Introduction to Leo Tolstoy's Novel Resurrection

While the main purpose of the blog is to discuss War and Peace, just as discussing the novel is incomplete without discussing the historical background, discussion of the novel is incomplete without discussing the author himself, which is most easily done through the discussion of his other works. With that in mind, as well as continuing to post and discuss War and Peace, I am going to start posting about Tolstoy's last novel length work Resurrection as I listen and read to it, at least as often as I can. I've never read the book before, so this won't be like War and Peace, where I'm coming from it having read it multiple times before. Audio is the Louise (Aylmer did not translate the novel) Maude translation, which can be found here in text form. The written version of Resurrection I am using is translated by Rosemary Edmonds (in 1966, the version I have was published in 1985, which I cannot find online. Penguin released another version in 2004). Leo Wiener's translation can be found here. A translation by Henry Britoff can be found here. William E. Smith's, who calls it The Awakening, translation can be found here. Aline P. Delano's translation is here. An introduction by Richard F. Gustafson can be found here.

First, I want to discuss the introduction found in my copy of the novel (also written by Edmonds).

She starts by emphasizing how Tolstoy's fight against death and his search for meaning not only lead to his family problems but his search for a higher art form: "And so Tolstoy the artist became subservient to Tolstoy the preacher and prophet." While later Tolstoy focused more and more on religion and he disconnected with his novels more and more (causing a change in his fiction), I still find it impossible not to see the Tolstoy that wrote War and Peace, with its long expository digressions, as a preacher and a prophet. But, this is where I think looking closely at the novel will be helpful, as we will be able to look closely at similarities and differences in ideas in the novel and War and Peace. Edmonds then discusses the "Doukhobors", their basic teachings. their petition to leave Russia,, and how this lead to Tolstoy's support and eventually, Resurrection. This is something that is worth talking about in some more detail, but I am going to leave off discussing it for now. For those interested in some background, I would point to Aylmer Maude's Tolstoy and His Problems which can be read here. 

Edmonds also mentions how the idea for Resurrection came from Tolstoy hearing a story about a nobleman on a jury realizing a prosecuted (for theft) prostitute was one he had seduced as a young person (indeed, the novel was begun by Tolstoy, but abandoned). Of course, Tolstoy also had an affair with a young servant girl that led to the birth of a child (in the story that Tolstoy was told, the person went to try to marry the young woman and "save" her, but she had already died). After quickly fighting off a criticism the book that said it "arouses lust", Edmonds lists the themes as "love, passion, death", "sincerity....pity"...."in contrast to the aristocratic ambiance of Anna Karenina it is the underworld that we experience in Resurrection." Tolstoy felt that the viewpoint of the peasants was tangible and positive, which is why Maslova's viewpoints becomes important to the plot. Gustafson writes, "The famine of 1891-3 had shocked him into a new awareness of the destitute state of the peasantry." I certainly think that this can be seen as a development in Tolstoy's thought, as War and Peace, though glorifying the peasant ethic through Platon Karaetev, is almost entirely made up of aristocratic characters because, as he said himself, this is the class that Tolstoy was most familiar with. The peasants and simple soldiers that are shown in War and Peace speak in broken, accented cliche that borders on nonsense. We saw a much more nuanced peasant character in "Master and Man", which was written four years before this novel. With Tolstoy growing closer to the peasant class, it makes more sense that his portrayal of the peasant class would become more frequent and sophisticated. 

Nekhlyudov, the novel's male protagonist, is seen as a self-portrait of Tolstoy (Tolstoy himself encouraged biographers to look in his novels to learn about himself, bucking the tradition of most authors, who beg for readers and critics to avoid making conclusions about their personal lives based on their work) and that Tolstoy meant to write a sequel following the character. "Tolstoy set himself to reproduce in artistic form the resurrection of fallen man. But he does not recognize the Christian conception of resurrection, and there it is the process of regeneration that he describes." We saw this in The Kingdom of God is Within You, which rejects miracles and instead focuses on how the person leads their life and their rejection of worldly power. Shklovksy on why there wasn't a sequel: "Their world (the one of the nobles and Nekhlyudov and friends) was dead and even if it repented it could not be resurrected wholly." Gustafson sees the novel most resembling Dostoevsky's early work Memoirs from the House of the Dead, with the metaphor of the prison permeating the entirety of human life. The Slavery of Our Times would come out around the same time as the novel Resurrection and we see that theme displayed in the format of non-fiction, with its emphasis on the way that the government uses the military, the Church, and taxation to institute state power and restrict the freedom of people. 

Edmonds then walks us through some of the different steps Nekhylyudov takes in his character journey (the most interesting point she makes is late in the introduction when she compares Nekhylyudov to Melchizedek, who ascended without dying, becoming a Son of God,  in the Bible. (Shklovsky: "her (Maslova's) resurrection comes about as a revival of love, and therefore it is anti-religious and moral. It is a triumph of love, of the river, of the moon-the triumph of life over Kreutzer Sonata." (Shklovsky also interesting claims that there is no resurrection for Nekhlyudov.)) that we will leave for now, just as we will leave the Maslova character development discussed here alone. 

There is an interesting, mostly in parenthetical form, discussion about how Countess Tolstoy, Sonya (Leo's wife), did not enjoy the book, particularly because of how Nekhlyudov mirrored her husband (she did write a letter defending her husband and emphasizing her own faith in the church after Leo was excommunicated and Shklovsky quotes her talking about how strange it is for a seventy year old man to write a sex scene between teenagers, (Troyat believes the gap between the author and his main character causes a problem for the novel) as well as arguing that part of her dislike was his motive of helping the Dukhobors while forgoing his rights for the previous stories hurt his own family.). Edmonds sees the book as more focused on its main character than Tolstoy's other novels, as well as being more psychological. Troyat writes: "whereas in War and Peace and Anna Karenina the pace of the novel was slowed by philosophical and historical digressions, here the author rushes straight ahead, without pausing once to become entangled in secondary plots...This universe-a place of stench and darkness-begins just on the other side of the paneled walls of drawing rooms, the gilded triptychs in the churches and the marble halls of the law courts. In denouncing the filth camouflaged by the opulent stage-setting, Tolstoy employs a technique of pitiless observation and a brutal style in which every word is calculated to sting the reader to the quick...In his efforts to alleviate the sufferings of Katyusha Mazlova and the other convicts, Nekhlyudov comes into conflict with every possible representative of bureaucracy." With so much emphasis in War and Peace of how the machine of the military and government (the latter mainly reflected in the Speransky section) was bogged down by disparate plans and egotistical, conniving men, I'm interested to see how the bureaucracy is portrayed in the novel and how it compares to Tolstoy's non-fiction writing and Tolstoy's most famous judge Ivan Ilyich.  

"For the Orthodox believer Christ is the manifestation of God in history, and the resurrection of Christ lies at the heart of all mystical striving. Tolstoy belongs far more to the Western world with its emphasis on the 'moral' and 'ethical' teaching of Christ and a consequent enthusiasm for ;'activite utile. But for the Russian mystic morals can only be the result of faith in eternal life. Kant's ethical teleology holds no attraction whatsoever for him. He is not interested in the 'utilitarian' aspect of morality as a means to the better organization of human society; but he has no difficulty in understanding the proposition: 'If I die, then the whole world dies in me, with me. If I am resurrected, then all mankind is resurrected in me.'"

I wanted to leave this Edmonds quote intact because I think it is a great example of the way that Tolstoy straddled the line of East/West and Christian/Secular. He rejects the miracles and rituals of the church (but embraces a spiritual reality, as this quote from Troyat shows: "Most of Tolstoy's novels are dominated by the idea that a man's real life begins when the spiritual forces in him triumph over his animal nature....In Resurrection Nekhlyudov's love for Katyusha Mazlova is the preface to the novel, rather than the substance of it."), but at the same time sees the teachings of Jesus himself as essential to modern life, which eliminates the connection between himself and the two biggest western philosophical theories of ethics (deontology, which Tolstoy most closely resembles, and utilitarianism, which Tolstoy completely rejects). Tolstoy emphasizes his Russianness (we see this explicitly in War and Peace) but rejects its institutions, leaving him, despite his popularity in both East and West, between the two and not really belonging to either, which leaves him alienated from the philosophical canon in a way that Dostoevsky, the Russian conservative, doesn't even suffer.

Edmonds discusses the different aspects of censoring the novel (Shklovsky makes a point of how the seduction scene of chapter 17 was censored in different parts of the world) went through and how the Church fought Tolstoy as well ("The Russian religious consciousness looks to Transfiguration, rather than revolution."). Tolstoy himself fought the Church in his writing, not only with what he said and believed, but also in how he described the services and rituals of the Church, alienating the reader from it in the same way that he does military ceremony or the opera in War and Peace (this can also be seen in a burgeoning form in War and Peace itself with Natasha's reaction to the different prayers offered against Napoleon). 

Introductions to the novel also focus on the political dimensions of the novel, especially the sympathetic portrayals of revolutionists, not typically portrayed favorably in Tolstoy's non-fiction writing, since they are, similar to the reformers like Speransky, seen as missing the point and relying on violence themselves to acquire power. Though most of Tolstoy's political and religious thought works by taking present (for him) day realities, recognizing them as timeless and suggesting timeless solutions to them, Tolstoy does seem to offer support for certain contemporary ideas and solutions.  Troyat: "Inspired by the American socialist Henry George, Nekhlyudov favors a single land tax, high enough to compel the large owners to cede their land to the state." I would like to discuss this more when we get to it in the novel and compare and contrast the section with Speransky and Pierre's ideas in War and Peace. 

My posts on Resurrection won't resemble the posts on War and Peace in several ways. For one, I will not make an individual post for each chapter. Instead, each post will be a few chapters each (at this point, I don't have a set number on how many chapters each post will contain and it will most likely vary), contain some information about what is in those chapters (though I don't want to be writing summaries, which can be found elsewhere) and some commentary (especially in the context of Tolstoy's thought processes and comparisons to War and Peace). I won't be doing much, if any, translation comparison and will mostly stay away from the block quote style I've used for some of Tolstoy's other work. The main goal is to mine Resurrection for interesting ideas and see what can be extracted from it and applied, whether it be to Tolstoy's thought in general, or more importantly, to a modern day individual operating in our world.