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47 of 50 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Not Just for Tolstoy Fans, December 17, 2007
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:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The pathos of a great man's last year, March 9, 2008
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:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Leo and Sofia--unhappy in their own way, December 26, 2009
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.
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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