The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy's Last Year (Unabridged) [Audio Download]

Its 1910 and Leo Tolstoy, Russia's greatest novelist is both a cult figure among his countrymen and an old man. Written with style and compassion, The Last Station is a semi-fictionalised account of the last year of his life and the dysfunctional and damaging relationships between him, his followers and his family. The main narrative centres on the struggle for Tolstoy's affections, soul and legacy between, chiefly, his deranged wife and his self-seeking and scheming acolyte, Chertkov.

The entire novel is told through five voices - a device which takes a little getting used to but is ultimately very rewarding as it provides insight into the minds and motivations of those who surround, nay smother, Tolstoy.

Intense and compelling, The Last Station reads like fiction even though it isn't, but it is also enlightening and troubling. While Parini has drawn this chief characters finely, there is scarcely one with whom the reader feels any sympathy. Tolstoy's daughter Sasha is perhaps the most likeable among the motley crew but even she turns out to the self-serving. Initially, the reader is tempted to feel sorry for Tolstoy himself but it rapidly becomes apparent that he too is as much responsible for the scheming and selfishness that surrounds him in his final months.

This is a remarkable book, a remarkable achievement and well worth reading but it comes with a health warning too to those who have not read Tolstoy previously: you will want to by the time you have finished this.

I would probably not have picked this book off the shelf, but it was chosen by my book club as our next nominated read, so I bought it, read it and thoroughly enjoyed it. I didn't know much about Tolstoy beforehand (other than his most famous books War & Peace & Anna Karenina) so the background to his life & details of his last year were fascinating. The characters were brilliantly desciptive as was the drama of his domestic life during his last year. If you are mildly interested in history, you will enjoy this even if only for the writing style.

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.