GUD Reviews: "The Last Station" by Jay Parini

The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy's Final Year by Jay Parini
Canongate Books Ltd
Paperback: 372 pages
ISBN: 9781841959672
£8.99

Parini's The Last Station is a study of the end of Russian authorLeo Tolstoy's life.  You don't need to be a fan of Tolstoy to enjoyit–you don't even need to have read any of his novels.  This bookstands on its own merits.

Told in multiple first person narratives, the book explores how thevarious players see themselves and each other, enabling the reader tomake 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'sdepicted by them as insane, hysterical, controlling, and I don't knowwhat else, when all she wants is to secure the royalties from Tolstoy'swork to their descendants.  This simple–some might say,laudable–ambition finds her ranged against her husband, their daughterSasha, and various of Tolstoy's adherents and hangers-on.  As itbecomes obvious to her that she's failed, she rages in variousfrightening–and impotent–ways, and finds herself excluded from herhusband's deathbed.  The winners write the history: she drove Tolstoyfrom his lifetime home; she wouldn't let him die in peace.  But Parinimakes sure Sofya's voice is also heard.

Russia stands on the brink of momentous change, but this novel, likeTolstoy's own work, is more about the personal than the political. Tolstoy may despise the luxury in which he lives, but he's unable tobreak away from it.  He may wish to make the grand gesture of leavinghis work to the nation, but he does it in secret, fearing aconfrontation with his wife.  What we see is a man who's lionised byeveryone around him–except Sofya–but who is too weak to live up totheir perception of him.  Yet his feet of clay go unobserved.  He'salready 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 thevarious narrators–Sofya, Tolstoy himself, their daughter Sasha,Tolstoy's new secretary Bulgakov, his doctor Makovitsky, and the scaryChertkov, the leader of Tolstoy's fan club.  The most likeablecharacter is Bulgakov, whose love affair troubles him only a little inthe light of one of the leading tenets of Tolstoyism: celibacy.  He'smore worried about the mission Chertkov has given him: to spy onTolstoy and report back.  Like Tolstoy himself, his solution is toobfuscate.  He begins a tentative friendship with Sofya, but soonadopts the majority view of her.

Interspersed in the narrative are some of the author's originalpoems.  If it is ironic that I found myself skipping them just like Iskipped Tolstoy's reflections on the nature of history in War andPeace, 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 anddisturbed the fictive dream.

That reservation notwithstanding, this is a highly readable novelwhich gives an insight into the nature of illustriousness–and its price.

[[Review by Debbie Moorhouse for GUD Magazine]]