 - at the height of preaching his personal, fundamentalist, anti-ecclesiastical, overbearingly heretical Christianity.