Leo Tolstoy

The first draft of Resurrection was finished in mid-1895. It was a rather short story focused on the seduction and Nekhlyudov’s repentance. It starts in the courtroom, where he sees Katyusha Maslova, the girl he had once seduced, accused of a murder she did not commit. The draft had a happy ending: the protagonist marries his newly rediscovered old love, emigrates to England and becomes a peasant in a commune. As all early versions of Tolstoy’s major works, this draft was supposed to be revised and expanded, but Tolstoy could not bring himself to do this. He was distracted by his essays and reluctant to complete a work that could provoke conflicts of the kind he had experienced with ‘Master and Man’. In 1897, however, he found a good reason to forge ahead.

The most radical of the many Russian sects receptive to Tolstoy’s beliefs were the so-called Spirit Wrestlers, who rejected the institutionalized Church and had been exiled by Nicholas I to the Caucasus. In the 1890s one of their leaders was struck by the deep affinities between his beliefs and the ideas of the famous count and urged his followers to burn their weapons, denounce military service and refuse to take the oath of loyalty to Tsar Nicholas II. As a result of this, some Spirit Wrestlers were beaten to death, others were arrested or deprived of the means to survive in the severe mountain climate where they lived. Tolstoy and his associates issued an appeal on their behalf. Once again, Tolstoy himself was spared any repression, but other signatories, including Chertkov, were arrested. Because of his aristocratic connections, Chertkov was allowed to leave for England; two other prominent Tolstoyans were sent into exile.

Due to Tolstoy’s intervention, the persecution of the Spirit Wrestlers began to attract international attention and the government felt compelled to grant them permission to emigrate to Canada. The resettlement of thousands of people was an expensive operation. Tolstoy therefore suspended, for a time at least, his resolve not to take money for his publications. He decided to donate the income from his new novel to help the sectarians. In the summer of 1898 he started reworking and expanding Resurrection.

Having found a valid excuse for writing prose, Tolstoy worked on it with intensity and passion. He turned the ‘Koni story’ into a full-scale novel that became the most elaborate artistic representation of his philosophy, and the broadest panorama of Russian life not only in his own fiction, but, arguably, in the whole of Russian literature. Apart from aristocrats, peasants and soldiers, whom Tolstoy always enjoyed writing about, the novel abounds with descriptions of civil servants, clerks, judges, gendarmes, merchants, clergymen, criminals and prostitutes. A significant part of the action takes place in Siberia, a place Tolstoy had never visited, but which had intrigued him since the time he had intended to write about the Decembrists. Nekhlyudov follows Katyusha there after her arrest and meets different sorts of convicts, including a number of revolutionaries.

Even before the novel was completed, the first instalments began appearing simultaneously in two versions: a censored one was published in the Russian magazine Niva (Field); the full one was printed in England through a press established by Chertkov. Complete editions appeared within weeks of the end of serialized publication and were immediately followed by English, French and German translations. Tolstoy’s third novel reached a bigger audience in one year than his previous two had achieved in three decades.

On 28 August 1898, the day of his seventieth birthday, Sofia wrote in her diary that Leo ‘was satisfied’ as he had worked well on his novel:

‘You know’, he said to me when I entered his room, ‘he won’t marry her, I reached a final decision today and it is a good one!’ ‘Of course, he won’t marry’, I said, ‘I told it to you long ago, if he were to marry, it would be false.’ (SAT-Ds, I, p. 405)

Sofia was also satisfied. Tolstoy’s idea that a man should marry the first woman with whom he had carnal relations meant that she had, at best, no more reason to call herself his wife than Aksinya Bazykina, the housemaid Gasha and many other women, including the unknown prostitute in Kazan by whose bed the teenage Leo had wept in despair. Tolstoy, however, did not make Nekhlyudov change his mind. It is Katyusha who rejects him, preferring instead to marry a political prisoner. She loves the prince, but sacrifices her love because she does not believe he could be happy with her. At the end of the novel, Nekhlyudov reads the Gospels and discovers there the same five commandments of Christ that Tolstoy discussed in What I Believe. The final paragraph of the novel promises the dawn ‘of new life’ for its hero.