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Back in the 1980s I was living for a period in Italy, when I came across the diary of a young man who was Tolstoy’s secretary during the last year of the great man’s life. I read it in fascination and noted that everyone was keeping diaries – he was, so was his wife, his daughter, his doctor, his disciples. When I read these diaries in succession, I realised that I had a novel before me.

I worked steadily for four years, making a fugue of these voices, creating a picture of Tolstoy’s amazing last year, when his whole life came into focus. I used that final year as a lens through which I could examine his whole life, his literary project, his moral and spiritual adventure. It was, for me, a thrilling experience and the novel – its theme is the power of love to transform our lives – seemed to work very well. It has been in print for 20 years, translated into 30 languages, and now – to my delight – been made into a film.

I’ve seen it by now about a dozen times, so I feel I could pretty much recite the lines. Many of them, of course, come straight from my novel. But I have to keep reminding myself that this is not my novel. There is, in fact, a necessary gulf between any novel and the film it becomes.

Usually writers secretly (or not so secretly) dislike the film versions of their work. I have been reading Selina Hastings’ wonderful biography of Somerset Maugham in which she notes how intensely Maugham disliked the adaptations of his work – and there were countless versions of his stories, plays and novels that appeared during his lifetime. “Just cash the cheque and walk away,” an old friend said to me, when I mentioned that I’d sold the film rights to my book. That’s easier said than done.

I have felt perhaps a little too proprietorial over this film. That’s partly because I tried, with Anthony Quinn, to write the screenplay myself – for Quinn to play Tolstoy. We did 18 different versions of the script and these never quite worked. They were much too focused on Tolstoy himself, whereas in my story Tolstoy remains a kind of still centre around which the story and characters swirl. I was, frankly, relieved when Michael Hoffman took over the script, and rewrote it.

He had the unenviable task of taking my novel of six first-person speakers and making a script with only one viewpoint: that of the camera. He had to strip away all the back story – how the Tolstoy marriage actually came to this horrendous place of disaffection after 48 years. He had no time in two hours of slithering celluloid to provide much context. In the novel, I follow Tolstoy into a poorhouse in Moscow, where he is appalled by what he sees. I was able to write about the poverty and oppression of the Russian people. The film had no time to do this.

No time and no money. Filmmaking is an expensive business, and Mike had roughly £10 million at hand. That’s a lot of dough, but it’s really not much for a film. I felt sorry to see Mike cutting and cutting, ultimately focusing on the marriage of Tolstoy rather intensely – and the counterpointing love story of Tolstoy’s young secretary (played by James McAvoy) and a beautiful Tolstoyan girl (Kerry Condon).

I do think Mike gets the strange combination of humour and pathos that – I think – I managed to get on the page in The Last Station. Helen Mirren, in my view, does an astonishingly good job of presenting the complexity of Sofya Tolstoy – her wild fluctuations of mood. Christopher Plummer makes a good Tolstoy. He looks the part, and he offers a kind of warmth to the character that (in truth) Tolstoy did not possess.

But this is Hollywood, not real life. I hope people read the novel, which will bring them to the historical moment – and to a fairly accurate notion of what life was like for those around Tolstoy in 1910.

Further reading...

The Last Station
By Jay Parini
Canongate Books Ltd
Buy now