More Introductions of Resurrection

Even though we have already started our adventure with Tolstoy's Resurrection, I wanted to take a look at a few different versions and look at a few more introductions to the novel to get the viewpoint of translators and publishers of the novel to continue to try to scratch the surface since deep in depth scholarly work on it is going to be out of our reach and I'm more interested in Tolstoy's overall political/social thought and its relationship with War and Peace. So, in this post, I'm looking at the introductions of four versions of Resurrection and discussing ideas I found thought-provoking in them.

Anthony Briggs introduction that can be found in Wordsworth Classics's 2015 version of the Maude's translation:

While trying to put the reader in Nekhlyudov's situation, Briggs describes the rape as "with some force", which as we will see when we get to that chapter in the book, somewhat matches the language of the book, at least in the Edmonds and Maude translations, though at least in a 21st century vocabulary, probably isn't impactful enough. For a better discussion of this, see the post that contains chapter 17 of the book.

Briggs calls Nekhyludov "the hero (who is also the villain)", which I think is helpful when looking at how Tolstoy frames his autobiographical characters (or really all characters), as well as the way he frames himself in his more self-reflective works. While the systemic social and political realities are shown to be very real enemies, the main enemy in Tolstoy's work is the protagonist himself, which is a stand-in for Tolstoy himself. Pierre's inability to make decisions for himself leads him to finding unhappiness in a marriage he didn't choose for himself and a religious sect that fails to meet his needs, just as Natasha's own urges and actions temporarily ruins her happiness and permanently ruins the chance for a happy marriage between herself and Andrei. Nekhyludov puts himself in the situation where he is serving on the jury for the trial of the woman he raped, creating a spiritual and moral crisis.

Briggs argues that Tolstoy is misunderstood and takes some time to talk about how War and Peace is interpreted by the culture as a book that everyone means to read but is too hard to get through. Briggs even says "although Tolstoy's early versions of the novel did contain long passages in French, including the opening lines, these were excluded from his edition of 1873, and good translations now reflect this decision." This, as we've seen with the Briggs introduction to War and Peace itself, is an aggressive (I almost called it passive-aggressive, but even though he doesn't use the name, it is a rather blatant shot) comment against two of the most prominent (and 21st century) modern translations of War and Peace that rival his own translations, those of Amy Mandelker (a modification of the Maude translation) and Pevear and Volokhonsky, which feature the French in the text, footnoting the translation of it. This tangent and discussion is bizarre and I am not entirely sure why he felt the need to go on it and am even more surprised that it was printed by the editor or publishing company.
He then gives, mostly good, reasons for why War and Peace is digestible (though ignoring the things, such as characters and culture, that do make it legitimately hard to read), which I think can be helpful, just as I created a calendar for reading War and Peace in a month and how long that would take. Tellingly, he praises Edward Crankshaw's extremely negative portrayal of Tolstoy (something I'd like to revisit) as not being "too lenient of him as a man" and says "In his day-to-day dealings Leo Tolstoy had the manners of a cave-man". And here is where Briggs takes the viewpoint that Tolstoy's religious turn and philosophical works are not only hypocritical but unfortunate because they distracted him from his work as a fictional author (again, as I talked about in the Sonya: The Countess Tolstoy post, this isn't an unusual view, as it was of course Ivan Turgenev's view on his deathbed).
Briggs divides Tolstoy's life into four or five stages: His childhood; his youth, including his participation in the Crimean War; his dealings in St. Petersburg and then his marriage which included writing War and Peace and Anna Karenina; then his search for religious truth up to his death.
Briggs asserts that the idealism of his work and the reality of his personal failings represent the contradiction at the heart of discussing Tolstoy and his work. Those familiar with famous philosophers are quite familiar with this contradiction (such as Nietzsche's constant sickness and reliance others contrasting with his ideas of "overcoming" or the way Heidegger's Nazism colors the way we have to look at his work), but in Tolstoy it is extremely fascinating because of the way he positioned himself as a moral preacher and social reformer (particularly the way his novels frame the moral decisions of his characters) rather than one primarily interested in more abstract ideas. It is something everyone who studies Tolstoy has to deal with and think about carefully, and I believe it undermines some of his moral teachings (and even explains some), but Briggs thinks it affects his political beliefs as well.
Briggs discusses Rousseau's hold on Tolstoy and ridicules the former's work, saying that Rousseau's idea about the noble savage (Briggs doesn't use this vocabulary) and the goal for humanity to return to a state of nature (again, Briggs doesn't use this vocabulary) of small moral communities outside of society "obviously unsound" and "disprovable". He argues that Rousseau's "mistake was a wrong deduction" and then argues that it is in fact civilization and modernity that has caused progress to happen (and he affirms more of an urban approach than Tolstoy). One could definitely argue that this is a convenient opinion for a white scholar not subject to the worst of capitalism and what society or modern politics has to offer, though to tackle such a broad subject here is probably as unwise as tackling it in an introduction to a fiction novel.
On the novel itself (after discussing a lot of the plot and structure), Briggs says that Tolstoy's ability to write a scene is as good in this novel as it is in any of his other novels and that the novel has an intentionally slow pace that is unified by the main character's goal, which is slowed by the slow process of justice and administration. The bureaucracy of government the way the novel is put together and helps to serve the underlining political beliefs of Tolstoy. He also, while discussing how the novel moves from place to place, mentions that it has over one hundred named characters. This is obviously far fewer than War and Peace, but shows how Tolstoy litters his fiction with characters that, just like his portrayal of the government, serve not only plot purposes, but purposes of social criticism. For Briggs, Tolstoy shows the contradiction of the suffering of the masses and the pampered upper classes, which is brought out, according to Briggs (which I agree with) through humor (though I don't agree with his assertion that this is unlike how he wrote War and Peace, as I think the novel uses humor not only to ridicule the French court and Napoleon, but Russian patriotism and its social and military circles).
Briggs argues that society's progress has been much more dramatic than the progress imagined by the Rousseau and Schopenhauer inspired Tolstoy, but that many of the societal problems highlighted by Tolstoy are still with us. This central contradiction of what progress is and how to measure (not to mention who benefits) is one of the most important political philosophy questions of not only our time, but of Tolstoy's of time. Tolstoy thought that the technological and economic progresses of his time were irrelevant and perhaps even contributed to further degradation and suffering (the growing strength of weapons as something that lead to the massacre of millions in the world wars and the "science" of murder exploited by the Nazis and Soviets was something that Tolstoy clearly foresaw) and was clearly more interested in the way moral progress would change the world.

Resurrection translated by Anthony Briggs, Penguin Classics, London, 2009:

This introduction is also by Briggs, but is a different introduction than above. Here he opens by defending the novel and comparing it to Tess of the D'Urbervilles, which was roughly contemporary to it. Doing contemporary novel comparisons is something that I haven't really done and I think would be incredibly instructive. When discussing how Tolstoy's work balances enjoyment with edification, he calls "The Kreutzer Sonata" "the world's worst story about the evils of sex", which I also agree with. Eventually I'll have to make a full post on the story.
In this intro, Briggs goes through Tolstoy's life and career and curiously calls Tolstoy's religious turn at 41 a "mid-life crisis, and it was a disastrous one." I'm not sure that is how I would frame Tolstoy's fixation on religion and existential reformation, and I think it dismisses the non-fiction work Tolstoy completed in the time.
He spends some time quoting contemporary reviews of the novel, which is intriguing and compares the novel to a Dickens novel or Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol (which provides the opening quote of the introduction), which I am completely unfamiliar with. I do like the Dickens comparisons because of Tolstoy's style of writing (Briggs makes plot comparisons, which I don't particularly agree with and Dickens's purpose underlining his writing and what he wants to communicate with the reader is absolutely foreign to Tolstoy), even though I don't enjoy Dickens's hyper-maximalist writing style for some reason and find it distracting (I really enjoy George Orwell's essay on Dickens).
Briggs discusses prisons and Tolstoy's research for a while and how he toyed with several different endings. He also compares it to a picaresque novel, which is a lens that I really like to read Tolstoy through and I'd like to talk about in a future essay. I also like the way that Briggs understands Tolstoy as using humor to communicate and get around censors, something he develops more in this introduction than he does in the introduction above. I think, despite all the seriousness surrounding Russian literature and Tolstoy's thought, to see his novel work outside of comedy and parody is to create a completely misguided sense of interpretation. Tolstoy constantly uses irony throughout his work, even his non-fiction, which off-sets the seriousness of what he is talking about and often mocking that seriousness.
Nekhlyudov is an outsider with his name meaning "not for people". To understand the Tolstoy protagonist this way puts him in the existentialist tradition of Dostoevsky and later Sartre and Camus, etc. and certainly makes sense when looking at Levin, Pierre, or Andrei, and even Tolstoy himself, finding themselves out of society, occasionally trying to integrate into it, but with failed results and ultimately regret. I'd like to look at the novel in this framework as well.

Resurrection (by "Lev Tolstoy") translated by Louise Maude, restored and edited by John W. Strahan, A Washington Square Press, New York, 1963. Introduction by Michael Scammell:

Soviet critics (another aspect I haven't penetrated at all, though I find the relative embrace of Tolstoy by the Soviets extremely interesting) saw the novel as a completely new and revolutionary type of novel while Western critics see it as a failure, with Scammell calling it "a highly problematical book". This introduction differs from the Briggs' introduction most fundamentally by time, since it is over 50 years old at this point. That gives it a perspective that I think is at least worth considering. Scammell calls the novel a failure in comparison to the height of Tolstoy's work (as well as Dostoevsky's). Koni, who Briggs also discusses, is mentioned here as helping Dostoevsky with the legal problems he got into while writing The Brothers Karamazov. Scammell goes through the history of Tolstoy's writing Resurrection, which I'll spare the reader here, except to make a mention to the fact that Tolstoy had six different completed drafts of Resurrection. He talks extensively about Tolstoy's method of making changes, including discussing that Maude would find herself translating the same passages three or four times. There is also a discussion of J. C. Kenworthy's claim on being authorized to translate it before being placed in "a hospital for mental care". While in England the novel had sections censored for being too sexual, in France the opposite happened, with these sections heightened and the "boring" parts removed. Scammell has critics seeing the novel as weakening as it goes on because of the different pressures Tolstoy was facing. Scammell argues against some of this point, including taking to task the argument that the novel suffered since he wrote for money (he also calls Hadji Murad "one of the most striking and most perfect works that Tolstoy ever produced."). Whether or not this is true I'll try to talk about in the different chapters on the novel.
He divides the first part and second part of the novel into "a psychological part" and "a socio-religio-philosophical part", claiming that the closest Tolstoy got to writing a psychological novel was his Childhood, Boyhood, and Adolescense trilogy. I am not entirely sure that this characterization is entirely helpful, and whether we can differentiate "psychological" versus "existentialist", though it is certain that Tolstoy is more interested in external description and internal morality than he is what we might call psychological profiles (he offers types more often, describing how characters are like other characters).
"Generalization" is seen to essential to Tolstoy's work for Scammell and this isn't without reason. Tolstoy takes a small episode and creates a conclusion about it (though often criticizing historians for doing something very similar to this) that fits his moral and political philosophy. In fact, his political philosophy relies on generalizations, uncompromising ones at this, that can be considered, especially by critics, as reductive. For Scammell, the biggest problem of Resurrection is that the philosophical part is not wedded to the rest of the story, unlike Anna Karenina and War and Peace (he even spends time arguing against George Steiner's argument that they stick out in War and Peace.) This is another aspect that can only truly be discussed as the chapter posts go on.
Nekhludov's character comes from an early fragment of Tolstoys called "A Landowner's Morning", another character that is alter-ego and semi-autobiographical. The key Tolstoy male protagonists are compared to the key Dostoevsky male protagonists. Scammell compares the often mocked and somewhat unsatisfactory ending of Crime and Punishment with the ending of Resurrection, which seems much neater than Pierre's or Levin's in those novels. I'll discuss the ending of Resurrection when I get there of course, but I think it is worth mentioning that the epilogue of War and Peace creates a much more complicated ending than Crime and Punishment, which, along with scale, is probably I enjoy the former more than the latter (not to say that I don't enjoy Crime and Punishment, since I do and find it very helpful as a comparison, particularly with Raskolnikov's embrace of great man theory and the way historians are portrayed as portraying Napoleon in War and Peace).

Resurrection (Annotated with Biography and Critical Essay) Golgotha Press, 2011. While she is not given credit, it is the Maude translation.

It is hard to say that it really has a critical essay and all the information in it is pretty basic and standard biographical and background information, so I definitely do not recommend this printing, which has some errors in the introduction and appears to be sort of a money printing of a public domain work. However, there were a couple of things I found worth mentioning, including:

the description of Count Ilya Andreevich Tolstoy, as someone who kept trying to avoid bankruptcy and dying a few years after the War of 1812, is reminiscent of Count Rostov, who shares the first two names with the connection even explicitly made.
Marya, Tolstoy's mother, who married his father Nikolai, is described in a way that is almost exact to Marya in War and Peace. "It was a marriage of convenience, for Nikolai in any case."
The Volkonskys (i.e. Bolkonsky) claimed to come from Rurik, just as Nikolai Bolkonsky in the novel. The discussion of Tolstoy not having much contact with the middle or merchant class early in his life, surrounded mainly by peasants and then in the teenage years with the aristocrat class is reductive, though a helpful framework. The isolation of his early years is also emphasized. The small note about having dogs and horses as pets may remind one of all the horses (who almost all serve utilitarian purposes) and dogs in War and Peace.
The following quote is probably the best thing to talk about last:
"According to Tolstoy's own diaries, he virtually raped his young wife on her wedding night. He also regarded her as a child and was attracted to her girlish ways"
The treatment of his wife is probably the most cringeworthy aspect of Tolstoy's life and contradiction to his philosophy of love (though others who emphasized love so much so that they have become iconic for it have treated women wrongly in the past as well, with John Lennon and Gandhi being obvious examples) and there is something absolutely abhorrent in the real-life setup of their relationship. An optimist might say that the guilt over this relationship is what lead to Resurrection, as his stand-in suffers for the crimes he committed against women. And perhaps this has to be how the modern reader has to approach the novel, seeing it both as a parable about past sins resurfacing in a rather ironic way and how the power and actions of men hurt women both physically and in subjugating their role in society.