[In the following review, Bayley offers a favorable evaluation of The Last Station.]

In spite of the eulogy on the cover by Gore Vidal, himself the pioneer of a remarkable new kind of historical novel, I began this book rather sceptically. Biographers have surely drained the last of Tolstoy dry, recording the latest period of his life from every angle—that of his wife, his daughters, his young secretary Bulgakov, his medical adviser Dr Makovitsky, the odious but somehow also pathetic disciple and bad angel. Vladimir Chertkov, A. N. Wilson’s biography, Anne Edwards’s Life of the Countess Tolstoy and the edition of her diaries have recently told the story in great detail from opposite sides, and told it very well. How can it be done again through the medium of a sort of poetic novel?

Well, evidently it can be done, because it has been done. The Last Station is an unexpectedly successful and subtle masterpiece which, as used to be said of Pushkin, may at first seem simple and banal but comes to reveal an ever-deeper distinction and warmth of meaning. Considering the kind of life and the people it presents, and how masterfully it manages to do this, it is surprisingly free from any hint of authorial superiority. Even Gore Vidal’s richest and most effective novel in this new genre, Lincoln, does not entirely avoid a background sense of the novelist’s own personal satisfaction in having woven history and the novel, the known and the intuited, so artfully together. The Last Station has by contrast something of the natural humility so desperately sought by the great man who is its subject. Pushkin himself would certainly have seen the point of Jay Parini’s novel, and its capacity to absorb and to move the reader in a new way about a familiar subject. What Tolstoy would have thought is less easy to say, but au fond he would probably have recognized the work of a true artist.

Because of the quiet and calm nature of the writing it is not easy to single out passages to indicate how good this novel is. In spite of the formal divisions of its structure, with the several characters contributing their brief sections alternately, it comes more and more in the reading to look like a seamless whole, as if the prodigious creature at the centre were animating the project with his own genius. It is of course the case that everyone around Tolstoy at this time was keeping a diary, and Parini has transposed this historical fact into a uniformity of style which in its directness and simplicity, its tranquil but unnerving air of going at every moment to the heart of the matter, certainly contributes to the Tolstoyan impression.

Bulgakov, the young secretary, is in his own way at once the most congenial person in the east and the one who comes closest to us: natural enough, because his position is most evidently that of a conventional authorial presence. He notes ironically in his diary the story told about the mighty Potemkin, minister and favourite of Catherine the Great, and the little clerk Shuvalkin. “Shuvalkin was a man who wished everyone to be happy, especially those above him in rank.” Bulgakov, too, tries to keep in with everyone in the tormented household at Yasnaya Polyana, and particularly Sofya Andreyevna, the Countess Tolstoy, who after a brief period of trying to win his confidence has already begun to distrust and dislike him. But more significant is the tale of Shuvalkin’s attempt to win favour and impress his superiors by being the only man willing to go to Potemkin’s study, during one of the great man’s fits of rabid melancholia, to persuade him to sign a batch of vital State documents. Overcome with terror, hut intrepid in his humble ambitions, Shuvalkin places the documents before the motionless figure of the minister and begs him to sign. To his amazement Potemkin, a huge and terrifying zombie, obediently takes each in turn and appends his signature with the quill the clerk has obsequiously proffered. The clerk returns trembling but in triumph to the Chancellery, but when his delighted superiors go through the documents they find each one has been signed, in the minister’s gigantic hand, Shuvalkin, Shuvalkin, Shuvalkin. …

It was of course true that each member of the household, each disciple, every Tolstoyan present and to come, together with the biographers and the critics, would be trying to persuade the great man to put his name to their view of him, and finding their own name written there. Every attendant upon Tolstoy, or any comparably great figure, is necessarily a Shuvalkin. But Parini’s altogether remarkable achievement is to have avoided this process by means of his own modest and almost invisible creative method, which removes the patterns of analysis, definition and judgment explicit in every biographical study of Tolstoy and implicit in any critical survey of his works. Vidal’s Lincoln saw himself in terms of a Shakespearean tragedy, which in a sense is historically true—his favourite play was Macbeth—and Tolstoy might well have said with Goethe that every old man was a King Lear, except that he detested Shakespeare as much as he had come to distrust art in general. But the point is that tragedy, which in Matthew Arnold’s words “calms and satisfies” us, does so by dissolving our urge to determine and possess both the nature of individuals, and the significance of policies and creeds.

Thus the problems of responsibility and blame, truth and falsehood, which preoccupy Tolstoy’s biographers and critics can disappear in the light of an art which is, in however remote a way, comparable to his own. War and Peace defies and denies its own massive capacity for assertion; Anna Karenina as a work of art cannot and does not say who in it was to blame, and why the love of Anna and Vronsky ended in disaster. The paradox of Tolstoyan penetration is that it knows it can ultimately reveal nothing. Parini’s method intuits this, and makes subtle and satisfying use of what follows from it. Tolstoy’s wife describes with fond love and patronage in her “diary” the way he would make love to her, rushing her out of the room before a dance or a party was over, throwing himself on her and taking her before she could even undress. When he slept she felt peaceful, and yet “I wished he understood about these things, but I could not tell him”. The reader’s response is to sympathize with Sofya Andreyevna, generalizing her position in terms of women of the time and what they had to put up with from importunate husbands who knew nothing about the niceties of female sexuality, and cared less.

On the other hand, to his young secretary Bulgakov Tolstoy talks openly, not of course about his sexual relations with his wife, but about those with other women in his past, and notably a Tartar girl whom he still frequently thinks of and dreams about. Together in the act of love they had chatted, made jokes, exchanged intimate endearments. The reader who might have been inclined to conclude (and every reader wishes to “conclude” things about Tolstoy) that his trouble was the kind of enormous ignorance to which he himself sometimes hauntingly referred—he had lived in a glass bubble, cut off and sheltered from the world—is brought up against a fresh perspective of reality: he has perceived something here for himself, but the author of this novel has put him in a position to do the perceiving. Tolstoy no doubt could not bear to behave with his wife as he had behaved with other women, and she in turn has taken to mocking him in old age for alleged homosexual tendencies—sneering at his friendship with the to her repulsive Chertkov, and at his diary entries about the young officer whom he had known in the Crimea.

All these matters, which a biographer can only produce and comment on, are blended by Parini into a continuously undefined and mobile portrait of the old man, bringing him to life in his physical and diurnal being, as much as in his mental processes. The sheer misery of his in a sense self-inflicted predicament—the crushing burden of being Tolstoy, the vast holy presence whom everyone was watching and writing about—is brought out in this novel as never before. It is significant that every friend of Tolstoy, and every surviving member of his family, had spoken or written what they considered to be the “truth” about him: even his sister, for whom he always remained the obstinate know-all little boy who nearly drowned in a pond because he boasted that he knew it was only two and a half feet deep. Chertkov, with his pasty face and eczema-covered hands, was certainly not physically attractive to Tolstoy, as Chertkov himself knew very well, but he also knew that Tolstoy pined for the kind of friends he had known in the army (Chertkov had been an officer in the Guards) and for a comradeship which alleviated the loneliness of his position.

With remarkable delicacy Parini has brought to life the people of the household around Tolstoy, and the poignant facts of their private lives to which the lonely giant had no access. Bulgakov and his fellow-disciple Masha start a happy affair together, and seem bound for the kind of simple happiness and mutual reliance which the old Count and Countess have never known. Tolstoy’s daughter Sasha, who is in charge of the “Remington Room” and who types his writings, has a blissful physical relationship with Varvara Mikhailovna, who looked after her when she had pneumonia in the Crimea. Not all these are known facts, but they do not in the least intrude on the known area of diary and memoir: they serve on the contrary to broaden and humanize the otherwise claustrophobic conditions of the year that ended at Astapovo railway station. So too does the curiously felicitous assumption by Sofya Andreyevna—I doubt whether it could be authenticated—of an affair between her mother, wife of the court physician Dr Behrs, and the novelist Turgenev. Sofya remarks in Parini’s version of her diary that her parents were miserable together, but that she had always supposed them to be ideally happy, and this had comforted her during the early days of her marriage with Tolstoy. Against all advice her mother had determined to marry Behrs, who was much older than her, although it was intimated that a doctor was not quite a gentleman, that he was German and might even be Jewish. Again, there seems a kind of inner truth in such possibilities, even in our glimpse of the Countess as a kind of distracted Yiddisher momma, striving to hold her family together, interfering in all they do, exasperating and exasperated.

“What a literary family we have turned out to be!” exclaims Sofya Andreyevna to her diary, with characteristic coyness, wondering at the fate that had drawn her mother to her family’s friend Turgenev, herself to Leo Tolstoy, and her sister Tanya to his elder brother Sergey. But although it is written by a poet and novelist this novel is not literary at all: it breaks triumphantly out of the “Tolstoyan” world of letters, memoirs and opinions by virtue of the very poetic skill and perception with which it has used them. We seem back in the real world of Yasnaya Polyana, among the pious idioms and helpless impulses of the people who actually lived there. A sense of the innocence of the past hangs over the end of the novel, as if, just by being in the past, these great figures had to take life much more seriously than we need to. But among the soft polyphonic hubbub of their different voices comes at the end the voice of Tolstoy’s own character, the hero of his story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”, who tried with his dying words to say “Forgive me”, but was too weak and said “Forget” instead, knowing at the last that it did not matter.