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The Last Station (Movie Tie-in Edition): A Novel of Tolstoy's Final Year (Random House Movie Tie-In Books)
 
 
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The Last Station (Movie Tie-in Edition): A Novel of Tolstoy's Final Year (Random House Movie Tie-In Books) [Paperback]

Jay Parini (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews) |

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Book Description

Publication Date: January 12, 2010 | Series: Random House Movie Tie-In Books
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE
Starring Helen Mirren, Christopher Plummer, & James McAvoy

In 1910, Count Leo Tolstoy, the most famous writer in the world, is caught in the struggle between his devoted wife and an equally devoted acolyte over the master's legacy. Sofya Andreyevna fears that she and the children she has borne Tolstoy will lose all to Vladimir Chertkov and the Tolstoyan movement, which preaches the ideals of poverty, chastity, and pacifism.

As Tolstoy seeks peace in his final days, Valentin Bulgakov is hired to be his secretary and enlisted as a spy by both camps. But Valentin's loyalty is to the great man, who in turn recognizes in the young idealist his own youthful struggle with worldly passions.

Deftly moving among a colorful cast of characters, drawing on the writings of the people on whom they are based, Jay Parini has created a stunning portrait of an enduring genius and a deeply affecting novel.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Book Description
Set in the last tumultuous years of Leo Tolstoy's life, The Last Station centers on the battle for his soul waged by his wife, Sofya Andreyevna, and his leading disciple, Vladimir Cherkov.

Torn between his professed doctrine of poverty and chastity and the reality of his enormous wealth, his thirteen children, and a life of relative luxury, Tolstoy makes a dramatic flight from his home. Too ill to continue beyond the tiny rail station at Astapovo, he believes that he is dying alone, while over one hundred newspapermen camp outside awaiting hourly reports on his condition. A brilliant re-creation of the mind and tortured soul of one of the world's greatest writers, The Last Station is a richly inventive novel that dances between fact and fiction.

The Last Station is now a major motion picture based on the novel, starring Christopher Plummer as Leo Tolstoy, Helen Mirren as Sofya Tolstoy, James McAvoy as Valentin Bulgakov, Paul Giamatti as Vladimir Chertkov, and Anne-Marie Duff as Sasha Tolstoy. Enjoy these images from the film, and click the thumbnails to see larger images.



(Photos by Stephan Rabold, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Inspired by diaries kept by members of the household of Count Leo Tolstoy, Parini ( The Patch Boys ) here offers a searching view of the last year in the life of the author of War and Peace . His venture is complex, making use of alternating narrators taken from the contentious factions of the Master's vast estate to depict a man at war within and without, torn between his philosophy of poverty and the life of privilege he leads at the insistence of Sofya Andreyevna, his wife. She, one of the voices telling this tale, is consumed by paranoia and a fear that her husband will sign over his lucrative copyrights to the people (which he does). And like Vladimir Chertkov, Tolstoy's friend and chief acolyte, his wife causes his "perpetual state of compromise." Surrounded by hangers-on, beset by inner struggles, the great one makes a run for peace in his final days, and--in a closing that Tolstoy might have written himself--the chronicler of the aristocracy and hero to the peasants finds all he has yearned for in a humble trainmaster's house. In the end, it is not the people around him who speak most eloquently for Tolstoy, but the sincerity of his own words--and those of Parini in his kaleidoscopically rich and skillful novel.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Product Details

  • Paperback: 304 pages
  • Publisher: Anchor; Mti edition (January 12, 2010)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0307739643
  • ISBN-13: 978-0307739643
  • Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.9 x 8 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #701,338 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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More About the Author

› Visit Amazon's Jay Parini Page
Jay Parini
Jay Parini is Axinn Professor of English at Middlebury College, Vermont. His six novels also include Benjamins Crossing and The Apprentice Lover. His volumes of poetry include The Art of Subtraction: New and Selected Poems. In addition to biographies of John Steinbeck, Robert Frost and William Faulkner, he has written a volume of essays on literature and politics, as well as The Art of Teaching. He edited the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature and writes regularly for the Guardian and other publications.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
47 of 50 people found the following review helpful
Not Just for Tolstoy Fans December 17, 2007
Format:Paperback
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 price.

[Reviewed by Debbie Moorhouse]
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24 of 24 people found the following review helpful
Format: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 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.
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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful
Format: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.
N.B. Jay Parini reviews an edition of Sofia Tolstoy's diaries (translated by Cathy Porter) in The Guardian, Dec. 5, 2009.
M. Feldman
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Tolstoy
[...]
I'm finding this book very informative about Tolstoy and about Russian culture at the turn of the last century. Read more
Published 8 months ago by mutzie
A Great Tribute to Tolstoy
Jay Parini has created an outstanding literary work in his novel, The Last Station. The novel presents the end times for Leo Tolstoy and captures the experiences and thoughts of a... Read more
Published 13 months ago by Russell T. Roe
Great Service !!
I ordered on a Sunday, the item shipped on Monday, and in a week I had it in my hand. Excellent condition. Good people to do business with.
Published 17 months ago by Bob Morton
What;s the point
This is one of those books that after you finish it, you wonder why you bothered. It was neither particularly enlightening nor enjoyable. Read more
Published 18 months ago by Karen K. Isaacs
My Impression: The Last Station
I was browsing among the books at Costco, where I had gone to buy groceries. I came across this novel about Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian novelist. Read more
Published 19 months ago by MeMesh
"Supreme Fiction"
As one who is fascinated with historical fiction, and yet usually disappointed in it, I found this a surprisingly sensitive and intelligent interpretation of the last year of... Read more
Published 19 months ago by Esther Shay
A Beautifully Constructed Novel
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. Read more
Published 22 months ago by Blake
Retelling of False Information!!!
The Last Station is yet another retelling of Tolstoy's life based on false information. While the author does tell us at the end of the book that he based this historical fiction... Read more
Published 23 months ago by R. Shaver
The Last Station
The book is narrated by each of the people closest to Tolstoy in his final year, by alternating chapters. Read more
Published on March 1, 2010 by Mrs. C. Colbert
The Last Station is a lyrical and soul searching novel of Count Leo...
"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. Read more
Published on February 17, 2010 by C. M Mills
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