The Last Station By Jay Parini: No Simple Heroes And Villains

I learned about Leo Tolstoy the way I learn most things these days: random exposure and scattershot curiosity. As I mentioned here last month, I picked up the Anna Karenina audio book at the Groton Library last winter in the hope of latching onto a bit of edification during my morning runs.

This book fit the bill. I was transported to pre-communist Russia and dropped into a lush society brimming with fully drawn, complex characters, each a psychological case study just waiting to be dissected.

How did Tolstoy do it? How did he make these people so real? I had to find out everything there was to know about this wise and wonderful Russian author.

This is turning out to be something of a Life Project. More than a year later, I’m still at it. Tolstoy was a complicated man. I don’t think his fame in Late 19th and Early 20^th Century Russia can quite be comprehended. He and his wife Sophia were the Brangelinas of their day, as well as the Obamas and the Mandelas. They were covered daily in the Russian newspapers, their every step hounded by reporters. Leo Tolstoy was universally adored. People honestly thought he was the Second Coming of Christ.

In reality, he was something more of an idealist, a seeker. After writing War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Tolstoy renounced fiction as frivolous (he was always renouncing something) and proceeded to publish more religious-based pieces. He became a beloved holy man, espousing a pared-down Christianity based on asceticism, love and non-violence, which got him into a world trouble with the Russian Orthodox Church.

He wore peasant clothing, ate a (mostly) vegetarian diet, and after siring thirteen children, tried to embrace celibacy. He was something of an anarchist and favored freeing the Russian peasants. He was a fierce pacifist. He believed everyone should live off the land, that this would bring true happiness.

His wife Sophia adored his novels and encouraged him to return to fiction for the duration of their life together, which amounted to decades of harping and badgering. Tolstoy wrote his great novels while still a relatively young man. When he was working on War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Sophia lovingly copied each day’s work by hand late into the nights, despite birthing and nursing and educating an ever-increasing passel of children.

Some say Sophia copied War and Peace in its entirety five times; others say seven. She was heartbroken when her husband turned away from fiction. A formidable character herself, she railed against the growing ranks of her husband’s disciples, the so-called Tolstoyans, who lived together in ascetic communes throughout Russia and anxiously awaited every written word from the great master.

Despite its fecundity, this was not a happy marriage. Sophia, who was eighteen to Tolstoy’s thirty-four on their wedding day, was essentially a society girl. She was raised in great luxury in Moscow and made her debut into a world of sitting rooms and balls before marrying and being whisked off to her new life as a farm wife on her husband’s country estate.

Tolstoy spent his youth fighting in the Caucasus and sowing his wild oats. Before marrying Sophia, he lived with a peasant woman with whom he shared a son. Life therefore at Yasnaya Polyana, the Tolstoy country estate, was something of a compromise for both of them. A compromise that never quite worked out.

It’s difficult to take sides in this marital war of attrition. I read excellent biographies from both camps, Henri Troyat’s Tolstoy and Alexandra Popoff’s Sophia Tolstoy: A Biography, both of which are available at local libraries, and I admit that I can see both sides.

Tolstoy, like so many holy seekers (think Jesus, think Siddhartha) wanted to live a pure life, away from family and worldly cares. He wanted to be a hermit, to give his money to the peasants, to live peacefully off the land in some blissful Xanadu.

His wife, however, had nine surviving children to raise, feed, clothe and educate. She thought Tolstoy was a holy fool bent on neglecting his family. She needed real money to raise her children as she had been brought up. And she was not a woman given to meek submission. She single-handedly took on the growing army of Tolstoyans and never gave in.

All of this came to a head during the last year of Tolstoy’s life. Yasnaya Polyana was by this time an emotional hothouse swarming with giddy society folk as well as grim Tolstoyans. Tolstoy’s closest friend and de facto leader of the Tolstoyans, a weasly man named Cherktov, was pushing Tolstoy to leave Sophia, leave his family and give up the rights to publish his works to the people. Sophia, of course, fought this tooth and nail. Tolstoy himself was torn between the two.

This sets the scene for The Last Station by Jay Parini, a fascinating, somewhat fictionalized yet highly scholarly account of Tolstoy’s last year; his ultimate flight from his home by train, and his death just days later in the station master’s cottage in the tiny town of Astapovo.

The book takes the form of a series of diaries written by the people closest to Tolstoy: his wife, his secretary, his personal physician, Cherktov and one of his grown daughters. It also includes actual text from Tolstoy’s own diaries and letters.

The book is beautifully done. Each diarist has a unique voice. And by giving voice to everyone involved, the author is spared the difficult task of taking sides in this intractable domestic war. He captures both the love and the incredible frustration between Leo and Sophia.

The reader enters Tolstoy’s estate along with his new secretary, a young Tolstoyan named Valentin Bulgakov. He is star struck by the Tolstoys and befriends both of them. He, like all detached observers, finds it difficult to take sides. In Tolstoy, he finds a gentle old master.

Here was the greatest author of the West, Leo Tolstoy, fetching tea for me, his new secretary, nearly sixty years his junior. This was a man I could easily love. Indeed as I lay there on my back surveying the crumbling plaster on the ceiling, I loved him already.

In Sophia, he finds a scheming and desperate woman, yet he is quite taken with her as well. He admires her strength and pities her situation. She is, after all, a single woman pitted against an active and energized movement fueled by her husband’s ideas.

Last night, once again, Sophia did her ritual dance, racing from the house, half naked, because her husband would not immediately turn over the diaries…. My impulse was to say, To hell with her. If she drowns herself in the pond, so be it. Life will be easier around here. But I cannot help feeling terribly sorry for her. Her life is made miserable by circumstances beyond her control.

The great strength of The Last Station is it’s stark portrayal of a house in conflict. The diary entries give access to everyone’s complicated motives. There are no simple heroes and villains here. Everyone is conflicted, including Leo Tolstoy himself. He lives a life of luxury on a beautiful estate staffed with servants. Yet he is rockstar famous for preaching simplicity and moral purity. The tension he feels is quite literally killing him.

There is no satisfying resolution here. Just like in life, no one really wins. All we can do is state our motives and move forward, live our lives the best we can. There is no omniscient narrator to explain it all to us. The big picture eludes us all, just as it eludes everyone in this book. It’s a great and worthwhile read.