Introduction

There is a moment near the beginning of this novel when a young woman named Katyusha Maslova walks out of a prison cell into a corridor that smells of typhoid and tar, steps into the thin April sunlight, and notices a pigeon. The bird flutters up from the cobblestones and fans her cheek with its wing. She smiles, then sighs, then remembers something the reader does not yet know. It is a tiny moment, almost nothing — a woman, a bird, a breath of spring air — and yet it contains the entire moral architecture of what Leo Tolstoy spent the last years of the nineteenth century building. That sigh, that half-remembered thing, that involuntary smile in the middle of misery: this is the territory the novel will inhabit for the next several hundred pages, and it is territory that no other writer of Tolstoy’s era, and very few since, has mapped with such ferocious honesty and such unexpected tenderness.

Resurrection was published in 1899, when Tolstoy was seventy-one years old. He had already written War and Peace and Anna Karenina. He had already undergone the spiritual crisis he described in A Confession, the crisis that convinced him organized religion was a fraud, private property was theft, and the Russian state was a machine for manufacturing human suffering. He had already alienated the Orthodox Church, which would formally excommunicate him two years after this novel appeared. He had already become, in the eyes of much of the world, not merely a novelist but a prophet — inconvenient, infuriating, impossible to ignore. By the time he sat down to complete this book, he had been working on it, on and off, for nearly a decade, and he brought to it everything he had learned about human beings, everything he had come to believe about God and conscience and the criminal absurdity of the social order, and everything he knew — which was considerable — about the specific textures of Russian aristocratic life, Russian peasant life, Russian prison life, and the long, frozen roads to Siberia.

The result is a novel unlike anything else in his body of work, and unlike almost anything else in the literature of its century. It is at once a love story and a legal thriller, a spiritual autobiography and a work of savage social criticism, a journey narrative and a meditation on guilt so searching that it can make the reader feel personally implicated in events that took place in a country that no longer exists. It is also, despite all of this, compulsively readable — driven by a plot that moves with the momentum of a criminal trial, a prison sentence, and a march across a continent, and animated by characters so fully realized that they seem to breathe on the page.

The novel grew from a true story, as Louise Maude notes in her translator’s preface to the original English edition. A lawyer acquaintance of Tolstoy’s described to him a case in which a juror recognized, in the dock, a woman he had seduced and abandoned years before. That seed of a story — the collision between a man’s comfortable present and his buried past, mediated by the machinery of a court of law — was exactly the kind of moral situation Tolstoy found irresistible. It gave him a structure in which the personal and the political could not be separated, in which a single act of private cruelty ramified outward into an indictment of an entire civilization.

The man at the center of the novel is Prince Dmitri Ivanovich Nekhludoff, a landowner and man of leisure in his thirties, the kind of educated, well-meaning, vaguely dissatisfied Russian aristocrat who appears throughout nineteenth-century Russian fiction as a type — the superfluous man, the man who thinks too much and does too little. When we first meet him, he is preparing to serve on a jury, a civic duty he regards with mild irritation. He is also, in a quiet way, at a crossroads: he is considering a socially advantageous marriage, he is managing his inherited estates with the comfortable inattention of a man who has never had to think seriously about where his money comes from, and he is living, in short, the life of a man who has successfully insulated himself from the consequences of his own choices.

The trial changes everything. The woman in the dock — charged with poisoning a merchant, a crime whose details emerge slowly and with considerable moral complexity — is Katyusha Maslova, and Nekhludoff knows her. He knew her, rather, a long time ago, in a different life, when she was a young ward in the household of his aunts, and he was a young man who believed himself to be in love with her, and then, later, when he was a young officer who had stopped believing in love and acted accordingly. What he did to her, and what became of her afterward, is the buried history that the novel gradually excavates, and it is a history that implicates not just Nekhludoff personally but the entire system of class and gender and legal power that made what he did possible and what happened to her inevitable.

The jury returns a verdict that is, through a procedural error partly attributable to Nekhludoff’s own distraction, unjustly severe. Maslova is sentenced to hard labor in Siberia. And Nekhludoff, sitting in the courtroom, feels something shift inside him — not immediately, not cleanly, but with the grinding, reluctant movement of a man who has been asleep for years and is beginning, against his will, to wake up. The novel that follows is the story of that waking: what it costs, what it requires, what it destroys, and what, if anything, it makes possible.

To call this a story of redemption would be both accurate and misleading. Tolstoy was too honest a writer, and too suspicious of easy consolation, to offer anything as tidy as redemption. What he offers instead is something harder and more interesting: the story of a man attempting to take genuine moral responsibility for his actions in a world that is structurally organized to make such responsibility unnecessary, and the story of a woman who must decide, on her own terms, what she makes of that attempt. Maslova is not a passive object of Nekhludoff’s conscience. She is one of the most fully realized female characters in nineteenth-century fiction — proud, damaged, funny, suspicious, capable of both cruelty and extraordinary grace — and the novel’s moral center of gravity shifts, as it progresses, increasingly toward her.

Tolstoy makes demands on his readers, and it is worth being honest about that before you begin. This is not a novel that flatters you or lets you off the hook. It is a novel that will, at various points, interrupt its own narrative momentum to deliver extended meditations on land reform, the theology of the Orthodox Church, the philosophy of criminal punishment, the economics of peasant serfdom, and the spiritual teachings of the Gospels. Some readers, encountering these passages for the first time, feel ambushed. They were following a story, and suddenly they are reading an essay. This is a reasonable reaction, and it is worth knowing in advance that it will happen, so that when it does, you can receive it as part of the experience rather than as an interruption of it.

The key is to understand what Tolstoy is doing structurally. He is not inserting his opinions into a novel that would be better without them. He is writing a novel in which the gap between how the world is described officially — by courts, by churches, by governments, by polite society — and how it actually functions is itself the subject. The essayistic passages are not digressions; they are the moments when Nekhludoff, or Tolstoy, or both simultaneously, refuses to let the narrative machinery of fiction smooth over what is actually happening. When a man is flogged in prison, Tolstoy does not just describe the flogging and move on. He stops and asks, with genuine fury, what kind of civilization produces this, and what kind of moral logic sustains it. These interruptions are, in their way, as formally radical as anything in modernist fiction — they are the novel refusing to aestheticize suffering, refusing to make horror beautiful and therefore bearable.

So the first piece of advice for reading this book is: do not resist the essays. Read them as you would read a letter from someone who is very angry and very intelligent and has thought about these things for a long time. You do not have to agree with everything Tolstoy says — he would probably be suspicious of a reader who agreed with everything — but you should engage with it, argue with it if you like, and let it complicate your experience of the story you are reading alongside it.

The second piece of advice is to pay attention to the minor characters. Tolstoy peoples this novel with an extraordinary gallery of human beings who appear briefly and then vanish: a prison warden who is neither villain nor hero but simply a man doing a job; a senator who is charming at dinner and monstrous in his official capacity; a revolutionary who has thought more carefully about justice than almost anyone else in the book and whose conclusions are not Tolstoy’s own. These figures are not merely background. They are the novel’s argument made flesh — the argument that the system Tolstoy is attacking is not maintained by monsters but by ordinary people, people who are kind to their families and cruel in their offices, people who have simply never been forced to look directly at what they are part of. Nekhludoff’s journey forces him to look. The minor characters are the people who have not yet been forced, or who have been forced and looked away.

The third piece of advice is to read slowly enough to notice the prose. Even in translation, and this Library of Alexandria Press edition has been prepared with scrupulous attention to rendering Tolstoy’s rhythms in contemporary English that neither archaizes nor modernizes, there is a quality to the writing that rewards attention. The famous opening pages, in which spring asserts itself over the stones and smoke of a city, and the narrator observes that the plants and birds and insects are all glad while the grown men and women continue to torment themselves and each other, establish in a few paragraphs the novel’s entire moral and aesthetic program. Nature, in this book, is not backdrop. It is a standard against which human behavior is measured and found wanting, and it recurs throughout — in the smell of fresh air that reaches even into prison corridors, in the pigeons on the cobblestones, in the vast Siberian landscape through which the convict columns march — as a reminder of what human beings are capable of feeling when they are not busy organizing systems of oppression.

To read this novel well, it helps to have some sense of the Russia it describes, though Tolstoy is a generous enough writer that ignorance of the historical context is never a fatal handicap. The Russia of the 1890s was a country under enormous pressure. The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 had transformed the legal status of the peasantry without transforming the economic realities that kept them poor and dependent. The industrialization of the cities was creating new forms of misery to replace the old ones. The tsarist state maintained its authority through a combination of bureaucratic inertia, official religion, and the systematic use of exile and imprisonment against anyone who questioned the arrangement too loudly. The revolutionary movements that would eventually produce 1917 were already active, and the novel’s third book, set largely among political prisoners being marched to Siberia, gives Tolstoy the opportunity to examine the various strands of radical thought with the same unflinching honesty he brings to everything else — admiring the courage of the revolutionaries while remaining skeptical of their programs, and reserving his deepest sympathy for the people who have been ground up by the system regardless of their political opinions.

The legal system that opens the novel is depicted with a precision that suggests Tolstoy had studied it carefully and found it, at every level, a mechanism for producing injustice while maintaining the appearance of procedure. The judges are distracted, the advocates are cynical, the jury is confused, and the whole apparatus moves forward with the terrible momentum of a machine that has been running so long that no one remembers why it was built or what it was supposed to accomplish. This is not caricature. Tolstoy is too good a novelist for caricature. The judges are not evil men; they are tired men, men with domestic concerns and professional ambitions and the mild moral numbness that comes from spending years in a system that rewards the smooth processing of human beings over the careful consideration of their individual cases. The horror is not that the system is run by monsters. The horror is that it is run by people very much like us.