Published in 1900, 'Resurrection' is Tolstoy's final large-scale
novel. It's a morally-driven tale of personal redemption, featuring
fewer characters than either War and Peace or Anna Karenina. Here
we focus on one man and a single story line that spirals around a
long-forgotten incident in his youth, which turns out to have had
tragic consequences for another. The hero is the young St
Petersburg aristocrat, Prince Dmitri. Having seduced a woman -
Katyusha - and made her pregnant, he'd left her on her on her own
and had thought no more about her until ten years later, he finds
himself on a jury trying her for murder. It becomes apparent that
her life fell apart after their brief liaison; the baby died, and
she drifted into alcoholism and prostitution. As he hears the
story, Dmitri feels personally responsible for all that has
happened, and after Katyusha is unjustly sent to Siberia, he begins
a spiritual journey to save both her and himself. Can he ever make
up for what he did to her all those years ago? It's a quest which
takes him to the highest offices in the land and to the bleakest
prisons, as the absurdities and inequalities of pre-revolution
Russia are savagely exposed. Dmitri uncovers a moral wasteland of
vested interest and uncaring attitudes, with Tolstoy particularly
hostile towards the Orthodox Church, which excommunicated him a
year later, and the Russian penal system. Just as Dickens did in
England, Tolstoy exposes the misery of the Russian under-class, but
he's less sentimental than Dickens and angrier. And there are
echoes here of another voice as well. As Boyd Tonkin said, 'Nowhere
does Tolstoy sound closer in spirit to his old foe, Dostoyevsky.'
There is an interesting back-story to the book itself. Though
finished in 1899 and published in 1900, it was started ten years
previously in 1889, and might never have been completed but for
Tolstoy's desire to help raise funds for the persecuted Doukhobor
sect. The royalties from the book were given to the Doukhabors to
fund their emigration to Canada. In the Doukhabors, (which
literally means, 'spiritual wrestlers') Tolstoy found an antidote
to the religion and society he denounces in 'Resurrection'; and a
living embodiment of his own religious and social ideas. Here were
a people committed to honest toil, living off the land, communal
sharing, pacifist principles and the teachings of Christ in deed.
As Tolstoy wrote in one of his many letters to them, 'You are
taking the lead and many are grateful to you for that. There is so
much I'd like to tell you, and so much to learn from you.' The book
continues to divide literary opinion. As a conduit for both
beautiful writing and naked sermonising, 'Resurrection' is not a
novel that invites the reader to make up their own mind. Instead,
here is the raw energy of rage which finally erupted in the volcano
that was the Russian Revolution of 1917.
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