A Literary Lion on the Big Screen

Having visited his grand Utopian estate just south of Tula, Russia, I can't wait to see the film "The Last Station," by Michael Hoffman. The movie debuts at the Spectrum in less than a week.

When he was alive, Tolstoy was of the most famous writers in the world. Even though he was a wealthy man with 13 children, his radical philosophies included passive resistance, vegetarianism and celibacy. His writings influenced Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Tolstoy's house at Yasnaya Polyana is a museum which includes his library of 22,000 volumes, his simple grave site, 10 acres of fir groves where Tolstoy gathered inspiration and the desk where he wrote manuscripts including 'War and Peace.'