SOURCE: “Tolstoy's Tumult,” in The Christian Science Monitor, August 10, 1990, p. 14.

In the following review, D'Evelyn offers positive assessment of The Last Station.

Once involved in this famously unhappy family, it’s impossible not to take sides. Jay Parini’s witty, immensely moving presentation of the Tolstoys, Sofya and Leo [The Last Station], concentrates on the last year of the writer’s life the year he finally took steps to put distance between himself and his wife of 50 years.

Parini has used the journals of both Tolstoys, their children, and the “Tolstoyans,” to provide as objective a view of the matter as possible. Of course this leads one to the conclusion that such judgment is completely subjective!

Though we see the dissolution of the marriage from the points of view of their daughter Sasha, Leo’s physician, his secretary, and his acolyte, as well as from those of the...