Produktdetaljer
Om bidragsyterne
Jay Parini is Axinn Professor of English at Middlebury College, Vermont. His six novels also include Benjamins Crossing and The Apprentice Lover. His volumes of poetry include The Art of Subtraction: New and Selected Poems. In addition to biographies of John Steinbeck, Robert Frost and William Faulkner, he has written a volume of essays on literature and politics, as well as The Art of Teaching. He edited the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature and writes regularly for the Guardian and other publications.An impressively knowing and sensitive performance, a wistful late twentieth-century tribute to the giant conflicts of a more titanic age.
* Observer *
One of those rare works of fiction that manage to demonstrate both scrupulous historical research and true originality of voice and perception.
* New York Times Book Review *
Jay Parini has written a stylish, beautifully paced and utterly beguiling novel.
* Sunday Times *
One of the best historical novels written in the last twenty years.
- Gore Vidal,
By 1910, Leo Tolstoy, the world's most famous author, had become an almost religious figure, surrounded on his lavish estate by family and followers alike. Set in the tumultuous last year of the count's life, The Last Station centres on the battle for his soul waged by his wife and his leading disciple.
Torn between his professed doctrine of poverty and chastity on the one hand and the reality of his enormous wealth, his thirteen children, and a life of hedonism on the other, Tolstoy makes a dramatic flight from his home. Too ill to continue beyond the tiny station of Astapovo, he believes he is dying alone, while outside over one hundred newspapermen are awaiting hourly reports on his condition.
Narrated in six different voices, including Tolstoy's own from his diaries and literary works, The Last Station is a richly inventive novel that dances bewitchingly between fact and fiction.
"Stylish, beautifully paced and utterly beguiling." Sunday Times
1910. Anna Karenina and War and Peace have made Leo Tolstoy the world's most famous author. But fame comes at a price.
In the tumultuous final year of his life, Tolstoy is desperate to find respite, so leaves his large family and the hounding press behind and heads into the wilderness. Too ill to venture beyond the tiny station of Astapovo, he believes his last days will pass in isolation. But as we learn through the journals of those closest to him, the battle for Tolstoy's soul will not be a peaceful one.
"A modern classic and an unforgettable portrait of Russia on the cusp of revolution." Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Young Stalin
"Remarkable . . . One of those rare works of fiction that demonstrates both scrupulous historical research and true originality of voice." New York Times
"A subtle masterpiece." Times Literary Supplement