Like many more ordinary stories it has a strong element of daydream, and also of nightmare.
I think of running away from her, hiding myself, going to America. I get as far as dreaming of how I shall get rid of her, how splendid that will be, and how I shall unite with another, an admirable woman – quite different …
The intended power of the tale is to compel us to own up – who doesn’t sometimes have similar daydreams? – but the accusing finger fails to disconcert us as much as it wants to. The melodrama of the murder is sensational rather than moving, but the conclusion of the story surely moves us very much. Its narrator says goodbye to Pozdnyshev in the railway carriage where the tale has been told.
‘Good-bye,’ I said, holding out my hand. He gave me his and smiled slightly but so piteously that I felt ready to weep.
‘Yes, forgive me …’ he said, repeating the same words with which he had concluded his story.
‘Forgive’ is almost the same word in Russian as ‘goodbye’. Since his wife’s death has deprived him of forgiveness, Pozdnyshev can only ask it of strangers.
Guilt is also the theme of another story, The Devil, which Tolstoy wrote just before The Kreutzer Sonata. It too concerns marriage, and the sexual guilt which the author himself had come to be obsessed by in his own life. But the longest, most detached and most successful working out of the theme is the story told in Resurrection, meditated for some time by Tolstoy and completed in 1899. He made use of a character to whom we were first introduced in Youth. Nekhlyudov there is essentially a comic character, beautifully perceived and described; the sort of person who takes himself more seriously than his friends do, and who often does the opposite of what he really wants because it gives him a feeling of self-satisfaction. In this way he takes up as a friend a poor student whom he does not like and with whom he has nothing in common. This philanthropic act makes him feel happy, but the student who is the hapless object of his philanthropy soon becomes very uncomfortable under the burden of supporting his patron’s self-esteem.
As a result of his actions in that story, and their consequences, Nekhlyudov in Resurrection becomes very much more of a serious character. But his essential temperament remains the same; and the way Tolstoy now presents it adds considerably to the interest of a story which might otherwise be too much like an enlarged version of Tolstoy’s parable tales. The young Nekhlyudov in Youth has the unconscious and slightly comic innocence of a clever young man: in Resurrection he has the innocence of a determined and conscientious convert; yet never loses the reader’s sympathy and even affection. But his motives, none the less, are not able to stand up to Tolstoy’s always remorseless and as if automatic powers of analysis. Maslova too, the girl he originally seduced and who has ended up in prison, is quite able to see in Nekhlyudov’s obstinate attachment to her not so much true remorse and repentance as the desire to display these qualities, to her but above all to himself. As she puts it to him once with brutal simplicity: ‘You want to use me now spiritually as you once did physically.’
Maslova too is very much a real personality in her own right. The fact that she had ended up as a convict on the way to Siberia is, in the circumstances, both wholly convincing and deeply pitiable as well. Tolstoy does not dismiss human justice wholesale, but he shows what may happen if it goes wrong, and how inertia and ineptitude reinforce official rigidity at each step of Maslova’s trial. If only they had done this, and had not forgotten to ask that … Is the system, corrupting and deforming those who attempt to supervise its working, always unjust, or has an exceptional miscarriage of justice occurred here? This is a point of some importance, but Tolstoy ignores it. He has to, because he believes all governmental procedures to be inherently wrong and bad. The information about such procedures which he acquired for the occasion, and which he deploys in such detail, emphasizes this underlying anomaly. He did a great deal of research. He found out about senatorial protocol, and what clauses in the penal code dealt with the various offences and with degrees of guilt. The Tolstoy archives in Moscow contain long lists of such queries.
In the end, though, the strength of Resurrection, as in the case of the other longer stories, is in the power and pictorial animation of its individual scenes – Maslova’s trial, the Siberian prison, the prison fortress of Peter and Paul at St Petersburg, the convicts’ march across Moscow. It is on such pages that the author’s magnificence as narrator and storyteller is at its height. They leave one wondering, too, at the vitality and above all at the variety of these stories by the man whom Turgenev called ‘Great writer of our Russian land’. They can be read again and again: there is always something new and fascinating to find in them.
John Bayley
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
BIOGRAPHY
MAUDE, AYLMER: The Life of Tolstoy, 2 volumes, Oxford University Press, 1930 (revised version of the 1908–10 edition). Besides translating Tolstoy’s writings, Maude was Tolstoy’s friend and follower, and has insights not available to later biographers. This Life remains a classic.
SIMMONS, ERNEST J.: Leo Tolstoy, 2 volumes, Vintage Books, Boston, 1945–46 (Vintage paperback edition 1960), Routledge, London, 1973. A detailed and scholarly account by a distinguished American critic.
TROYAT, HENRI: Tolstoy (first published in French, 1965), Doubleday, New York, 1967, W. H. Allen, London, 1968, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1970. A detailed and popular biography (denounced by Nabokov as ‘a vile biographie romancée’). Highly readable if somewhat bland, and thin on the implications of Tolstoy’s ideas. Comprehensive in its references to the shorter fiction.
CRANKSHAW, EDWARD: Tolstoy – The Making of a Novelist, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1974. Less detailed and more idiosyncratic than the titles above, but a knowledgeable and well-illustrated study concentrating largely on Tolstoy’s personal and spiritual development before 1880.
WILSON, A. N.: Tolstoy, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1988, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1989. A stimulating, consciously unreverential treatment which is very readable, and good on the ideas as well as the literary writings. Refers to most of the more important short fiction.
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SOURCES
CHRISTIAN, R. F. (editor and translator): Tolstoy’s Letters, 2 volumes, Athlone Press, London and Scribner’s, New York, 1978.
CHRISTIAN, R. F. (editor and translator): Tolstoy’s Diaries, 2 volumes, Athlone Press, London and Scribner’s, New York, 1985.
These two comprehensive collections, clearly presented and well annotated, provide invaluable tools for the reader who wants to explore the connections between Tolstoy’s life and his fictions.