http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/arts/tolstoy-last-station-window-to-the-world/story-e6frg8n6-1225847327539
Leo Tolstoy: window to the world Peter Craven From: The Australian April 03, 2010 12:00AM In the 100 years since Tolstoy's death there has been no novelist to match his understanding WHEREVER human experience and imagination go, Leo Tolstoy has been there before us. If anyone wants to know why we should read and re-read Tolstoy, the answer goes something like this: his vision of life may be described as the most comprehensive the human mind has produced in the form of novelistic fiction. He was not only acknowledged by figures as diverse as George Bernard Shaw and James Joyce to be the greatest writer of the 19th century, he was also the articulate conscience of a world that had no idea it had World War I and the Russian Revolution around the corner, let alone the rise of fascism. In this centenary year of his death, and with a luminous film, The Last Station, recounting his troubled last years, it is right to remember exactly what he means to us. Imagine a novelist who wrote in the plain straight-up-and-down style of the second half of the 19th century, but at its most direct. It is not an infinitely subtle, serpentine style, indicating this point of view, that refinement of moral subtlety or psychological intricacy, as with Henry James. Nor is it scalpel-like, as in Flaubert; or a slap-down style flooded with the blood and tears of drama-laden human catastrophe such as that of his contemporary, Dostoyevsky. It is not even that supple, flawless style, golden with intelligence, that you get in the George Eliot of Middlemarch, though that's closer. Tolstoy, in fact, writes a bit like the epic 20th-century writers he influenced -- there would be no Gone With the Wind without him -- except that he is an exceptional artist, not just a storyteller. During John Howard's days in the federal opposition, Barry Jones gave him a copy of War and Peace and told him that he if he ever became prime minister he would do the job better for having read this book. Some people are reassured that Lindsay Tanner, the federal Finance Minister, has read every word of Tolstoy. War and Peace is a panoramic novel of a kind that can only be vulgarised by imitation, yet it's the most imitated novel in the world because it shows just how much life the novel can be made to contain. There's a fine BBC television version from the 1970s (now on DVD) that has just one piece of perfect casting: the young Anthony Hopkins as Pierre. Pierre is a clumsy bear of a man who is possessed of much mildness and a desire to be good as well as a sizeable capacity for simple-mindedness and confusion. If you want a hero who is also, like all of us sometimes, a stumbling, blundering fool, then Pierre is your man; you identify with him as the idealisation of your own capacity for embarrassment. (There's a BBC radio version with fine contemporary British actor Simon Russell Beale, who plays Pierre rather the way Derek Jacobi played the title role in I, Claudius.) Russian critic Victor Shklovsky said if you have an awkward bear of a man such as Pierre then you'll need his opposite: a lean, mordant, sceptical, arrogant character who is less interested in being good (though he is good) than he is in being great. Tolstoy pulled off the best of all buddy acts by creating -- as it were, to go with Pierre -- Prince Andrei, the staff officer who carries the standard and who believes in honour the way he believes in polished boots. This duo are an extraordinary pair as they move through time -- and the tumult of the first real world war, the Napoleonic War -- and as they tilt with each other and try to establish the meaning of their own lives by explaining things to each other. They are matched by the women in this book. There is no finer representation of girlhood in flower than Natasha at the outset; then we get the process of her growth into womanhood: first love, raw infatuation, mature love. We see her as the beloved of Andrei and Pierre at different points. And we see Sonya, who has grown up in the same household, so neat and decent but without Natasha's flame of physical glamour. And Princess Marya, Andrei's sister, who is religiously devout and cares for poor God-struck peasants, and her irascible father, the old prince who can scream like a tyrant and cry like a child. War and Peace is an enthralment of a book, a pleasure everyone should give themselves, preferably as young as possible -- when it will present such a spacious window to the world -- but then again when you can experience it like a lost dream of ripeness. Some people like to take an opulent approach to War and Peace by reading it in the recent boutique edition from Penguin, the spaciously designed hardback that gives plenty of room to Tolstoy's words in the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation. Then again, you can get the classic Maude translation (which has never been bettered) for $5 or so in a Wordsworth classic paperback. Recently I listened to the whole 60 hours of it as a spoken-word recording. That also happened to be my last way of experiencing Anna Karenina, the novel that even English-language loyalist F.R. Leavis thought outshone all others. (It has also been adapted for film and TV on several occasions, most recently in 2000 for Britain's Channel 4, starring Helen McCrory, Stephen Dillane and Kevin Kidd.) Many years ago Irene Worth, the American actress who used to act with John Gielgud, did an old vinyl recording of an hour or so of Anna Karenina for the Caedmon label, which proved that the dialogue between Anna and Vronsky is as wonderful as anything in drama. The final monologue, as Anna makes her way towards that railway station, not only has a dim family resemblance to Molly Bloom's soliloquy in Ulysses but Tolstoy, who looks as straight as a die stylistically, gets all the effects Joyce got with his spectacular modernist innovations to the novel. Joyce, who was in no doubt about the stature of Tolstoy, thought Tolstoy's very late fable How Much Land Does a Man Need? one of the best things written. That's the abiding miracle and lingering mystery with Tolstoy. How does he do such different things in a way he makes look simple? Of course everyone has to read Anna Karenina. Think of the thundering authority of that opening sentence: "All happy families are alike, an unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." It's the kind of generalisation novelists make fools of themselves trying to imitate. You can't fake wisdom. Vladimir Nabokov said the clue to Tolstoy, whom he admired above all other writers, was that everything took exactly the right amount of time. That seems to be at the heart of how this novelist's art works. How else can we explain The Death of Ivan Ilyich, that extraordinary novella that Susan Sontag, who loved it, made Vikram Seth read because she thought it should be the most fundamental possession of any human being, let alone a writer? It's the story of a dull official who has never been much fun to anybody and who finds himself dying, painfully, a burden to his family. All this is described in detail, in bold strokes, wasting no word, but the effect is a revelation. The description of how this man, who is no better than he should be, meets death and the dazzlement it involves is one of the most astonishing things the human mind and the human heart have created. With gifts such as this, gifts surpassing brilliance because they partook of wisdom, it's almost no wonder Tolstoy lived to become a sage and to distance himself from the grandeur of his books, and that he tried to teach people to live in absolute material and spiritual simplicity. But it is a wonder nonetheless, and that wonder is central to the drama of The Last Station, in which two superb actors, Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren, pay homage to the novelist and the woman, Sofya, who inspired him but could not understand him. Another wonder is that the literary power persisted even as Tolstoy went on, King Lear-like, to climb the mountain of wisdom that doubled with the mountain of folly. The very late story Father Sergius tells of a man who tries to be a saint and falls, again and again, for the devil of human pride. He abases himself and comes to nothing, and finds that nothing is something. When Sontag, the most famous American critic of her generation, was young, she and her circle used to declare that the greatest novelist of the 19th century was Constance Garnett because she was the translator who brought the work of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Gogol and Chekhov into English. Critic George Steiner, in his famous study Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, maintains Dostoyevsky is like Shakespeare whereas Tolstoy harks back to Homer. Like Homer in the Iliad, with its panoramic survey of the fierce glory and the fiercer pity of war, or in the Odyssey with its endless variegation of romance and adventure before the wayfarer, Odysseus, makes his way home to his beloved Penelope, Tolstoy has an epic imagination. Dostoyevsky is the closest thing the 19th century has to a tragedian, whether it's in Crime and Punishment where Raskolnikov, the student, kills an old woman to prove he's a superman, or in The Brothers Karamazov where a ranting buffoon of a father lies murdered and three brothers -- Dmitry, the man of action, Ivan, the man of ideas, and Alyosha, the man of God -- contemplate the enigmas of love and death. Where Dostoyevsky is a master of dramatic form, Tolstoy, who has an effortless sense of drama when he wants it, is also keen to cram in the widest range of life. That's why War and Peace, which Henry James was to describe wrongly as a "loose and baggy monster", contains so many stories and so many angles on those stories. Was it because they went through so much that the Russians wrote like gods? Turgenev, the author of Fathers and Sons, was condemned to house arrest. Chekhov was tragically cut off by TB in middle age. Dostoyevsky was put in front of a firing squad by a sadistic tsar but then not shot; instead he was condemned to Siberia, about which he wrote The House of the Dead, and only afterwards went on to write works such as The Idiot and The Possessed. Tolstoy lost both his parents early. Some biographers think the loss of his mother, when he was just two, in 1830, determined his dealings with womankind. In any case, his father died a few years later, and Tolstoy seems to have been the kind of unencumbered orphan who romped like a god. He was born to the highest level of aristocratic society and, although not vastly wealthy from the outset, he belonged, at least potentially, to the set that could dominate Russian society with grace and power. His estate Yasnaya Polyana appears in the film The Last Station like a crystallisation of Chekhovian nostalgias, and it's a weird fact of history that the Soviets rebuilt this count's residence after it was destroyed by the Germans in the war. He was a young officer who became enthralled with reading Rousseau (who was an abiding influence on his thought) and he read everything, including that most extraordinary of English-language shaggy dogsters, Laurence Stern. He read it all, in French, German and English, and he also taught himself Turkish, Arabic and classical Greek. Anna Karenina famously says, in English, to herself, "the zest is gone" and Tolstoy was capable of writing a letter to the London papers himself. He married a radiant girl. The first note of conflict is when he upset her completely by making her read his diaries which turned out to contain, among a world of other things, the details of his homosexual feelings for some of his fellow officers. Sofya -- the model for Natasha in War and Peace -- freaked out completely and, although she went on to marry him and to transcribe his work for him and bear 13 children, the tensions in the marriage were to burst into flame at the end, as The Last Station testifies. The essay he wrote attacking Shakespeare's King Lear is one of the craziest and most ornery failures on the part of one refined artistic sensibility to understand another. But at the same time it is a formidable and unforgettable exercise in perverseness because it is a bit like an uncomprehending critique of King Lear written by King Lear himself. Talk about anxiety of influence, to use Harold Bloom's term. It wasn't just Shakespeare's art Tolstoy rejected; he actually competed with his characters in personal tragic heroism. He did everything in his power to renounce his kingdom and this is the drama The Last Station (based on Jay Parini's novel) depicts. Tolstoy, that infinitely worldly novelist, decided to renounce the pomps of the earth. He developed a political and religious vision that came to bear his name. Tolstoyanism was a form of Christian Socialism -- Steiner points out its affinity with a humane Marxism -- that emphasised simplicity of heart, emulation of the life of those close to the soil, and the nearest thing possible to selling what you have and giving it to the poor. It filled his wife with rage. The real-life situation The Last Station depicts is essentially about the battle between Vladimir Chertkov, Tolstoy's powerful disciple and Rasputin figure (played by Paul Giamatti in the film) and Sofya over the novelist's will. History has recorded this drama, which had Tolstoy and Sofya shouting and screaming at each other like Albee or Strindberg characters. It led to Tolstoy, nowhere more Lear-like than in this, running away to die. It is one of the more dramatic facts in the history of literature that Tolstoy fled his home on October 28, 1910, and died in the annex to the railway station of Astapova on November 7. Plummer, 45 years after his BBC TV Hamlet at Elsinore and The Sound of Music, captures all Tolstoy's glinting intelligence and irony. The scenes between Plummer and Mirren are a homage to Tolstoy's simmering sense of the conflicts and blindnesses between men and women. >From dawn to darkest night he was an incomparable writer. His dashed-off >quasi-memoir Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth is as gorgeous and intimately sweet >as that written by anyone who has gone down memory's lost pathway, including >Proust. Then there is Hadji Murad, written in the last years of his life. It is the story of a Chechen warrior that's like a compression of the Homeric epic. It shows an effortless sympathy for the alien mores of a Tartar Muslim world, as well as a deeper sense of abiding human affinity. Anyone who thinks we've got beyond this aspect of Tolstoy in our post-9/11 world doesn't understand anything.
