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Better not to know the dull domestic squabbles behind War and Peace

Evening Standard – May, 2007

Coming soon to a screen near you: the marital miseries of the grand old man of Russian literature. A biopic about the ghastly marriage of Leo Tolstoy, author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, is in the works, with our own age’s worthiest thesbian grandees – Sir Anthony Hopkins and Meryl Streep (as Tolstoy’s wronged wife Sonya) – to take the starring roles.

I love Russian literature; I love Tolstoy. So it ought to be right up my street. But I’m not at all convinced I’m going to want to watch it.

Biopics are high-risk. Feature films need just enough story to squeeze into a clear, concise couple of hours – and no more. That’s already a tall order if you’re making a film out of a novel – a fiction that comes with a pre-existing beginning, middle and end. It’s even harder to render down a whole life. Lives are just too messy and too rich to be compressed that much without the risk of cartoonish distortions. Stephen Daldry pulled it off with his adaptation of the novel The Hours, an impressionistic fiction set in three different time periods, with three stories linked to the writing and death of Virginia Woolf. But Stephen Soderbergh, darling of the critics after a brilliant debut with sex, lies and videotape, came a terrible cropper with his 1991 film Kafka. It gave us paranoid Prague in 1919, with bits in black and white; bits in colour; a nasty murder from Kafka’s life, and passing references to all his most famous stories — a right old dog’s breakfast, in fact; Coles’ Notes on speed. Critics panned it. It was box office disaster. No wonder.

It’ll be still more hellish for whatever poor sod gets to pick out the highlights (or lowlights) in Tolstoy’s life and marriage. He was a mass of contradictions. A nobleman, he served in the Russian army then retired to his estate to write two of the world’s most famous love stories. Always eccentric (before his marriage, he forced the young Sonya to read the diaries detailing his past amours), he later grew a long beard, started wearing peasant shirts, and developed an idiosyncratic Christian philosophy of non-violence and chastity even in marriage. His fans worldwide included Mahatma Gandhi. But he irritated Russia’s military authorities, most of his thirteen children, and the long-suffering Sonya, whom he ended up very publicly loathing.

Practically all his thoughts and actions, over 82 years, were chronicled by himself and an army of devotees and detractors. His life still arouses such controversy, nearly a century on, that any misstep in the film – and someone’s bound to see every step as a misstep – will be howled at.

But the real reason I don’t know if I’ll want to go is that I don’t want to know too much about the ranting, fanatical old wife-torturer Tolstoy became. It might spoil the way I enjoy his novels, which are still read today because they were written while he was still most famous for making art out of love, rather than for turning his marital life to hate.

ENDS