|
The Tolstoy Estate
From the winner of the inaugural Prime Minister's Literary Award comes a powerful, densely rich and deeply affecting novel of love, war and literature. Epic in scope, ambitious and astonishingly good, The Tolstoy Estate proclaims Steven Conte as one of Australia's finest writers. During the doomed German invasion of Russia in World War II, Paul Bauer, a German military doctor, is assigned to establish a field hospital at Yasnaya Polyana – the former grand estate of Count Leo Tolstoy, the author of the classic War and Peace. There he encounters a hostile aristocratic Russian writer, Katerina Trubetzkaya, who has been left in charge of the estate. But even as a tentative friendship develops between them, Bauer's arrogant commanding officer, Julius Metz, becomes erratic and unhinged as the war turns against the Germans. Over the course of six weeks, in the terrible winter of 1941, everything starts to unravel …
"A riveting story of war, love and literature - Conte's prose does not miss a beat. I devoured The Tolstoy Estate, it was a pleasure to read."
JANE GLEESON-WHITE, award-winning author of Classics and Double Entry "Steven Conte has written a sweeping historical saga spanning the second world WAR and the frigid decades of PEACE that followed; an essential novel about essential things – love’s triumphs and failures, the redoubtable human spirit, and the power of literary art itself. Tolstoy, of course, is at the novel’s heart, and in its very soul."
LUKE SLATTERY |
Sharing some thoughts on the book.
|
"Reading a book that is such a complete world, evoked in such fine detail, is almost wickedly satisfying. Like Tolstoy, whose presence haunts this elegant, intelligent novel, Conte has the gift of bringing the moral ambiguity and complexity of war and those caught up on its periphery to life in a way that is utterly engrossing and immersive. He reminds us that travel is always possible in the imagination even when reality goes dark and that literature always leads us towards the light."
CAROLINE BAUM
CAROLINE BAUM
On Writing The Tolstoy Estate
What is it about the Second World War? Catch-22, Sophie’s Choice, Schindler’s Ark, The English Patient, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Charlotte Gray, The Reader, Atonement, The Book Thief – it seems that readers can’t get enough of novels set in World War II. My theory is that the war is our Homeric era, a time when millions of ordinary men and women were suddenly forced to live on an epic and (compared to World War I) freewheeling scale. Plus there’s the extraordinary scope of the war – ranging from the skies, seas, deserts, forests, jungles, fjords, great cities and, in the case of The Tolstoy Estate, the former estate of Count Leo Tolstoy, three hundred kilometres southwest of Moscow, at the beginning of the severe and fateful winter of 1941.
The Tolstoy Estate is a love story, a war story, a ghost story (of sorts) and a hospital drama – a dark, Teutonic version of M.A.S.H. It is also a book-infused novel, a homage to literature and in particular to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which is both an inspiration for the novel and one of its subjects.
The novel was born out of a book that’s little known today: Journey Among Warriors (1943) by Ève Curie (the daughter and biographer of Nobel Prize-winning scientist Marie Curie) – specifically her description of a visit to Yasnaya Polyana, the former Tolstoy estate, just three weeks after its liberation from invading German forces. The Germans had established a field hospital there, and Curie’s interviews with the estate’s Soviet staff revealed that everyone present during the six-week occupation – Germans and Russians alike – had become acutely conscious of the site’s cultural, ideological and even metaphysical significance as the former home of the author of Russia’s great national epic of resistance to a foreign invader.
Within minutes of reading Curie’s account, I had imagined most of what became The Tolstoy Estate. As the son of a nurse and the stepson of a doctor, I chose as my protagonist a 40-year-old German military surgeon, Captain Paul Bauer, a good man enlisted in an immoral cause. At Yasnaya Polyana, Bauer encounters Katerina Trubetzkaya, the estate’s acting chief custodian and a once passionately committed Bolshevik writer, who takes years of pent-up rage at the Soviet regime and redirects it at the invaders.
I want readers of The Tolstoy Estate to feel what Bauer feels: the suction of mud on boots, the itch of lice, the sting of ice crystals flicked up on an arctic wind, the exhaustion of performing surgery for forty hours straight. I want to convey the experience of two cultivated but otherwise ordinary people caught up in the machinery of totalitarian states.
The Tolstoy Estate is a love story, a war story, a ghost story (of sorts) and a hospital drama – a dark, Teutonic version of M.A.S.H. It is also a book-infused novel, a homage to literature and in particular to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which is both an inspiration for the novel and one of its subjects.
The novel was born out of a book that’s little known today: Journey Among Warriors (1943) by Ève Curie (the daughter and biographer of Nobel Prize-winning scientist Marie Curie) – specifically her description of a visit to Yasnaya Polyana, the former Tolstoy estate, just three weeks after its liberation from invading German forces. The Germans had established a field hospital there, and Curie’s interviews with the estate’s Soviet staff revealed that everyone present during the six-week occupation – Germans and Russians alike – had become acutely conscious of the site’s cultural, ideological and even metaphysical significance as the former home of the author of Russia’s great national epic of resistance to a foreign invader.
Within minutes of reading Curie’s account, I had imagined most of what became The Tolstoy Estate. As the son of a nurse and the stepson of a doctor, I chose as my protagonist a 40-year-old German military surgeon, Captain Paul Bauer, a good man enlisted in an immoral cause. At Yasnaya Polyana, Bauer encounters Katerina Trubetzkaya, the estate’s acting chief custodian and a once passionately committed Bolshevik writer, who takes years of pent-up rage at the Soviet regime and redirects it at the invaders.
I want readers of The Tolstoy Estate to feel what Bauer feels: the suction of mud on boots, the itch of lice, the sting of ice crystals flicked up on an arctic wind, the exhaustion of performing surgery for forty hours straight. I want to convey the experience of two cultivated but otherwise ordinary people caught up in the machinery of totalitarian states.
* * *