When literature possesses a Tolstoy, it is easy and pleasant to be a writer; even when you know you have achieved nothing yourself and are still achieving nothing, this is not as terrible as it might otherwise be, because Tolstoy achieves for everyone.
Trust Chekhov to get it exactly right. He puts his finger on what matters most about Tolstoy: “because Tolstoy achieves for everyone.”
Because for all us readers and writers, Tolstoy has always already written. No matter what happens, what we do and don’t read, what we do and don’t write, what device we do or don’t use for reading, Anna Karenina and his other great works will already have been brought into existence.
2010 is the centenary of Tolstoy’s death, and many events and commemorations of his life are planned. One such event is the release in London and Berlin of the new film, The Last Station, starring Christopher Plummer (my dear Colonel von Trapp) and Helen Mirren. The film covers the tempestuous period immediately before Tolstoy’s death at the age of 82. The film is based on the 1990 novel by Jay Parini which is itself based on the diaries kept by the various members of Tolstoy’s household.
As Robert McCrum says in yesterday’s Guardian in his review of The Last Station, Parini was the first to spot the huge potential of the diaries as raw material for a novel. Which is one of those things that makes you wonder how it cannot have been spotted previously.
I’m a fan of the film in advance. Because of its subject, naturally, but also because of its title.
The common story is that Tolstoy died at the tiny railway station of Astapovo after leaving his beloved estate, Yasnaya Polyana, in the middle of the night for fear his deteriorating relationship with Sophia, his wife, would kill him.
However, according to a new website established to mark the centenary of his death, he didn’t actually die at the station but at the station master’s residence where he’d been taken after getting off the train. And he lingered for several days before dying. Long enough for Sophia to hire her own train and bring the family to see him, though by the time they arrived, he was not conscious.
Regardless of whether it’s the location where he actually dies, or where he begins to die, the railway station is crucial to the story. Because, as hinted in the film’s title, railway stations have featured throughout his novels as the scene of event and death.
In Anna Karenina, for example, his masterpiece above masterpieces, Anna first meets Vronsky at the railway station, soon after a guard is killed at the station when de-coupling carriages. So too Anna experiences the “greatest joy she will ever have of Vronsky,” alone in her carriage at the halt between St Petersburg and Moscow, and disembarks, grasping the cold post in her hand, to find Vronsky waiting on the platform in the swirling snow.
And, of course, in the end there is Anna’s suicide at the station when, agitated and disoriented, she disembarks one last time and waits for the “midpoint between the two wheels” to come even with her.
That Tolstoy should also have his death scene at a railway station, 40 years after writing Anna’s death, brings to mind Flaubert’s exclamation over his greatest creation, “Emma, c’est moi!”
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In reading the website marking the centenary of Tolstoy’s death, I came across so many surprising and mind-boggling facts about the man I’m hereby starting a year of sharing them on this blog. Here’s a few to start with:
- the Soviet version of his collected works consists of 90 volumes
- to better study the gospels of the Bible in later life Tolstoy learnt Hebrew and then Dutch “because someone directed him to an admired translation in that language”
- his favourite book was Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, and he had a portrait of Dickens on his study wall in Yasnaya Polyana
- in his early 70s he “devoured” Confucius, and at the age of 75 read the whole of Shakespeare … for the second time
- in the last year of his life he was corresponding with Mahatma Gandhi, then working as a lawyer in South Africa; Gandhi named his second ashram in South Africa, the “Tolstoy Colony.”
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To go to the website for the centenary of Tolstoy’s death, click here: http://tolstoy.beckerfilmgroup.com/index.html
To read Robert McCrum’s review of The Last Station in The Guardian, click here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jan/31/tolstoy-the-last-station-film-mccrum
Images: http://tolstoy.beckerfilmgroup.com/index.html (top and bottom); Wikipedia (middle)
He looks like a gnome or mythical creature.
… and a surly one at that. If i met him in a glade or a forest I wouldn’t be expecting three wishes.
I can’t wait to see that movie!
If you were marooned on a desert island and could only have either War and Peace or Anna Karenin, which would you choose?
Can barely remember W&P; read it a long time ago. Must read it again during the year. What about you? Which would you choose? If you could choose 5 books to take with you which would you choose (from all the books that have ever been written)?
War and Peace would certainly keep you reading longer on that desert island. You’d starve before you got to the last page. So this is my choice. ;)
Good point. You’d be preoccupied with the struggles of Russian peasants until the end. And you’d have some friends in spirit. What about if you could choose any 5 books? What would you choose?
The Aeneid, Catch 22, The Bhagavad Gita… that’s three. Gotta think about my remaining two.
Oh yes, yes, yes, Catch 22 (you’d be welcome on my island … you could play Yossarian and I’d be Major Major). The Aeneid … thought you might say that ;)
BG? Geez, you mean I should have read those books thrust into my hands by the Hare Krishnas? SG x
Unless some empire builder like Napolean came along and rescued you!
Yeh, cos he did hang around a desert island or two, didn’t he?
Mmmm, hard enough to choose between W&P and AK. Plus my top five list changes every day.
At the risk of being branded as pedestrian, I’d say:
Dune by Frank Herbert
Collected Poems of WB Yeats
Shakespeare’s Tragedies
The Dictators by Richard Overy (to remind me I don’t miss civilization)
Thank You for Smoking by Christoper Buckley (because I need something funny)
As I say, ask me tomorrow and I’ll have 5 different titles!
OK, I’ll ask you tomorrow :) I like the Dune and Yeats. Richard Overy and Buckley I’ve never heard of. Will investigate.
Today, I think I’d take something to comfort me and give me hope (the Bible?), something to make me laugh (Joseph Heller or Douglas Addams or the silly comic stories Chekhov wrote to get money) and the books I’ve never got around to reading so I could finally get them out of the way: The Odyssey and Remembrance of Things Past. Plus AK.
your post was directly under mine @ andreas blog – so i clicked :)
can’t wait to see the movie. i can’t write as well as any of this bunch and i don’t read as much, but i was motivated to respond – move Remembrance of Things Past to the top of the list. be mindful of the translation. it makes a big difference.
you are brave, i would never choose to be marooned with an unknown book.
Hi Dafna, thanks for popping over :) Moving Remembrance to top of list as we speak and looking thru dustiest section of bookcase to find it … ah, here it is. OK, the translator is Terence Kilmartin. What do you reckon?
sorry, no suggested translation. i read it in french while studying french literature.
i always marveled at how much was “lost in translation” with the french literature. but i never asked myself how much was lost in translation with my beloved russian authors.
perhaps it is because i know no russian had had nothing to compare it to?
now dante’s inferno is another story… i buy translation after translation and still can not break the surface – it’s on my bucket list.
i will have to take a course one day devoted only to this book :)
Today I guess I would add Catch 22–or maybe Something Happened–Catch 22 gets sort of grim in parts. Don’t laugh, but Robinson Crusoe might be good to have along as well. And now that I come to think of it, maybe some Conrad.
Of course, Robinson Crusoe is essential. Maybe also Lord of the Flies, hey? Are you thinking Lord Jim (my only Conrad acquaintance)? Today I think I’d also like a dash of my dear Vladimir N for his gamesmanship (might come in handy) and probably a bit of Candide for Pangloss.
Yes, Lord Jim or Victory. I think one of the requirements of this island will be that a daily care package of books (on demand) will be delivered!
Wouldn’t be too bad really …
“……..Anna Karenina, for example, his masterpiece above masterpieces……….”
Although I’ve read Anna Karenina only once, and this was over 35 years ago, I’ve never forgotten how true to life the main characters were. I felt as if I’d met them before in the flesh. I would say that Anna Karenina is the greatest novel I’ve so far read.
War and Peace, on the other hand, I found a long boring polemic, which I could barely finish.
What five books would I take to a Desert Island?
Definitely Anna Karenina. Plus two of Thomas Hardy’s novels – The Mayor of Casterbridge and Jude the Obscure; plus Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street: plus F Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night.
But why only five?
If I could add five to the above, they would be Testament of Youth, by Vera Brittain; Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert; Death in Venice (although a mere novelette) by Thomas Mann (did you see the wonderful film of it with Dirk Bogarde?); An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser; and Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh.
Never seen Death in Venice, the film. Love the book and Mann in general. Flaubert is up there on the pinnacle with Tolstoy. Dreiser I’ll put on my reading list.
You’re in mighty company. William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf and many other writers have also called AK the greatest novel ever written.
Why five? Because I don’t want my lifeboat to sink before it gets to land. Thomas Hardy is great but oh-so-tragic. I’d dive overboard if I knew I had to live with Jude on the island.