I very much enjoyed the first episode of "The Trouble With Tolstoy" on the BBC last Sunday. The portly Alan Yentob made an excellent guide for a literary travelogue by rail which followed Tolstoy's life - starting with his death at a railway station - from birth to middle age. Beginning at his ancestral home (shown here), an earlier version of which the young man Tolstoy gambled away, the journey took in the city of Kazan where he was a student, the Crimea where he was a soldier, St Petersburg where he was a socialite, and back to Yasnaya Polyana where Tolstoy settled down to married life and wrote the epic "War and Peace". Episode one ended with a regular re-enactment of the Battle of Borodino outside Moscow, which the Russians successfully defended against Napoleon. For the viewer, as for Yentob, the scenes of dare devil horsemanship seem to symbolise the brinkmanship of the Russian soul which Tolstoy's life also embodied. Episode two is next Sunday.
