Nick G.
(Above: Leo Tolstoy with wife Sofia)Based on the last years of the life of the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, this disappointing effort might rather have been called The Desperate Housewife.
Helen Mirren plays the role of Countess Sofia Andreevna Tosltoya, wife of the literary giant. She is desperate to retain the affections of her husband and to protect her and her children’s entitlement to the proceeds of the copyright on Tolstoy’s works.
These are threatened by the villain of the film, depicted by one reviewer as a “particularly revolting character”, in Vladimir Chertkov, leader of the “Tolstoyan movement”. To ensure the audience’s revulsion towards Chertkov, much is made of his waxed and upturned moustache, including one sequence where his vanity is undone as one side, not properly waxed, is left ridiculously drooping.
This film, as entertaining as some of its portrayals are through Mirren, Christopher Plummer and others, essentially serves the ideological interests of the bourgeoisie.
It does this by presenting Tolstoy as the typical idealist – impractical and at times hypocritical – who is manipulated by the cold and sinister agents of “the movement”.
Nothing is shown of the evils of Tsarist feudalism, of the collaboration between the Orthodox Church and the repressive apparatus of the Tsarist state, of the ignorance and backwardness of the peasantry, indeed of any of the social conditions against which Tolstoy railed and which served as the background to his emergence as Russia’s greatest writer.
One reviewer states that Tolstoy comes across as “a rather ludicrous Lear-like fool: pompous, ill-tempered, insensitive, constantly talking of love but rarely practising it.”
So who was the real Tolstoy, and what was his significance?
Three years after the 1905 Revolution, and two years before Tolstoy’s death, Lenin presented this devastating analysis of the contradictions in the man:
“The contradictions in Tolstoy’s works, views, doctrines, in his school, are indeed glaring. On the one hand, we have the great artist, the genius who has not only drawn incomparable pictures of Russian life but has made first-class contributions to world literature. On the other hand we have the landlord obsessed with Christ. On the one hand, the remarkably powerful, forthright and sincere protest against social falsehood and hypocrisy; and on the other, the “Tolstoyan”, i.e., the jaded, hysterical sniveller called the Russian intellectual, who publicly beats his breast and wails: “I am a bad wicked man, but I am practising moral self-perfection; I don’t eat meat any more, I now eat rice cutlets.” On the one hand, merciless criticism of capitalist exploitation, exposure of government outrages, the farcical courts and the state administration, and unmasking of the profound contradictions between the growth of wealth and achievements of civilisation and the growth of poverty, degradation and misery among the working masses. On the other, the crackpot preaching of submission, “resist not evil” with violence. On the one hand, the most sober realism, the tearing away of all and sundry masks; on the other, the preaching of one of the most odious things on earth, namely, religion, the striving to replace officially appointed priests by priests who will serve from moral conviction, i. e., to cultivate the most refined and, therefore, particularly disgusting clericalism” (Leo Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution, Lenin, Collected Works Vol 15).
This statement was given further elaboration in the tribute written by Lenin to Tolstoy following the latter’s death in 1910.
“Tolstoy’s works express both the strength and the weakness, the might and the limitations, precisely of the peasant mass movement. His heated, passionate, and often ruthlessly sharp protest against the state and the official church that was in alliance with the police conveys the sentiments of the primitive peasant democratic masses, among whom centuries of serfdom, of official tyranny and robbery, and of church Jesuitism, deception and chicanery had piled up mountains of anger and hatred. His unbending opposition to private property in land conveys the psychology of the peasant masses during that historical period in which the old, medieval landownership, both in the form of landed estates and in the form of state “allotments”, definitely became an intolerable obstacle to the further development of the country, and when this old landownership was inevitably bound to be destroyed most summarily and ruthlessly. His unremitting accusations against capitalism—accusations permeated with most profound emotion and most ardent indignation—convey all the horror felt by the patriarchal peasant at the advent of the new, invisible, incomprehensible enemy coming from somewhere in the cities, or from somewhere abroad, destroying all the “pillars” of rural life, bringing in its train unprecedented ruin, poverty, starvation,, savagery, prostitution, syphilis—all the calamities attending the, “epoch of primitive accumulation”, aggravated a hundredfold by the transplantation into Russian soil of the most modern methods of plunder elaborated by the all powerful Monsieur Coupon(i.e. the capitalist class – N.G.).
“But the vehement protestant, the passionate accuser, the great critic at the same time manifested in his works a failure to understand the causes of the crisis threatening Russia, and the means of escape from it, that was characteristic only of a patriarchal, naive peasant, but not of a writer with a European education. His struggle against the feudal police state, against the monarchy turned into a repudiation of politics, led to the doctrine of “non-resistance to evil”, and to complete aloofness from the revolutionary struggle of the masses in 1905–07. The fight against the official church was combined with the preaching of a new, purified religion, that is to say, of a new, refined, subtle poison for the oppressed masses. The opposition to private property in land did not lead to concentrating the struggle against the real enemy—landlordism and its political instrument of power, i.e., the monarchy—but led to dreamy, diffuse and impotent lamentations. The exposure of capitalism and of the calamities it inflicts on the masses was combined with a wholly apathetic attitude to the world-wide struggle for emancipation waged by the international socialist proletariat.
“The contradictions in Tolstoy’s views are not contradictions inherent in his personal views alone, but are a reflection of the extremely complex, contradictory conditions, social influences and historical traditions which determined the psychology of various classes and various sections of Russian society in the post-Reform, but pre-revolutionary era” (L.N. Tolstoy, Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 16).
Tolstoy remains, as Lenin described him, “a great artist”. His great works, including War and Peace, Anna Karenina and Resurrection can never be diminished by such a cinematic caricature as The Last Station.
Helen Mirren plays the role of Countess Sofia Andreevna Tosltoya, wife of the literary giant. She is desperate to retain the affections of her husband and to protect her and her children’s entitlement to the proceeds of the copyright on Tolstoy’s works.
These are threatened by the villain of the film, depicted by one reviewer as a “particularly revolting character”, in Vladimir Chertkov, leader of the “Tolstoyan movement”. To ensure the audience’s revulsion towards Chertkov, much is made of his waxed and upturned moustache, including one sequence where his vanity is undone as one side, not properly waxed, is left ridiculously drooping.
This film, as entertaining as some of its portrayals are through Mirren, Christopher Plummer and others, essentially serves the ideological interests of the bourgeoisie.
It does this by presenting Tolstoy as the typical idealist – impractical and at times hypocritical – who is manipulated by the cold and sinister agents of “the movement”.
Nothing is shown of the evils of Tsarist feudalism, of the collaboration between the Orthodox Church and the repressive apparatus of the Tsarist state, of the ignorance and backwardness of the peasantry, indeed of any of the social conditions against which Tolstoy railed and which served as the background to his emergence as Russia’s greatest writer.
One reviewer states that Tolstoy comes across as “a rather ludicrous Lear-like fool: pompous, ill-tempered, insensitive, constantly talking of love but rarely practising it.”
So who was the real Tolstoy, and what was his significance?
Three years after the 1905 Revolution, and two years before Tolstoy’s death, Lenin presented this devastating analysis of the contradictions in the man:
“The contradictions in Tolstoy’s works, views, doctrines, in his school, are indeed glaring. On the one hand, we have the great artist, the genius who has not only drawn incomparable pictures of Russian life but has made first-class contributions to world literature. On the other hand we have the landlord obsessed with Christ. On the one hand, the remarkably powerful, forthright and sincere protest against social falsehood and hypocrisy; and on the other, the “Tolstoyan”, i.e., the jaded, hysterical sniveller called the Russian intellectual, who publicly beats his breast and wails: “I am a bad wicked man, but I am practising moral self-perfection; I don’t eat meat any more, I now eat rice cutlets.” On the one hand, merciless criticism of capitalist exploitation, exposure of government outrages, the farcical courts and the state administration, and unmasking of the profound contradictions between the growth of wealth and achievements of civilisation and the growth of poverty, degradation and misery among the working masses. On the other, the crackpot preaching of submission, “resist not evil” with violence. On the one hand, the most sober realism, the tearing away of all and sundry masks; on the other, the preaching of one of the most odious things on earth, namely, religion, the striving to replace officially appointed priests by priests who will serve from moral conviction, i. e., to cultivate the most refined and, therefore, particularly disgusting clericalism” (Leo Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution, Lenin, Collected Works Vol 15).
This statement was given further elaboration in the tribute written by Lenin to Tolstoy following the latter’s death in 1910.
“Tolstoy’s works express both the strength and the weakness, the might and the limitations, precisely of the peasant mass movement. His heated, passionate, and often ruthlessly sharp protest against the state and the official church that was in alliance with the police conveys the sentiments of the primitive peasant democratic masses, among whom centuries of serfdom, of official tyranny and robbery, and of church Jesuitism, deception and chicanery had piled up mountains of anger and hatred. His unbending opposition to private property in land conveys the psychology of the peasant masses during that historical period in which the old, medieval landownership, both in the form of landed estates and in the form of state “allotments”, definitely became an intolerable obstacle to the further development of the country, and when this old landownership was inevitably bound to be destroyed most summarily and ruthlessly. His unremitting accusations against capitalism—accusations permeated with most profound emotion and most ardent indignation—convey all the horror felt by the patriarchal peasant at the advent of the new, invisible, incomprehensible enemy coming from somewhere in the cities, or from somewhere abroad, destroying all the “pillars” of rural life, bringing in its train unprecedented ruin, poverty, starvation,, savagery, prostitution, syphilis—all the calamities attending the, “epoch of primitive accumulation”, aggravated a hundredfold by the transplantation into Russian soil of the most modern methods of plunder elaborated by the all powerful Monsieur Coupon(i.e. the capitalist class – N.G.).
“But the vehement protestant, the passionate accuser, the great critic at the same time manifested in his works a failure to understand the causes of the crisis threatening Russia, and the means of escape from it, that was characteristic only of a patriarchal, naive peasant, but not of a writer with a European education. His struggle against the feudal police state, against the monarchy turned into a repudiation of politics, led to the doctrine of “non-resistance to evil”, and to complete aloofness from the revolutionary struggle of the masses in 1905–07. The fight against the official church was combined with the preaching of a new, purified religion, that is to say, of a new, refined, subtle poison for the oppressed masses. The opposition to private property in land did not lead to concentrating the struggle against the real enemy—landlordism and its political instrument of power, i.e., the monarchy—but led to dreamy, diffuse and impotent lamentations. The exposure of capitalism and of the calamities it inflicts on the masses was combined with a wholly apathetic attitude to the world-wide struggle for emancipation waged by the international socialist proletariat.
“The contradictions in Tolstoy’s views are not contradictions inherent in his personal views alone, but are a reflection of the extremely complex, contradictory conditions, social influences and historical traditions which determined the psychology of various classes and various sections of Russian society in the post-Reform, but pre-revolutionary era” (L.N. Tolstoy, Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 16).
Tolstoy remains, as Lenin described him, “a great artist”. His great works, including War and Peace, Anna Karenina and Resurrection can never be diminished by such a cinematic caricature as The Last Station.
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