Director's Notes

The Summer section of the film makes use of readings from and visual allusions to Tolstoy's fiction, including Tolstoy's remarkable tree point of view in his story "Three Deaths" and Levin's dog Laska's point of view in Anna Karenina. A skewbald horse that looks at the camera as if asking "shall I tell you my life story?" references Tolstoy's horse narrator in "Strider the Story of a Horse". Readings and principal allusions are the following:

1. Anna Karenina (Part VI, Chap 6) read over shots of the Tolstoy house. In the scene in the novel most of the adults sit on the balcony after an afternoon excursion. Levin, tutoring his nephew downstairs, jumps out the window when he hears his brother-in-law's carriage on the Avenue (the birch-lined "Preshpekt" of the film's opening shots).

2. Anna Karenina (Part VI, Chap 8). Levin's dog Laska, sitting in a cart next the porch, waits impatiently for the men to emerge from the house for a hunting party.

3. Anna Karenina (Part I, Chap 22), Tolstoy's astonishing description of how Kitty feels wearing the perfect dress as she arrives at the ball. Consistent with Tolstoy's focus on eventual domestic happiness, the concluding shot in this segment shows a man calling to a child who runs to him; the puppies jump up and join in the running.

4. Anna Karenina (Part VII, Chap 31), Anna's last thoughts. Tolstoy's keen depiction of one of his richest characters speaks for itself. The silhouette tree trunk (seen at "a second bell sounded"), when living, grew next to the Tolstoy House porch and held the dinner bell. The manor house site resonates with absence in multiple ways in the film, and the Tolstoy house, originally a wing flanking the manor house, without the manor house, is striking in its simplicity.

5. War and Peace (Book 4, Part I Chap 16), the death of Prince Andrei. Wounded Prince Andrei dies after reuniting with Natasha and her family fleeing Moscow. Among the visual allusions to Leo Tolstoy's death and legacy are shots of thistles in the apple orchard, evoking Tolstoy's posthumously published Hadji Murat (which opens with a discussion of thistles) and the coachman's cottage, where Leo Tolstoy woke the coachman before sunrise to leave Yasnaya Polyana for his last journey in the fall of 1910.

6. "Three Deaths" (Chap 4), a soundscape narrative over shots of Tolstoy's grave. A tree contributes to the living through its death (the third death of the story). In the forest, a young coachman fells this tree to make a grave marker for the old coachman who bequeathed the younger man his fine boots. "Waving their branches" the living trees acknowledge the dead tree.