SOURCE: “Resurrection,” in New Statesman and Society, March 26, 1993, pp. 37-8.

In the following review, Coover offers a positive evaluation of The Last Station.

The 20th century has produced so many monsters and so few even-might-be saints that the temptation is to cling on to the few moral exemplars we inherited from the 19th: Schweitzer, Gandhi, Tolstoy … the list seeps into the sands already. Written from the points of view of six protagonists, including Leo Nikolayevich, the American poet Jay Parini’s novel [The Last Station] appears at first to be little more than another appliqué of varnish in the Tolstoy hagiographic tradition, all breathless deference and significant pauses.

We have Tolstoy’s wife, Sofya Andrevevna, his leading disciple and spy Chertov, the new, sycophantic secretary Bulgakov, his doctor Dr Makovitsky, and so on, each narrating, commenting, bitching, moaning—all obsessed with the Christ-like, self-appointed old saint. It was...