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The Last Station, Murder in Samarkand and Shakespeare fanfic
This seems to be my week for watching or listening to biographical stories set in the former Soviet Union. Who don't cover entirely lives but brief excerpts. On Friday, it was The Last Station, set during the last year of Tolstoy's life, starring Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer, and today, it was Murder in Samarkand, David Hare's radio play about former British ambassador Craig Murray, starring David Tennant, which was broadcast yesterday and then because available to non-Brits like myself through the BBC website I just linked.
The Last Station: was an acting tour de force. As a story, it was a bit predictable, and not in terms of knowing Tolstoy's life; I mean the parallel story of the young lovers, especially the character through whose eyes we see everything happening, a Tolstoy disciple. If there's a shy young man determined on celibacy at the start of a movie, you just know he'll be deflowered and embracing the female embodiment of joie de vivre before you can blink. This being said, the actors - James MacAvoy and Kerry Condon (Octavia in Rome) play it out charmingly, and at any rate it's obvious this story is there as a contrast to that famous literary marriage gone cannibalistic, Lew Tolstoy and his wife Sofya, who after 48 years exceed at both making each other profoundly miserable and profoundly happy. Mind you, as with nearly all movies starring a writer, you have the problem that the script doesn't really tell you why X, Y, or Z is such a genius, just that he (or in rare cases she) is. (Films about painters or composers don't have that problem; you can show pictures, you can use music in the soundtrack. This, btw, is why Amadeus the film works better than Amadeus the play; all the Mozart music in the former makes it very clear just why Salieri is so enraged at God handing out so much genius to someone he considers so unworthy.) So The Last Station doesn't give you any clear impressions on just why everyone in it was Mad About Tolstoy, and since I doubt much of the audience has read Anna Karenina, War and Peace, let alone Kreutzer Sonata, Tolstoy's vivisection of marriage and diatribe against sex. Which means the story of an old man and his wife has to stand on its own merit. Not least because of the great actors involved, it does. You believe them all those decades together; you believe both her insights and her histrionics, his pompousness and his tenderness, and eventually retreat.
Something I think even within the film world should have been dealt with more is Tolstoy's old age attitude towards sex, because the way it comes across in the movie is that only only the disciples make the whole sexual abstinence thing into a doctrine while the old man himself, remembering fondly his wilder, younger days, is fine with it. Which makes it a bit confusing as to who the disciples got the idea from to begin with. It also avoids one component of what made the Tolstoy marriage so tragic, his resentment of his own ongoing attraction.
Something I understand not being mentioned for lack of time, especially as the film does make it clear theirs was a marriage of the mind as well as the body, with Sofya transcribing War and Peace no less than seven times and discussing it with him in an editor-like fashion: Sofya had been writing before her marriage - one novella, Natasha, provided Tolstoy with the name of his War and Peace heroine - and did in fact write during her marriage as well, a reply to the Kreutzer Sonata - which everyone took as autobiographical and Tolstoy's depiction of his own marriage and wife - entitled "A question of guilt. A woman's story" which was only published in Russia in 1994 (more than a hundred years after she wrote it) and in Germany in 2008. (It doesn't seem to be published in English yet.) I remember the reviews in our papers were pretty glowing, and I'm really curious to read it now.
Lastly, a poem by Ted Hughes, himself a party of a can't live with/can't live without type of marriage, about Tolstoy, taking a darker view of the man than this film does:
Kreutzer Sonata
Now you have stabbed her good
A flower of unknown colour appallingly
Blackened by your surplus of bile
Blooms wetly on her dress.
"Your mystery! Your mystery!..."
All facts, with all absence of facts,
Exhale as the wound there
Drinks its roots and breathes them to nothing.
Vile copulation! Vile! - etcetera.
But now your dagger has outdone everybody's.
Say goodbye, for your wife's sweet flesh goes off,
Booty of the envious spirit's assault.
A sacrifice, not a murder.
One hundred and forty pounds
Of excellent devil, for God.
She tormented you Ah demented you
Now you have stabbed her good
Trukachevsky is cut off
From any further operation on you.
And she can find nobody else.
Rest in peace, Tolstoy!
It must have taken supernatural geed
To need to corner all the meat in the world,
Even from your own hunger.
Murder in Samarkand the radio play, based on Craig Murray's account of the same name, is fascinating in that it actually avoids making its narrator look very sympathetic, despite casting him with a very popular actor. Murray, despite being not fictional, comes across as a Graham Greene character: he womanizes, he boozes, he's not a little patronizing at first, and when his long-suffering first wife finally has had enough later on, you cheer for her. It's also not a story of moral awakening wherein Our Hero, after being confronted with suffering, mends his profligate ways and becomes a better person; Craig Murray at the end is pretty much the same as he is at the start, and he spends as much time feeling sorry for himself as he does feeling sorry for the citizens of Uzbekistan. What remains true throughout, though, is his genuine outrage at what he finds in Uzbekistan: the human right abuses, the easy way any torture is justified by linking any Muslim to Al-Quaeda, and the utter moral bankruptcy of both the American and British goverments. Hare is great with the dialogue here, but I suspect several statements didn't even need a playwright because they sound just like what the people in question have said in public as well: "There is some argument as to what complicit actually means," is the reply when Murray points out to his superiors in London that using intelligence gained by torture and signalling that such intelligence will continue tobe in demand is making them complicit in said torture. It's a merciless tale for everyone around, and David Hare leaves you with Craig Murray stating: "They call me a hero now. I'm not. What kind of world have we created where merely being opposed to torture makes you a hero?"
And finally, two recs for Shakespeare fanfiction. I've talked about The Merchant of Venice before, and why it's such an interesting but impossible play. Lo and behold, two stories set in the aftermath, both with Shylock as the pov character, who are very complex; among other things they pull off an extravagant pairing, but what I find most fascinating are the encounters between Shylock and his daughter Jessica, and the slow coming to terms between these two:
A wilderness of monkeys
Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves
The Last Station: was an acting tour de force. As a story, it was a bit predictable, and not in terms of knowing Tolstoy's life; I mean the parallel story of the young lovers, especially the character through whose eyes we see everything happening, a Tolstoy disciple. If there's a shy young man determined on celibacy at the start of a movie, you just know he'll be deflowered and embracing the female embodiment of joie de vivre before you can blink. This being said, the actors - James MacAvoy and Kerry Condon (Octavia in Rome) play it out charmingly, and at any rate it's obvious this story is there as a contrast to that famous literary marriage gone cannibalistic, Lew Tolstoy and his wife Sofya, who after 48 years exceed at both making each other profoundly miserable and profoundly happy. Mind you, as with nearly all movies starring a writer, you have the problem that the script doesn't really tell you why X, Y, or Z is such a genius, just that he (or in rare cases she) is. (Films about painters or composers don't have that problem; you can show pictures, you can use music in the soundtrack. This, btw, is why Amadeus the film works better than Amadeus the play; all the Mozart music in the former makes it very clear just why Salieri is so enraged at God handing out so much genius to someone he considers so unworthy.) So The Last Station doesn't give you any clear impressions on just why everyone in it was Mad About Tolstoy, and since I doubt much of the audience has read Anna Karenina, War and Peace, let alone Kreutzer Sonata, Tolstoy's vivisection of marriage and diatribe against sex. Which means the story of an old man and his wife has to stand on its own merit. Not least because of the great actors involved, it does. You believe them all those decades together; you believe both her insights and her histrionics, his pompousness and his tenderness, and eventually retreat.
Something I think even within the film world should have been dealt with more is Tolstoy's old age attitude towards sex, because the way it comes across in the movie is that only only the disciples make the whole sexual abstinence thing into a doctrine while the old man himself, remembering fondly his wilder, younger days, is fine with it. Which makes it a bit confusing as to who the disciples got the idea from to begin with. It also avoids one component of what made the Tolstoy marriage so tragic, his resentment of his own ongoing attraction.
Something I understand not being mentioned for lack of time, especially as the film does make it clear theirs was a marriage of the mind as well as the body, with Sofya transcribing War and Peace no less than seven times and discussing it with him in an editor-like fashion: Sofya had been writing before her marriage - one novella, Natasha, provided Tolstoy with the name of his War and Peace heroine - and did in fact write during her marriage as well, a reply to the Kreutzer Sonata - which everyone took as autobiographical and Tolstoy's depiction of his own marriage and wife - entitled "A question of guilt. A woman's story" which was only published in Russia in 1994 (more than a hundred years after she wrote it) and in Germany in 2008. (It doesn't seem to be published in English yet.) I remember the reviews in our papers were pretty glowing, and I'm really curious to read it now.
Lastly, a poem by Ted Hughes, himself a party of a can't live with/can't live without type of marriage, about Tolstoy, taking a darker view of the man than this film does:
Kreutzer Sonata
Now you have stabbed her good
A flower of unknown colour appallingly
Blackened by your surplus of bile
Blooms wetly on her dress.
"Your mystery! Your mystery!..."
All facts, with all absence of facts,
Exhale as the wound there
Drinks its roots and breathes them to nothing.
Vile copulation! Vile! - etcetera.
But now your dagger has outdone everybody's.
Say goodbye, for your wife's sweet flesh goes off,
Booty of the envious spirit's assault.
A sacrifice, not a murder.
One hundred and forty pounds
Of excellent devil, for God.
She tormented you Ah demented you
Now you have stabbed her good
Trukachevsky is cut off
From any further operation on you.
And she can find nobody else.
Rest in peace, Tolstoy!
It must have taken supernatural geed
To need to corner all the meat in the world,
Even from your own hunger.
Murder in Samarkand the radio play, based on Craig Murray's account of the same name, is fascinating in that it actually avoids making its narrator look very sympathetic, despite casting him with a very popular actor. Murray, despite being not fictional, comes across as a Graham Greene character: he womanizes, he boozes, he's not a little patronizing at first, and when his long-suffering first wife finally has had enough later on, you cheer for her. It's also not a story of moral awakening wherein Our Hero, after being confronted with suffering, mends his profligate ways and becomes a better person; Craig Murray at the end is pretty much the same as he is at the start, and he spends as much time feeling sorry for himself as he does feeling sorry for the citizens of Uzbekistan. What remains true throughout, though, is his genuine outrage at what he finds in Uzbekistan: the human right abuses, the easy way any torture is justified by linking any Muslim to Al-Quaeda, and the utter moral bankruptcy of both the American and British goverments. Hare is great with the dialogue here, but I suspect several statements didn't even need a playwright because they sound just like what the people in question have said in public as well: "There is some argument as to what complicit actually means," is the reply when Murray points out to his superiors in London that using intelligence gained by torture and signalling that such intelligence will continue tobe in demand is making them complicit in said torture. It's a merciless tale for everyone around, and David Hare leaves you with Craig Murray stating: "They call me a hero now. I'm not. What kind of world have we created where merely being opposed to torture makes you a hero?"
And finally, two recs for Shakespeare fanfiction. I've talked about The Merchant of Venice before, and why it's such an interesting but impossible play. Lo and behold, two stories set in the aftermath, both with Shylock as the pov character, who are very complex; among other things they pull off an extravagant pairing, but what I find most fascinating are the encounters between Shylock and his daughter Jessica, and the slow coming to terms between these two:
A wilderness of monkeys
Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves