The Last Station was first published in the UK in 2007 and Canongate are reprinting it to tie in with the release of the film version starring James McAvoy, Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer.
The story relates the last year of the famous Russian author Leo Tolstoy’s life in 1910. By then, Tolstoy was loved in his home land – his written works had been greeted with enthusiasm and his devotion to improving the lot of the working class made him a national hero. Tolstoy had fathered thirteen children with his wife of 48 years by then, and at least one out of wedlock. Crowds of followers worshipped him – he was as close to a celebrity writer as any novelist since. The closing chapter of his life should have been a mellow time, surrounded by his acolytes and loving family, but as Parini’s novel shows, it was fraught with tension, mostly because of his histrionic, grasping wife Sofya.
Jay Parini has researched his subject meticulously by reading not only biographies of Tolstoy but also the diaries kept by his wife, some of his sons and daughters, his assistant, his personal physician and various close friends. From these he has fashioned a historical novel that, although largely fictional, has its roots very much in fact. Just as Mantel created a fictional world based around the real characters in the court of Henry Vlll in Wolf Hall, Parini has imagined himself into the shoes of those closest to Tolstoy. He even states in the afterword that for the most part when Tolstoy speaks in the novel, Parini has quoted him directly or based his words on events related by Tolstoy’s inner circle.
The novel is written from the point of view of various characters around Tolstoy, alternating in viewpoint from one to another in subsequent chapters. There is Sofya Andreyevna, 66 years old in 1910 and married to Tolstoy for 48 years. Although the love they felt for each other when they married has never disappeared, it has become distorted and soured by their differing goals. Sofya, the daughter of an eminent physician, is used to a luxurious existence. She is driven almost insane by the thought that her husband may have left his works to the public in his will, thus, as she sees it, robbing her and her children of the copyright money to which she feels entitled. Often melodramatic, her possessiveness, jealousy, greed and acquisitive nature spur her to almost daily outbursts and tantrums. Tolstoy, who turns 82 in 1910, was born into aristocracy but has since become disillusioned with capitalism, the rich-poor divide, the monarchy and the military. He is weary of his wife’s eruptions and just wants a quiet life where he can write, talk to his close friends, give money to the poor and philosophize about the point of life. He is as generous and unmaterialistic as his wife is selfish and money-grabbing.
There are also chapters from the perpective of others: one of Tolstoy’s daughters Sasha, who adores her father and acts as a secretary for him; Bulgakov, Tolstoy’s newly hired private secretary who embarks on a love affair with a fellow Tolstoy follower; Chertkov, Tolstoy’s closest friend who has a malign urge to know everything about him; and Makovitsky, Tolstoy’s personal physician. There are also extracts from Tolstoy’s letters to various luminaries including Gandhi and George Bernard Shaw.
Tolstoy comes across as a concerned, guilt-ridden man much like Britain’s George Orwell circa Down and Out in Paris and London. Tolstoy berates himself for being cocooned in wealth, though unlike Orwell, his attempts to live a spartan life like the peasants for whom he feels so much sympathy are largely thwarted by his shrieking wife who rails at him whenever he gives money or possessions away or when he attempts to leave home. The closest he comes to slumming it until the very last few weeks of his life is taking third class train carriages amidst heaving crowds.
A vivid picture emerges of Russia in the years leading to the Revolution – the chasm between haves and have-nots, the discontent, the imperious lack of concern of most wealthy land-owners, including some of Tolstoy’s own children such as Andrey and Ilya.
Parini manages to make the novel convincing but also entertaining. The light touches and humour are omnipresent, whether it is Bulgakov grimly noticing that Chertkov ‘always seemed to be suppressing a burp’ or noting of him that ‘although I very much admired him, liking him would require an act of will,’; Bulgakov likening the deflated Dr Makovitsky to ‘a muffin that, having been mixed with too much yeast,expands beyond its natural limits before collapsing into itself’; or Sasha cattily assessing her goody-two-shoes sister Tanya as ‘my saintly sister…She is like a bucket in search of a fire.’ Sasha is refreshingly frank about several people – she describes her mother as being ‘impossible, positively bleeding with jealousy and bourgeois rancor. Weeping, preening in the mirror, prowling about the house all night like a crazed animal!’ When the exhausted Sofya collapses after getting incensed about Chertkov and is carried to her room by two servants, Sasha sketches the satisfyingly undignified picture of her ‘swinging between them like a large hammock.’ Even Sofya herself is capable of wickedly bitchy comments, noting that Sasha’s friend Varvara ‘has the sensitivity of a granite monument’ and ‘shed a few lightly manufactured tears.’ Perhaps the ubiquity of this wit is spread too far by Parini – it’s hard to believe the insight-free, egocentric, rather stupid wife is capable of such caustic and sharp observations.
Sofya is the most glorious creation, part screeching monster, part object of contemptuous pity. Her views on the working-class are the polar opposite of her husband’s: while he sees them as noble people broughto to heel by cicumstance, she either glosses over their suffering, viewing them as ‘long symmetrical bands of muzhiks, bending over their work in happy unison,’ or viciously judges them: ‘typical hypocrisy of the Russian lower classes’, ‘stinking, uncouth disciples: insane noblemen, beggars who are proud of their fallen state, toothless nuns, idealistic students, revolutionaries, criminals, vegetarians, foreigners.’ Her crazed hysterical fits are simultaneously chilling and hilarious – although it’s disturbing to envisage a middle-aged mother hurling herself into the pond to try and drown, the thought of her hiding in a ditch with binoculars to try and spy on her weary husband raises a delicious snicker.
Underneath the sharp characterisation is a prescient view of the circumstances that would lead to political upheaval in a few years’ time. Although Tolstoy himself believed that violent revolution could only lead to chaos and even worse conditions for the poor, it is only one small step from the dire, crowded, dirty conditions in which the poor lived to the seething, hissing discontent that would bring down the Tsar.
The Last Station is an entertaining and informative novel about the closing year in the life of a highly esteemed Russian writer and thinker, knitting his respectable public and tumultous personal lives. It is also an insightful glance into the climate that led to Revolution, the overthrow of the Tsar and the advent of communism.
