Rosamund Bartlett's "Tolstoy: A Russian Life," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Tolstoy: A Russian Life by Rosamund Bartlett.

The entry begins:

The image of Tolstoy as an old sage is now deeply ingrained thanks to The Last Station. Christopher Plummer did a marvellous job, even if his character lacked Tolstoy’s gravitas. If they ever made my biography into a film, I'd like to concentrate on Tolstoy’s earlier years, when he was a reckless young man of extraordinary physical and intellectual prowess who caroused with the gypsies, bedded peasant girls, fought bears single-handed, served with honour in the Crimean War and gambled to excess while at the same time developing superlative literary gifts and the stamina to write War and Peace. Tolstoy was not a refined aesthete, but gruff and down to earth despite his aristocratic pedigree. He was an eccentric - a man who always went against the grain and against his class by siding with the beleagured peasants.

He abhorred convention and the hypocrisy of the society world he belonged to by birth, and he loved the natural world of rural Russia which was his home for the best part of his life. I think Russell...[read on]

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My Book, The Movie: Tolstoy: A Russian Life.

--Marshal Zeringue