El's Reviews > Resurrection

Dear Tolstoy:

I heart you.

Love,

El.

______________________

I had some reservations about reading this book because I knew going into it that it was the last novel he wrote, and I know that in his later years he became especially religious and it showed in his writing, and jeez, do we really need more of that sort of preachiness?

Apparently we do.

Resurrection isn't as popular as Tolstoy's other two major novels, Anna Karenina and War and Peace, nor is it as long as those others. Apparently when it was first published, however, it outsold both Anna Karenina and War and Peace before its popularity waned over the years. I'll agree that it's not as broad in scope or vision, but the story itself still managed to intrigue me.

When Prince Nekhlyudov is called to serve on a jury, he realizes that one of the accused is Katusha Maslova, a woman he recognizes from his younger days. She had served as a maid in his house, at which time he was a pig, seduced her, and abandoned her after; she lost her job because of it, and she had to prostitute herself in order to survive. It's through this new occupation that she is arrested and tried for murder; Nekhlyudov realizes (a bit melodramatically) that had he not treated her the way he had, she would not have come to this end. He spends his time trying to save her from being sent to Siberia, knowing that she could not possibly have done what she was accused of doing.

Unlike Anna Karenina and War and Peace, Resurrection takes place primarily in the prison, or in Nekhlyudov's immediate surroundings. The focus is on him for the most part as he struggles with the realization that there's an entire other side to life than he has been aware of all these years, that things aren't quite as rosy as they have been for him as an aristocrat. He's guilty in the way he has lived and strives to make the world a better place by changing society however he can. A bit of an idealist, that Nekhlyudov, but then it seems everyone goes through a phase like that in their life.

Some of the complaints I've seen about this book is the heavy-handed nature of Tolstoy's writing. He was on a mission with this book, and it's pretty apparent in the writing, particularly in the last 75-100 pages or so. Tolstoy's characters all had beef with some group or another, and they at one time or another take shots at criminals, landowners and aristocrats, peasants and the poor, the penal system, Russians, Christians, Germans, suffragettes, Nihilists, Socialists, etc. Nekhlyudov spends a considerable amount of time talking with different people and discussing/arguing their beliefs in his effort to see how the other part of society lives. For the first time in his life the rose-tinted glasses have come off and he's aware of the social changes that needed to be made, and he absolutely became a mouthpiece for Tolstoy's personal opinions on how the incarcerated are treated. But for some reason I didn't find it distracting.

Probably because Tolstoy could puke on a piece of paper, put a cover on it, and I would read it.

As Occupy Wall Street has become such a huge social campaign in our own time, I couldn't help but read Tolstoy with that in the back of my mind. I believe he would have plenty to say about the movement.

"Forgive me, but that is not so: every thief knows that stealing is wrong and that he ought not to steal - that stealing is wicked," said Rogozhinsky, with a calm, self-assured, slightly contemptuous smile which specially irritated Nekhlyudov.

"No, he does not. You tell him: 'Don't steal!' and he sees the factory owners stealing his labour by keeping back his wages; he knows that the Government, with all its officials, never stops robbing him by means of taxes."

"This sounds like anarchism," Rogozhinsky said, quietly defining the meaning of his brother-in-law's words.

"I don't know what it sounds like. I only know what happens," Nekhlyudov continued. "He knows that the Government robs him; he knows that we land proprietors robbed him long ago when we took the land which ought to be common property. And now if he gathers a few sticks from that stolen land to light his fire we clap him in gaol and tell him he's a thief. Of course he knows that not he but the man who robbed him of the land is the thief, and that ever restitution of what has been stolen from him is a duty he owes to his family."

What strikes me the most is just how little issues have changed - apparently Russian society in 1899 isn't all that different from American society in 2011, and that's actually a pretty depressing thought.