Ilya tolstoy

Leo tolstoy
Anna karenina
Sophia tolstaya grandchildren

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The Last Station: war, peace, sex and chickens = one eventful Tolstoy biopic

The Last Station (2010)

Director: Michael Hoffman

Entertainment grade: C

History grade: B+

Count Lev Nikolayevich “Leo” Tolstoy, author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, is considered to be one of the greatest writers of all time. He had a long, tempestuous marriage to Sofya Andreyevna Tolstaya.

Locations

The film begins in 1910 at Yasnaya Polyana, the estate where Leo Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer, with excellent lookalike beard) wrote his great works. The real Yasnaya Polyana is now immaculately preserved as a museum. The Last Station was filmed at the Schloss Stülpe in Brandenburg, Germany, a comparable (though perhaps even grander) house. Alongside his writing, Tolstoy was a moral philosopher, advocating vegetarianism, celibacy and non-violence.

Celibacy

Earnest young disciple Valentin Fyodorovich Bulgakov (James McAvoy) is appointed by sinister Tolstoyan purist Vladimir Grigorievich Chertkov (Paul Giamatti) to act as Tolstoy’s secretary. He is shown into Tolstoy’s stud

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Rosamund Bartlett's books include Wagner and Russiaand the acclaimed Chekhov: Scenes from a Life. An authority on Russian cultural history, she has also achieved renown as a translator of Chekhov.

Here she shares some suggestions for casting the leads in an adaptation of her latest book, Tolstoy: A Russian Life:

The image of Tolstoy as an old sage is now deeply ingrained thanks to The Last Station. Christopher Plummer did a marvellous job, even if his character lacked Tolstoy’s gravitas. If they ever made my biography into a film, I'd like to concentrate on Tolstoy’s earlier years, when he was a reckless young man of extraordinary physical and intellectual prowess who caroused with the gypsies, bedded peasant girls, fought bears single-handed, served with honour in the Crimean War and gambled to excess while at the same time developing superlative literary gifts and the stamina to write War and Peace. Tolstoy was not a refined aesthete, but gruff and down to earth despite his aristocratic pedigree. He was an eccentric - a man who always went against the grain an
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Lev & Sonya: The Story of the Tolstoy Marriage
November 4, 2007
Tolstoy was in his thirties and already somewhat famous when he married a barely 18 year old Sonya Bers. The marriage lasted 48 years and produced 13 children.
Sonya was a woman before her time. She took care of everything involving the management of their daily life (household, properties, children, even proofing and recopying his manuscripts and seeing to his every need) so that he could devote all of his attention to his craft. I’m sure she (and her family) was not only an inspiration for characters in his book, but probably had a lot to do with the fact that he wrote such rich female characters.
They both wrote extensively in their diaries and they both read what each other wrote. They ached for each other physically.
After writing two of his great novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Lev suffered in a period of depression and searching. He had trouble resolving his philosophical beliefs while living his aristocratic lifestyle. He said he wanted to give away everything but at the same time he enjoyed hi