From Russia With Love
What’s it like to have your novel turned into an Oscar-tipped blockbuster?
Jay Parini describes the experience of adapting his novel The Last Station into a screenplay, and about what happened after that…
I remember how this project began: in the mid-1980s I was wandering in a used bookshop (in Naples, as I was living on the Amalfi Coast at the time), and I found a dusty volume of memoirs by Valentin Bulgakov. He was Leo Tolstoy’s private secretary for about a year. This was Tolstoy’s final year, and he was torn between the ideals he had championed – devotion to God, chastity, poverty, social justice – and his life as a Russian nobleman. He was torn between his leading disciple, Vladimir Chertkov, and his wife, the brilliant but difficult Sofya. These two figures bitterly opposed each other. In the end, Tolstoy abandoned his old life at the family estate and took to the road. He died a few weeks later in a small railway station in southern Russia, believing himself alone with a few disciples. In fact, the media had descended, setting up press tents, and Tolstoy’s death became a story that carried around the world.
Intrigued by this tale, I began reading diaries by others in the Tolstoy circle: they all kept diaries. And each version of the day’s events would vary slightly, sometimes wildly.
I realized I had a novel here, a ‘found’ novel, if you will. I began writing, and worked steadily for nearly four years. The result was The Last Station, which appeared in 1990, to fairly wide acclaim – and it was soon translated into many languages. It was only a few months after the first publication that I got a call from Anthony Quinn, who had starred in such classic films as La Strada and Zorba the Greek. He called me in Vermont one night, and he said, in his husky voice: ‘I want to play Tolstoy. We’ll write the screenplay together.’
How could I resist that? I became a close friend of Tony Quinn, and we worked off and on for years, either in his apartment in New York or in Vermont. About nine years later, the screenplay was done, and we were ready to go. But Tony was ill by then, and he died in 2000. That left me with our script and Bonnie Arnold, who had produced Dances with Wolves. (She had been introduced to me by Tony.) So began a journey with Bonnie that ended with Michael Hoffman, who has directed many brilliant films over the past two decades.
He wrote another version of the script – it needed it – and brought the film closer to the book than before. We often talked over his script, and we have become close friends in the course of this work. I visited the set during the filming, in eastern Germany, and have remained in constant touch with Mike and the producers – Chris Curling, Phil Robertson, and Jens Muerer had joined Bonnie.
I love the film, which is sensuous and lively – a separate thing from the novel but wonderfully responsive to its contours and thematics. As a writer, of course, I can only hope that the film will attract readers to the source material, my novel – which remains close to my heart.
