The Last Station (Movie Tie-in Edition): A Novel of Tolstoy's Final Year

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The pathos of a great man's last year, March 9, 2008
By Ralph Blumenau (London United Kingdom)

This review is from: The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy's Last Year (Paperback)

We are given a picture of Tolstoy's last year through a variety of voices: that of his wife, Sofya Andreyevna; of his daughter Sasha; of Valentin Fedorovich Bulgakov, his young secretary who had just been appointed; of Vladimir Grigorevich Chertkov, whom Tolstoy loved as his closest friend and disciple; and of Dushan Petrovich Makovitsky, Tolstoy's doctor. (They had in fact all kept diaries.) In between, we have passages from Tolstoy's letters, diary entries, and other writings, as well as some poems by `J.P.' who, I learn from other reviewers, is Parini himself.

In the first half of the book there is in some of these accounts, ostensibly of Tolstoy's last year, a good deal of flash-back to earlier times; and I found that device somewhat artificial, when, for example, Parini has the doctor say, `I am small ... Though I am hardly an old man, not having yet passed fifty, I am quite bald'. On those occasions I thought that I would rather be reading a straightforward narrative account of that last year, which could equally well have brought out how Tolstoy was regarded by his adoring entourage and the dislike which everyone in the story felt for almost everyone else. In particular they all (daughter Sasha included) ganged up on Tolstoy's unhappy and neurotic wife, who may not have shared Tolstoy's lofty ideas, but who had so much more affection for him than he seemed to have for her.

In the second half of the book, this irritant falls away as the haunting story develops. There is old Tolstoy himself: deeply emotional; adored by his disciples and by the crowds who turned out to greet him at railway stations; guilt-ridden about his wealth and about whether his actions were really inspired by idealism or by a kind of selfishness; tormented by his exasperation with his wife; pulled hither and thither between giving in to her and or to his devotion to Chertkov. She, in turn, was maddened by the hold that the detested Chertkov had over her husband. Tolstoy had even handed over his diaries for safe-keeping to him. Sofia bullied her weary husband to have them returned to her, and then used them against him to devastating effect. She was also tormented by the idea that Chertkov would persuade Tolstoy to leave all his writings to the nation instead of providing an income for her and her children by assigning the copyright to them - and this indeed Chertkov accomplished. (Sofia will have to live on a pension from the Tsar.)

In the end Tolstoy fled from his home, hoping perhaps to die as a solitary hermit, though he took his doctor with him, and Sasha knew his whereabouts. He died nine days later in the house of the station master at Astapovo. His family had found him, though Sofia was only admitted to see him when he was no longer conscious. The press camped outside the house, as did people who came from far and wide.

As Parini says himself, his novel sails as close as possible to the shore line of the literal events that made up the last year of Tolstoy's life, and this is confirmed by reading, for example, the relevant pages of Henri Troyat's biography of Tolstoy. I do not feel that Parini has added as much imagination or artistry to his story as Leonid Tsypkin did when, in his `Summer at Baden-Baden', he described a year in the life of Dostoevsky (see my Amazon review). But comparisons are odious; the story is well re-told; the characters are well described; and the pathos of both Tolstoy's and Sofia's life in that year is well captured.

Review By M. Feldman (Maine, USA)

This review is from: The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy's Final Year (Paperback)

I read "The Last Station' in anticipation of the film (recently released) based on the novel, which details the eventful last year of Leo Tolstoy's life and, in particular, the final unraveling of his marriage to Sofia Tolstoy. The author, Jay Parini, describes his own work quite accurately; "The Last Station" is, he says, "fiction, though it bears some of the trappings and affects of literary scholarship." That scholarship is extensive. Each chapter belongs to the voice of a different character, all of whom kept diaries or notes on their relationship with the great man, including Sofia; Tolstoy's daughter Sasha; his disciple, Vladimir Cherthov; his physician, Dushan Makovitsky, and a young secretary, Valentin Bulgakov The dominant voice, of course, is that of Tolstoy himself, and Parini stays very close to things he actually wrote or said.

It is helpful for a reader of this novel to have an interest in Tolstoy and an acquaintance with some of his work. I don't think "The Last Station" stands on its own as historical fiction, and I don't think it is meant to. If, however, you admire Tolstoy's writings, "The Last Station" offers an interesting perspective on a man who attracted adoring crowds, who drew to him disciples who hung on his every word, and who drove his wife, who despised the cultish atmosphere that surrounded her husband, to despair. His death in 1910 at the railway station in Astapovo was a true celebrity spectacle, utterly cinematic.

Much of the novel is about the tension between Tolstoy's status as an aristocratic landowner and his sympathies, which lay with the peasants. The world of 1917 is not far away, and the Tsar's policemen prowl uneasily on the edges of the scenes where Tolstoy appears before his adoring public. It is also a novel about love. Tolstoy and his wife had 13 children and a marriage whose deeply personal details survive in the diaries of both husband and wife. Their disagreements on his views about how he wished to live his life, eschewing luxury and espousing celibacy, led to unbearable tension and, ultimately, estrangement between them. Yet the novel has several love affairs (despite the great man's philosophy): between the young secretary Bulgakov and Masha, another Tolstoy acolyte; between Tolstoy's daughter Sasha and her friend Varvara. Here the tension, Parini seems to suggest, is between the love that exists between individuals and a more abstract love for humankind. It is a divide that Tolstoy cannot reconcile, only flee---hence the spectacle of the death at Astapovo. "The Last Station" will make you want to pick up "Anna Karenina" again, or, if you come to this novel from the film based on it, perhaps it will make you want to pick up Tolstoy's great novels for the first time.

Outstanding acting by Christopher Plummer as Leo Tolstoyand Helen Mirren as Sofya Tolstoy in the film.

BBB