Fiction: Leo Tolstoy's ‘Resurrection'

Wall Street Journal

a day ago

'It was perhaps inevitable that a man who did nothing by half-measures would experience something beyond the typical mid-life crisis,' Rosamund Bartlett writes in her 2010 biography of Leo Tolstoy. At the age of 49, while completing his work on 'Anna Karenina,' (serialized in 1877), Tolstoy underwent a profound spiritual crisis. He began a comprehensive study of world religions, published his own translation of the Gospels and left the Russian Orthodox Church, which he considered fatally in thrall to political power. He threw himself into wide-ranging philanthropic efforts, started dressing in peasant garb and learned to cobble shoes. By the turn of the 20th century, as he entered his 70s, Tolstoy had become the founder of a growing Christian sect based on pacifism and the abolition of privately owned land.
Though much of his writing during this late stage was devoted to theology and pedagogical treatises, and though he was becoming increasingly disenchanted with fiction (his own included), Tolstoy continued his literary production. He is mostly known from this period for his stories, both the brief, cautionary parables modeled on rural folk tales, such as 'How Much Land Does a Man Need?' (1886), and dark, sophisticated works such as 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich' (1886) and 'The Kreutzer Sonata' (1889). But he also wrote another novel, 'Resurrection,' which he worked on in fits and starts for nearly a decade and published in 1899. This long, significant book has, strangely, become the black sheep in the Tolstoyan oeuvre, and for many serious readers its reissue by Everyman's Library will serve both as a commemoration and a reminder of its existence.
'Resurrection' opens with a courtroom trial in Moscow, where a prostitute named Katerina Maslova is wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to hard labor in Siberia. Sitting on the jury is Prince Dmitri Ivanovich Nekhlyudov, who is shocked to realize that he knows the defendant. Years ago, when Maslova worked as a servant for some of the prince's relations, Nekhlyudov seduced and abandoned her, setting her on a downward path toward the brothel. Maslova's conviction has direct causes—both prosecutorial bias and absurd administrative errors play a part—but Nekhlyudov holds himself singularly culpable for her fate and, in horror, resolves to seek atonement.
Nekhlyudov is in many ways similar to Pierre Bezukhov from 'War and Peace' (1869) and Konstantin Levin from 'Anna Karenina'—a well-to-do young landowner who enjoys the pleasures of aristocratic living while feeling secretly repulsed by its idleness and decadence. Before Maslova's conviction Nekhlyudov had been content to ignore his principles and behave in the easy, dissolute way of those around him. 'This he had done,' writes Tolstoy, 'because it was too difficult to live believing one's self; believing one's self, one had to decide every question, not in favour of one's animal I, which is always seeking for easy gratification, but in almost every case against it. Believing others, there was nothing to decide; everything had been decided already, and always in favour of the animal I and against the spiritual.'