Leo Tolstoy

Resurrection

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.

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Christianity
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Spirituality

Details

Publisher: White Crow Books

Publication Date: November 2010

Extent: 548

Size: 140 x 216 mm

ISBN: 978-1-907661-09-9

eBook ISBN: 978-1-907661-08-2

Summary

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. 

Translation: Louise Maude

About the Author

Number of books: 11

Leo Tolstoy

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, better known as Leo Tolstoy, is rightly regarded as one of the greatest writers in the history of literature. His masterpieces, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are considered by many to be two of the most important novels ever written.

He was born in 1828 in Yasnaya Polyana, in what was then the Russian Empire, into a noble family with long-established ties to the highest echelons of the Russian aristocracy. His parents died while he was young, leaving relatives to raise him. After a brief and disappointing time at university, where he enrolled in 1844, he spent several years gambling—and often losing—in St. Petersburg and Moscow before joining the army in 1851.

He began writing while in the army and, upon leaving, took it up as his occupation. His first books detailed his life story, along with Sevastopol Sketches, which discussed his experiences in the Crimean War. By the time he had completed Sevastopol Sketches, he had returned from the first of two trips abroad that would change his outlook on life and, consequently, his writing approach and the themes of his work.

A trip to Europe in 1860–61, during which he met Victor Hugo—who had just completed Les Misérables—had a marked influence on War and Peace. On the same trip, Tolstoy also met Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the French anarchist, with whom he discussed the importance of education for all levels of society. This revelation led Tolstoy to open up 13 schools in Russia for the children of the working class, further highlighting his growing separation from his noble roots.

War and Peace, published in 1869, and Anna Karenina, published in 1878, were universally recognised as great works. However, not long after the publication of the latter, Tolstoy fell into an existential crisis. Although not suicidal in the literal sense, he did feel that if he could find no purpose for his existence, life would no longer be worth living. He sought answers from many of his friends in intellectual and aristocratic circles, but their theories failed to satisfy him. Just as he was on the verge of despair, he experienced a moment of clarity in a dream and concluded that faith in God—understood in a spiritual, rather than institutional, sense—was the key to life’s meaning. He remained wary of the church and of those who abused religion as a tool of oppression.

He published A Confession in 1882, explaining his crisis, his search for meaning, and how he had resolved it. Two subsequent works, The Death of Ivan Ilyich and What Then Must We Do?, further reinforced his views and included strong criticism of the Russian Orthodox Church.

The culmination of his 30 years of religious and philosophical thinking was The Kingdom of God Is Within You, published in 1894. In the book, Tolstoy denounced the abuses of those in power, both in the church and in the government, which eventually led to his excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901. Tolstoy’s central message derived from Jesus’ teaching to “turn the other cheek,” which he believed was the core of Christ’s message, particularly as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount. This doctrine of nonviolence would have a profound impact on Mahatma Gandhi, who read the book as a young man while living in South Africa.

In 1908, Tolstoy wrote A Letter to a Hindu, in which he urged the Indian people to use nonviolent resistance and love as a means to overcome British colonial rule. The letter was published in an Indian newspaper and came to Gandhi’s attention; Gandhi not only read it but also wrote to Tolstoy to request permission to translate it into his native Gujarati. The Kingdom of God Is Within You and A Letter to a Hindu helped solidify Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance, which he later implemented in the movement that culminated in India’s independence in 1947. Tolstoy and Gandhi continued their correspondence until Tolstoy’s death in 1910.