By Kohinoor Dasgupta
(Originally published on March 8, 2011 in my weblog Draupadiarjun)
'RESURRECTION' was Leo Tolstoy’s last novel, published in 1899, when he was seventy-one. He completed War and Peace thirty years prior, and Anna Karenina twenty-two years ago. Resurrection was the novel of Tolstoy’s old age. Here he is more a human being at a specific spiritual and intellectual destination than a novelist displaying his craft.
The inspiration for Resurrection was a true story that resonated with Tolstoy in a shameful way. There were two women he had brought to grief similarly. After several false starts, the novel was written during 1897-99.
What started as a story of repentance became also a novel about the Russia of the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Tolstoy could never write without making a thorough study of particular issues that were to have a bearing on his work. All his novels have precisely detailed backgrounds. The conduct, the impulses and the thought process of the characters derive from the political, social, familial, religious and psychological aspects of their situation. When you read a Tolstoy novel, you consent to be a witness, as though you are really reading or hearing the contemporary discourse, as though you move in the courtly and official circles of St. Petersburg and Moscow, and as though you work on the estates with peasants. In War and Peace and Anna Karenina, the canvases are crowded, the protagonists are from the nobility and there are wars, court intrigue, litigation, salons and soirees. The works have color and pageantry, love and romance, young people with expansive hopes and ardor. Tolstoy’s voice, examining society and trying out solutions to problems, is heard in these novels too, loud and clear, but enough of the main attractions of the novel form are provided all the way.
Resurrection is short on obvious novelistic attractions. There are times when you say, this is a treatise. Tolstoy’s voice is as unrelenting as the Ancient Mariner’s; his need to document all that he has seen and understood, to record as many cases of the failure of the justice system, as he possibly can, rather robs Resurrection of the subtle graces of a work of fiction. It comes across as an experiment with reduction, as though the novelist decided not to polish the gem, and he will no longer call us to him with any writerly device other than a truthful voice.
The cast of characters is strikingly different from those of Tolstoy’s earlier novels. Most of the people you remember from Resurrection are not glamorous or wealthy or powerful. There are such people, you meet many, but altogether they construct in this novel the frivolous and uncaring social system that casts off natural/divine law and subject multitudes to misery. Tolstoy’s spotlight falls briefly on these men and women, illuminating their motivations and indifference. There is among them no Prince Andrei or Pierre, not even Anna or Kitty, and no Napoleon or General Kutuzov. There are few good people, and the derangement of the bad is examined in general didactic terms rather than drawing out our evaluation while they think and act. The sympathetic characters are mainly peasants or ordinary people of all ages. When you meet them, they are prisoners on the way to Siberia, traveling and staying in halting stations en route in dehumanizing conditions.
The main character, however, is a nobleman, Prince Dmitry Ivanovich Nekhlyudov, who at first glance seems like Stepan Arkadyich – how deceptive first impressions can be! A man in his early thirties, he is a Moscow bon vivant toying with the idea of settling down when one morning, while on jury duty, he sees a prostitute accused of murder. He recognizes her as the teenage girl he had raped and abandoned when he was young. The jury agrees that she did not intend to cause death, but an awful error on their part results in her conviction. She is sentenced to fifteen years of penal servitude in Siberia.
The woman in question was the illegitimate child of a dairymaid and a gypsy tramp. As an infant, she was taken in and brought up to be “half servant, half young lady” by Nekhlyudov’s spinster aunts, who "called her Katusha, which sounds less refined than Katinka but is not quite so common as Katka”. At age sixteen she met Nekhlyudov, then a nineteen-year-old university student. Two years later, he visited his aunts for four days, during which time he managed to wreck Katusha’s life. Leaving her one hundred roubles, he put her out of his mind. The aunts dismissed the pregnant Katusha, and her baby son died at the Foundlings Hospital in Moscow. After failing in several attempts to earn a living as a housemaid, she turned to prostitution.
Nekhlyudov is shaken by the sight of Katusha, by the transformation that she has undergone in the ten years since he saw her. She is coarse, no longer charming or innocent, and she does not recognize him. Nekhlyudov remembers that Katusha was his first love, and unconsciously pinned in his mind to the pure and idealistic days of his youth, particularly that summer they met when, influenced by Herbert Spencer’s Social Studies, he was preparing an essay on land tenure. Abandoning her a second time, now, would be akin to spiritual doom. It would mean giving up the possibility of ever retrieving the moral light that used to guide him before he adopted a hedonistic lifestyle. Guilt and remorse seize Nekhlyudov. He resolves to do his utmost to get her sentence commuted, and marry her. The rest of the novel details that endeavour.
Katusha is the female protagonist, but Tolstoy does not peer too deeply into her soul. He tends to summarize her rather than give her to us, which is deeply disappointing, because we know he did know her. Perhaps time was short, and he had too many things to say about society, religion, and redemption. Thus, Katusha Maslova is not as memorable a character as Anna Karenina. We see Katusha a little in the beginning, when Nekhlyudov visits her in a prison in Moscow. Now and then we chance upon her after his visits. During the three-month-long journey to eastern Siberia, she becomes just one of the prisoners, we are only allowed to see her through a wide-angle lens. Towards the end of the novel, she appears twice when Nekhlyudov speaks to her. She answers, but we have only Nekhlyudov’s interpretation of why she says what she does. Even so, a great change comes over Katusha during the course of the novel. In spite of the distance that Tolstoy puts in-between, we almost hear Katusha – with her sloe-black, slightly squinting eyes, and vigorous, inelegant body – breathing. And though the novel is a sort of pilgrim’s progress centered on Nekhlyudov, Katusha, having little to lose, and not seeking intellectual explanations, makes, in my eyes at least, a less self-conscious and a more successful pilgrim.
The book is about why people do things – why we sin, why we repent, why we want things to remain the same, why we want things to change, why we pray, why we cling to power and possessions, why we renounce, why we want to be political leaders, why we despise the very people we claim to serve. Resurrection is as big as you can make it, or as focused as one punishing trek to redemption. The book refuses to stay within the confines of its time and place.
As a young girl, I dared to read Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle (1968). Now, years, later, I come across, in Resurrection, political prisoners in a different era of Russian history. Nekhlyudov appeals to Czar Alexander III for a mitigation of Katusha’s sentence. While they wait for a reply, Katusha is permitted to be with political prisoners. Thus, Nekhlyudov has an opportunity to study the rebels and the ideologues, including women, and also the set of conditions that led to their infractions and the condition in which they are now being held, according to the law of the land, before they start serving their sentences in Serbia. As Nekhlyudov sees it, every case is different, but everyone is judged by the same draconian laws that were imposed after Czar Alexander II was assassinated on March 13, 1881. Secondly, the way the prisoners, political or other, are treated, clearly reveals that the system does not believe that they can ever redeem themselves. The system tries its best to ensure that they perish. After the question of Katusha’s future is resolved, Nekhlyudov knows that he must take on an active role to reform the justice and prison systems. The last time we see him in Resurrection, the five laws of the Sermon on the Mount give him the clarity he had been seeking.
Resurrection contains sharp criticism of church ritual. After a description of a church service for prisoners, including Katusha, in a temporary Moscow prison, Tolstoy writes:
“The great majority of the prisoners believed that in these gilt images, these vestments, candles, cups, crosses, in this repetition of incomprehensible words – 'Jesu sweetest’ and 'have mercy’ – there lay a mystic power through which much convenience in this life and in that to come might be obtained. Only a few saw clearly the deception practised on those who adhered to this faith, and laughed in their hearts; but the majority, having made several attempts – by means of prayers, masses, and candles – to get the conveniences they desired, and not having got them (their prayers remaining unanswered) were each of them convinced that their want of success was accidental, and that this organization, approved by the educated and by archbishops, is very important and necessary, if not for this life, at any rate for that hereafter.”
Tolstoy was excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church on February 22, 1901. But if you read Resurrection with an open mind, you may see him as one of the true Christian humanists.
All the takeaways from Resurrection cannot be put in a nutshell. But I will not stop without dwelling on two more things! First, the old man whom Nekhlyudov meets during the river-crossing while leaving Perm and later on, as a prisoner. “There are many faiths,” the old man says, “but the spirit is one – in me and in you, and in him.” Everyone laughs at the old man, some call him “a worthless tramp” and some label him a lunatic.
The last thing: Nekhlyudov himself is not spared temptations and doubts, nor ambivalence towards Katusha. He is determined to do his duty and, in his better moments, he appreciates the change in Katusha, but when the Czar’s mitigation comes and he sees her, dressed in a prison jacket, his heart sinks:
“I want to live, I want a family, children, I want a human life,” he thinks.
The man has devoted months to atonement and even as he stands on the threshold of his last epiphany, when Katusha at last has a chance to live, his own future, with her, looks like death to Nekhlyudov.
**
Resurrection (1899) by Leo Tolstoy
Translated by Louise Maude in 1916
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