Tolstoy

As proof followed proof, each covered with fresh alterations, excisions, and additions, often very illegibly written, it required the closest attention to keep the text correct and to discriminate between changes made voluntarily, and changes made for the Censor which I was to disregard [for the English edition].⁸⁵

Maude sent Tolstoy twenty-three long letters with detailed queries as he worked his way painstakingly through the text, which was finally published in full in 1898. The socialist playwright George Bernard Shaw, a didactic writer like Tolstoy who would enter into correspondence with him in his last years, was almost the only critic to write an enthusiastic review in England. There was a certain degree of mutual admiration between the two, but Tolstoy later chided Shaw for a lack of seriousness.⁸⁶ In Russia most people shared the view about What is Art? expressed by the artist Isaak Levitan, who described it in a letter to his friend Chekhov in Nice as brilliant and ridiculous at the same time. Five thousand copies were sold in the first week.⁸⁷

Tolstoy was glad to get aesthetics out of the way, as his major project in 1898 was to help persecuted sectarians. In 1897 some Molokans came from Samara to ask for his help and advice: police had raided their villages late at night and taken away their children in order to bring them up in the Orthodox faith at an orphanage. Tolstoy wrote a lengthy letter to Nicholas II, and then a few months later wrote again when there was no response. His second letter was also greeted with silence, as was the letter he published in the St Petersburg Gazette that October. The Molokan children were returned to their parents only after Tolstoy’s daughter Tanya succeeded in gaining an audience with Pobedonostsev in January 1898.⁸⁸ That left Tolstoy free to concentrate all his energies on the mission to help the dukhobors, who finally learned that month that they were going to be allowed to settle abroad. Tolstoy had been tinkering since 1889 with a new novel, and this news gave him the impetus to finish it. He now decided he would make an exception and sell the rights, so that he could raise money to help pay for the dukhobors to emigrate. As it turned out later, the funds would go to pay their passage to Canada, the country which expressed a willingness to receive them.

Resurrection, as the novel came to be called, drew on a story Tolstoy had heard from a lawyer friend. A nobleman appointed as a jury member had recognised a defendant on trial for theft as a poor woman he had once seduced, and been overcome with remorse. When she was sentenced to exile in Siberia, he offered to marry her, but she had died before he could atone for his sins. Hearing the story aroused guilty feelings in Tolstoy, who could not help but remember having taken advantage of his sister’s servant girl Gasha Trubetskaya when he was a young man. He now combined the story he had heard from his lawyer friend with that of his own spiritual journey. Accordingly, the central character Prince Nekhlyudov breaks with his former life once he recognises in court his aunt’s former peasant girl Katyusha Maslova, whom he once callously seduced. After she is sentenced to hard labour in Siberia through a miscarriage of justice, Nekhlyudov gives his land away to his peasants and follows her to Siberia in the hope of expiating his sins. Sonya had found it hard enough to deal with her husband’s sanctimonious advocacy of chastity in The Kreutzer Sonata back in 1889, while still being forced to satisfy his apparently unquenchable sexual appetite. A decade later, when it was finally beginning to subside (when Masha had married in 1897, Sonya had moved into her bedroom at Yasnaya Polyana),⁸⁹ she read with distaste her husband’s sensual description of the ravishing of Katyusha Maslova. But Resurrection was more than a love story and Bildungsroman, as Tolstoy suppressed the dictates of his artistic conscience to exploit another opportunity for lambasting all his favourite targets, namely the government, the Church and the judicial system, as well as private property and upper-class mores. Not all his readers would find the resulting mixture of intense lyricism, biting satire and moralising demagoguery terribly appealing, even if it was a compulsively readable narrative, like everything else that Tolstoy wrote, with flashes of brilliance.