The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy's Last Year

What an achievement! Parini captures a real sense of tension between Tolstoy, his wife and his ideals in a way that makes those ideals feel material and full of consequence. A compelling structure orders the whole novel as the characters surrounding Tolstoy tell their story and what they understand of his) The characters circle Tolstoy like cars about a roundabout--Tolstoy the font, the center, mysterious, and revolving around him a cast of characters with utterly divergent positions. It is a triangulation of great character. Tolstoy's dialogue, all of it authentically reproduced from his contemporaries' journals, rings out like a bell. Perhaps the largest challenge of the novel is the portrait of Sophia, Tolstoy's wife, her violent tempers and changes in mood, the pressure between her past importance and her present capacity. It is difficult to capture crazy, but Parini manages it, and in the process unpacks her wild attitudes and explosiveness with a sympathetic probing of her past and her bleak view of a future without her husband. She comes alive on the page. All in all, a wonderful read. I highly recommend it.

"The Last Station" is the new movie on the last year of Tolstoy's (1828-1910) life. It stars Christopher Plummer, Helen Mirren and a distinguished cast. However, you are cheating yourself if you fail to read the Jay Parini 1990 novel upon which the film is based. Parini is a teacher, poet and novelist who has written literary biographies of such lions as William Faulkner, Robert Frost and John Steinbeck. The Last Station refers to the tiny Asypovo railroad station where the famous author of Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Resurrection, The Cossacs and other great works of fiction died in 1910. He fled from home wanting to get away from his mentally ill and dominating wife. The book is a series of observations on life with the Tolstoy family recorded in diary form. These voices include: Sofya Andreyevna-She is the daughter of a Moscow doctor who married Tolstoy in 1862. The couple had 13 children and she helped her famous husband with his work. In this novel she is 66 and mentally disturbed. She hates the fans of Tolstoy and his religious followers who spend their time around the great man. She wants the Tolstoy literary work royalties to go to her and her family. She is disdainful of the radical non-violent sect of which Tolstoy has become the leader. He wants to give away everything to the poor and live as a peasant while she most certainly does not. She is a complex woman who has lived with an enigmatic satyr of a genius for almost fifty years of marriage. Tolstoy is sixteen years her senior. His sexual and behavioral treatment of her was often horrendous but she persevered to the end. Bulgakov is a young man who is hired by Tolstoy to help the author compile a book of quotations. He falls in love with Masha a follower of the author. Their love story is beautifully told. Dr. Makovitsky is a medical man whose role at the Tolstoy home is to take care of the fractious and hard to contro Count Leo. Sasha is the sickly, lesbian daughter of Tolstoy who uses her Remington typewriter to record the words of her father. She is a sweet and sensitive girl who is jealous of her father's love for his other children. Jay Parini, the author, inserts several of his original poems into the novel's text. Parini's book is a beautiful historical novel on a famous man. The Russia pictured reminds one of a Chekhov play just before World War I and the Soviet takeover ruined the rural society of old Russia. The book is a good and relatively short read at 287 pages. All lovers of Tolstoy or literature will enjoy this well researced and written modern novel.

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. N.B. Jay Parini reviews an edition of Sofia Tolstoy's diaries (translated by Cathy Porter) in The Guardian, Dec. 5, 2009. M. Feldman

Leo Tolstoy, the author of `War and Peace' and `Anna Karenina', died in November 1910 at Astapovo in the west of Russia. He died (aged 82) at a railway station, in the tiny dwelling of the stationmaster. In this rich novel, Jay Parini explores Tolstoy's last year of life. With skilful interweaving of fact and fiction, Mr Parini paints an image of Tolstoy which shows his struggles between convictions and conventions. The novel itself incorporates points of view by Tolstoy himself, members of his family and his followers and brings to life a man that many of us only know through his contribution to literature. Tolstoy lived a fascinating life, and this novel touches only on part of it. The novel is a wonderful work of fiction. It could also be an image of Tolstoy himself, helpful to those reading his works and seeking to understand a little of the environment in which he lived and worked. Highly recommended. Jennifer Cameron-Smith

Parini's The Last Station is a study of the end of Russian author Leo Tolstoy's life. You don't need to be a fan of Tolstoy to enjoy it--you don't even need to have read any of his novels. This book stands on its own merits. Told in multiple first person narratives, the book explores how the various players see themselves and each other, enabling the reader to make up their own mind about their characters and motives. Personally, I came to like Tolstoy's long-suffering wife Sofya Andreyevna the best, if only because all the other characters are ranged against her. She's depicted by them as insane, hysterical, controlling, and I don't know what else, when all she wants is to secure the royalties from Tolstoy's work to their descendants. This simple--some might say, laudable--ambition finds her ranged against her husband, their daughter Sasha, and various of Tolstoy's adherents and hangers-on. As it becomes obvious to her that she's failed, she rages in various frightening--and impotent--ways, and finds herself excluded from her husband's deathbed. The winners write the history: she drove Tolstoy from his lifetime home; she wouldn't let him die in peace. But Parini makes sure Sofya's voice is also heard. Russia stands on the brink of momentous change, but this novel, like Tolstoy's own work, is more about the personal than the political. Tolstoy may despise the luxury in which he lives, but he's unable to break away from it. He may wish to make the grand gesture of leaving his work to the nation, but he does it in secret, fearing a confrontation with his wife. What we see is a man who's lionised by everyone around him--except Sofya--but who is too weak to live up to their perception of him. Yet his feet of clay go unobserved. He's already an icon, no longer a man. All that's left to him, therefore, is to die. Parini writes well, and does a good job of distinguishing the various narrators--Sofya, Tolstoy himself, their daughter Sasha, Tolstoy's new secretary Bulgakov, his doctor Makovitsky, and the scary Chertkov, the leader of Tolstoy's fan club. The most likeable character is Bulgakov, whose love affair troubles him only a little in the light of one of the leading tenets of Tolstoyism: celibacy. He's more worried about the mission Chertkov has given him: to spy on Tolstoy and report back. Like Tolstoy himself, his solution is to obfuscate. He begins a tentative friendship with Sofya, but soon adopts the majority view of her. Interspersed in the narrative are some of the author's original poems. If it is ironic that I found myself skipping them just like I skipped Tolstoy's reflections on the nature of history in War and Peace, I'm not convinced that the irony was intentional. On the whole, I didn't feel that the poems belonged--they broke up the narrative and disturbed the fictive dream. That reservation notwithstanding, this is a highly readable novel which gives an insight into the nature of illustriousness--and its pric