Tolstoy’s Last Novel

Leo Tolstoy is the greatest writer in the Western world—greater, yes, than Shakespeare, Dante, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, and Proust. In evidence I would submit his two masterpiece novels War and Peace (1867) and Anna Karenina (1878), and 20 or so magnificent novellas and short stories, among them “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” “The Kreutzer Sonata,” “Father Sergius,” “Hadji Murad,” and “Master and Man.”

Resurrection (1899), now reissued in a handsome Everyman Library edition, is Tolstoy’s last novel. Ostensibly it is a love story. I say ostensibly because the love in the story doesn’t quite come off. The book’s heroine, Katerina Maslova, remains shadowy through the novel’s nearly 500 pages; and the twists and turns of its hero, Prince Dmitry Ivanovich Nekhlyudov, aren’t always quite creditable. A novel with the grandest of intentions, Resurrection, alas, fails in the way only a great writer could write a failed novel.

Resurrection has no fewer than 93 named characters, and perhaps quite as many characters—family aristocrats, peasant-prisoners, various bureaucrats—who go nameless. The plot begins simply enough. Katerina Maslova works as a maid for two of Nekhlyudov’s aunts. She is an attractive young woman, and he is as much taken with her as she with him. The flirtation between them is not consummated until a few years later, when Nekhlyudov returns from his military service. He then seduces her, and she, though he does not know it, becomes pregnant. She loses the baby, and, owing to her pregnancy, also loses her job with Nekhlyudov’s aunts. Katerina soon ends up in an “establishment,” for which we read bordello, working as a prostitute.

Fast forward (why do we never slow backward?) a few years, and Katerina Maslova is given a potion to put in the wine of a pestiferous client that will put him asleep. What she doesn’t know is that the potion is poisonous, given to her by a couple who have robbed the man. Katerina is indicted for his murder, imprisoned, and put on trial, where she is found guilty and sentenced to exile and hard labor in Siberia. On the jury for her trial sits Nekhlyudov, who realizes what he has brought about in seducing the young Katerina. Tolstoy writes:

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