What Tolstoy and Jung Teach Us About Love, Change, and the Journey Home
The Last Station (2009), directed by Michael Hoffman, is a moving and visually striking depiction of Leo Tolstoy’s final year. The film delves into the historical and personal drama of the Russian literary icon, but its core focus is on love — the same love Tolstoy grappled with defining, living, and coming to terms with in his last moments.
As I was watching this movie, and being a student of Jung, I wondered how Tolstoy’s philosophy correlates with that of Jung. Especially with Jung’s concept of the second half of life and individualization.
As we reach the second half of life — our 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond — something often begins to stir deep within. It’s not always loud or dramatic. Sometimes it shows up as restlessness. Sometimes as grief, or a quiet question: “Is this really all there is?”
We may have done all the “right” things — raised children, built careers, cared for family — yet there can come a point when the outer life no longer fills us the way it used to. That’s when a new journey begins. One that doesn’t require a passport or a change of address, but rather a return to the self.
This is the journey that both Carl Jung and Leo Tolstoy spoke about in different ways.
And the film The Last Station (2009), which portrays the final months of Tolstoy’s life, offers us a moving glimpse into what this inner journey can look like.
What happens when everything we’ve built starts to fall away? What do we do when the old roles no longer fit? What, then, is left to live for?
Jung would say: this is the call to individuation.
It’s not about becoming someone new — it’s about becoming more fully, more honestly, who we already are.
Jung believed that the second half of life wasn’t meant to be a repetition of the first. It was meant to be different. It’s a time when we are invited to turn inward, to listen to the parts of ourselves we left behind — the artist, the dreamer, the lover of silence — and to allow those parts a place in our life again.
In The Last Station, we watch Tolstoy — a world-famous writer, thinker, and spiritual teacher — wrestle with questions that many of us ask later in life. What does it mean to live authentically? To love without attachment? To leave a legacy, but also to let go?
We see his wife, Sofya, desperately clinging to their shared life and memories — while Tolstoy searches for simplicity, for purity, for freedom from ego and control. Their conflict is painful, beautiful, and deeply human.
Tolstoy’s philosophy in his later years was centred around love — not romantic love, but something deeper. Love as compassion. Love as service. Love as surrender. Love as the only thing that remains when all else falls away.
Jung too believed that love, especially in the second half of life, was essential to the soul’s growth. Not the love of pleasing others or proving our worth — but the kind of love that comes from knowing and accepting who we truly are, shadow and all.
The second half of life invites us into a new kind of courage. Not the courage to succeed, but the courage to soften. To feel. To forgive. To listen to the quiet voice within that says, “There’s more of you still to be lived.”
And so, like Tolstoy in his final days, or the characters in Jung’s dreams and writings, we walk toward our deeper truth. Sometimes stumbling. Sometimes resisting. But always being drawn home — not to a place, but to a more honest self.
You don’t have to be famous, or wise, or spiritually perfect to begin this journey. You just have to be willing to ask the question:
What is the unlived life still waiting inside me?
Because that’s what the second half of life is really about — not fixing what was, but welcoming what wants to be.