SOURCE: “A Household and Its Head,” in Times Literary Supplement, December 28-January 3, 1991, p. 1408.

In the following review, Bayley offers a favorable evaluation of The Last Station.

In spite of the eulogy on the cover by Gore Vidal, himself the pioneer of a remarkable new kind of historical novel, I began this book rather sceptically. Biographers have surely drained the last of Tolstoy dry, recording the latest period of his life from every angle—that of his wife, his daughters, his young secretary Bulgakov, his medical adviser Dr Makovitsky, the odious but somehow also pathetic disciple and bad angel. Vladimir Chertkov, A. N. Wilson’s biography, Anne Edwards’s Life of the Countess Tolstoy and the edition of her diaries have recently told the story in great detail from opposite sides, and told it very well. How can it be done again through the medium of a sort of...