{"id":144,"date":"2011-10-09T04:12:00","date_gmt":"2011-10-09T04:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/anne.myupcomingsite.com\/poetry-tolstoy-and-the-hard-work-of-adapting-a-novel-to-film\/"},"modified":"2013-08-04T14:49:39","modified_gmt":"2013-08-04T14:49:39","slug":"poetry-tolstoy-and-the-hard-work-of-adapting-a-novel-to-film","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/anne.myupcomingsite.com\/?p=144","title":{"rendered":"Poetry, Tolstoy and the Hard Work of Adapting a Novel to Film"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a><\/div>\n

Last weekend I attended\u00a0the Crossroads Writers Conference<\/a>\u00a0in Macon, Georgia. The weather was perfect to gather with a group of like-minded writers. Macon\u2019s downtown is charming, with a vital arts base. A long list of writers got their start in this gem of Middle Georgia. <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Friday evening my friends and I attended a poetry reading and book launch for Writing on Napkins in the Sunshine Club<\/a>.<\/i> Edited by Kevin Cantwell, this poetry anthology was written in, around and about Macon, Georgia. <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Several featured poets answered audience questions following the readings. Poet Anya Silver urged writers to find their voice and discover who they are.\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cDon\u2019t worry so much about publication; just write,\u201d she said. <\/span>\"\"<\/a>
\nGeorgia State University professor David Bottoms, the poet laureate of Georgia\u00a0for 11 years,<\/span> explained that what brought him to writing was a search for some significance \u2013 something of consequence. \u201cI thought I could find it in the written world,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/span><\/span>Bottoms urged the aspiring writers in the room to \u201cread fiction, read novels.\u201d He especially recommended 19th<\/sup> century Russian writers such as Leo Tolstoy \u2013 \u201cIt gets no better than that.\u201d Of all the translations of War and<\/i> Peace<\/i>, one of the most important works of world literature, the one by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky is the best, Bottoms said. <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/div>\n
A highlight on Saturday was meeting another Tolstoy admirer \u2013 distinguished novelist and biographer Jay Parini. Parini has chronicled Herman Melville, William Faulkner and\u00a0Robert Frost, and\u00a0wrote The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy’s Last Year<\/em>.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>He shared his two-decade struggle to get his Tolstoy drama adapted into a movie. The first 10 years he collaborated with Anthony Quinn, who had planned to portray the famous writer.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/div>\n
\u201cWe wrote 18 versions of the script,\u201d recalled Parini, who commuted to New York from Connecticut on weekends to meet with Quinn. <\/span><\/div>\n

The project lost funding support\u00a0when Quinn died from throat cancer\u00a0in June 2001. It took another four years to raise money for the film once Anthony Hopkins and Meryl Streep signed to play Tolstoy and his wife, Sofya Andreyevna. However, Streep pulled out because of timing with another project, Mamma Mia!<\/i> In 2009, his tenacity was rewarded and the historical drama starring Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer came out, later garnering two Oscar nominations.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/div>\n

Parini said he originally intended The Last Station<\/i> to be non-fiction. He was living in Naples, Italy, when he came across a copy of the diary of Tolstoy\u2019s 25-year-old secretary. Parini learned that not only did Tolstoy and his secretary keep journals, but also did others in his inner circle, including his wife, his daughter, his personal physician and his publicist.\u00a0 <\/span>He wrote to the London Tolstoy Society and received copies of all the journals and they formed the basis of his book.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI created the novel out of seven voices,\u201d says Parini, who visited Tolstoy\u2019s two homes and other key locales. With such rich first-person material, \u201cthe novel wrote itself,\u201d he says, estimating it took six to seven months. <\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s useful to travel,\u201d says the author, who visited Tolstoy\u2019s two residences and the famous train station where he died while researching\u00a0the novel. <\/span><\/span>Asked how much is he willing to stretch truth to tell\u00a0his character’s\u00a0stories in dramatic form, Parini said he doesn\u2019t like to venture too far a field, preferring instead to\u00a0do what\u00a0he calls \u201chugging the shore.\u201d <\/span><\/span>\u201cI don\u2019t like to go out so far you can\u2019t see the shore,\u201d he explained. <\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/div>\n

Parini\u2019s current projects include collaborating with Stanley Tucci on the film adaptation of his book, Benjamin\u2019s Crossing<\/i>, which novelizes the life and death of Walter Benjamin, a German Jewish intellectual who died fleeing Nazis into Spain.\u00a0 <\/span>He also is working with Paul Giamatti on the screenplay for his Melville novel, The<\/i> Passages of H.M. <\/i>Critics have called the work too contemporary.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHow do you know how people talked? You\u2019ve got to make it available for contemporary readers,\u201d noted Parini, who says that it\u2019s a delicate balance and something that Giamatti and he are grappling with on the screenplay. \u00a0<\/span> <\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

Of the three biographies Parini penned, he was most attracted to the story of Robert Frost in part because he could identify with Frost as a fellow New Englander. Parini admitted that he strongly prefers writing novels to biographies. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

At the conclusion of his presentation, I asked Parini what he was currently reading. Besides a\u00a0book of poetry, he mentioned\u00a0the FDR biography, Traitor to His Class<\/i>, and Falling Upward<\/i>, a book penned by Franciscan priest Richard Rohr that explores how one\u2019s failings can be the foundation for spiritual growth. <\/span><\/p>\n ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last weekend I attended\u00a0the Crossroads Writers Conference\u00a0in Macon, Georgia. The weather was perfect to gather with a group of like-minded writers. Macon\u2019s downtown is charming, with a vital arts base.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,334,66],"tags":[486,484,485],"class_list":["post-144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-author-interview","category-films-pop-culture","category-writing-conferences","tag-historical-fiction-writing","tag-jay-parini","tag-the-last-station-a-novel-of-tolstoys-last-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/anne.myupcomingsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/anne.myupcomingsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/anne.myupcomingsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anne.myupcomingsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anne.myupcomingsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=144"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/anne.myupcomingsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":671,"href":"https:\/\/anne.myupcomingsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144\/revisions\/671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/anne.myupcomingsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anne.myupcomingsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anne.myupcomingsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n