The Tolstoy Estate

​I like to switch between weathers in my reading as well as settings, eras and genres and this is another title that has long loitered in my TBR (to be read) pile. The only reason I can think of is that I acquired it around the time I read the extraordinary, but emotionally exhausting, The Winter Station, another novel set in a grimly frozen Russian medical world and I suspect I put it aside as I went off in search of sunnier climes and subjects.

Paul Bauer is a surgeon who is part of the occupying Wehrmacht forces pushing into Russia in 1941. His medical unit sets up a hospital in the home of the famous author Leo Tolstoy, Yasnaya Polyana. They come up against the fiery Katerina Trubetzkaya, who is caretaker of the estate. She walks a fine line between being shot or imprisoned as she challenges and even mocks the invaders. In spite of their situation, it is their mutual passion for exploring ideas and literature that irrevocably draws Katerina and Bauer together.

The intelligent and compassionate narrative style is excellent; largely dialogue that is honest and concise in its observations of the weaknesses and strengths of character of individuals dealing with perilous situations on both sides of war. Philosophy and politics run alongside base human needs like the struggle to keep warm and find relief in liquor and sex. There are the flashes of black humour that are common – even essential – to medical staff working on individuals in extremis. Bauer remains the solid anchor while his irascible superior Metz is determined to retain control as he falls under the spell of Tolstoy’s ghost that may, or may not, be the result of the pharmacist Drexel’s experimentation. Bauer takes a German edition of War and Peace from Tolstoy’s library and although Metz insists it be destroyed, he reads it surreptitiously. (It will be helpful if you have read this famous work and are familiar with its characters.)

Around the two-thirds point, the novel diverts into an exchange of letters from the future. This may dismay readers who don’t like to know what happens in advance. Normally, I would feel the same but somehow in this case the letters work well, as you think you will know what happen, but it may not be the case.

Here are a couple of passages that demonstrate the quality of this writing.

Bauer, on finding consolation in War and Peace in which Tolstoy said:

“… the rhythms of life would remain the same. The young would be foolish, hopeful and wild, would fall in love and out of it, become sadder, maybe wise. Some would meet their deaths sooner than others, yet there would come a day when everyone engaged in the struggles of their age would without exception die, bequeathing the world they had made to those strangers, their children, who would struggle to change it again.”

And Katerina’s observations in her later years on the importance of novels as “engines of empathy”:

“To borrow a Stalinist idiom, the novel is a machine, a noisy, violent thing whose product, oddly enough, is often human understanding, perhaps even a kind of love. I daresay some might look at the last one hundred years and say, ‘Nonsense, what love?’, but if so they are naïve because it could have been worse. Hitler could have won. Kennedy and Khrushchev could have blown us all to hell. And who knows what other horrors we’ve evaded because someone, or someone’s teacher, once put down a novel and thought, ‘My God, I am like that stranger’ or ‘That stranger is like me’ or even ‘That stranger is utterly different from me, and yet how understandable his hopes and longings are’.”

Five stars (plus!)
 
amazon.com

amazon.co.uk (audio)
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