This time Tolstoy chose not to split his alter ego between two autobiographical characters. Instead, one gradually turns into another. Rich, prosperous and self-confident Prince Nekhlyudov, as he appears at the beginning of the novel, may be seen as a new incarnation of Prince Andrei or Vronsky, but then he is transformed into a sort of Bezukhov or Levin. After the reading of the first draft of the novel, Nikolai Strakhov suggested that Tolstoy was describing Chertkov’s rebirth, an observation that seems especially pertinent if one remembers that Chertkov was for Tolstoy an idealized embodiment of his own spiritual quest.
The first draft of Resurrection was finished in mid-1895. It was a rather short story focused on the seduction and Nekhlyudov’s repentance. It starts in the courtroom, where he sees Katyusha Maslova, the girl he had once seduced, accused of a murder she did not commit. The draft had a happy ending: the protagonist marries his newly rediscovered old love, emigrates to England and becomes a peasant in a commune. As all early versions of Tolstoy’s major works, this draft was supposed to be revised and expanded, but Tolstoy could not bring himself to do this. He was distracted by his essays and reluctant to complete a work that could provoke conflicts of the kind he had experienced with ‘Master and Man’. In 1897, however, he found a good reason to forge ahead.
The most radical of the many Russian sects receptive to Tolstoy’s beliefs were the so-called Spirit Wrestlers, who rejected the institutionalized Church and had been exiled by Nicholas I to the Caucasus. In the 1890s one of their leaders was struck by the deep affinities between his beliefs and the ideas of the famous count and urged his followers to burn their weapons, denounce military service and refuse to take the oath of loyalty to Tsar Nicholas II. As a result of this, some Spirit Wrestlers were beaten to death, others were arrested or deprived of the means to survive in the severe mountain climate where they lived. Tolstoy and his associates issued an appeal on their behalf. Once again, Tolstoy himself was spared any repression, but other signatories, including Chertkov, were arrested. Because of his aristocratic connections, Chertkov was allowed to leave for England; two other prominent Tolstoyans were sent into exile.
Due to Tolstoy’s intervention, the persecution of the Spirit Wrestlers began to attract international attention and the government felt compelled to grant them permission to emigrate to Canada. The resettlement of thousands of people was an expensive operation. Tolstoy therefore suspended, for a time at least, his resolve not to take money for his publications. He decided to donate the income from his new novel to help the sectarians. In the summer of 1898 he started reworking and expanding Resurrection.
Having found a valid excuse for writing prose, Tolstoy worked on it with intensity and passion. He turned the ‘Koni story’ into a full-scale novel that became the most elaborate artistic representation of his philosophy, and the broadest panorama of Russian life not only in his own fiction, but, arguably, in the whole of Russian literature. Apart from aristocrats, peasants and soldiers, whom Tolstoy always enjoyed writing about, the novel abounds with descriptions of civil servants, clerks, judges, gendarmes, merchants, clergymen, criminals and prostitutes. A significant part of the action takes place in Siberia, a place Tolstoy had never visited, but which had intrigued him since the time he had intended to write about the Decembrists. Nekhlyudov follows Katyusha there after her arrest and meets different sorts of convicts, including a number of revolutionaries.
Even before the novel was completed, the first instalments began appearing simultaneously in two versions: a censored one was published in the Russian magazine Niva (Field); the full one was printed in England through a press established by Chertkov. Complete editions appeared within weeks of the end of serialized publication and were immediately followed by English, French and German translations. Tolstoy’s third novel reached a bigger audience in one year than his previous two had achieved in three decades.
On 28 August 1898, the day of his seventieth birthday, Sofia wrote in her diary that Leo ‘was satisfied’ as he had worked well on his noveclass="underline"
‘You know’, he said to me when I entered his room, ‘he won’t marry her, I reached a final decision today and it is a good one!’ ‘Of course, he won’t marry’, I said, ‘I told it to you long ago, if he were to marry, it would be false.’ (SAT-Ds, I, p. 405)
Sofia was also satisfied. Tolstoy’s idea that a man should marry the first woman with whom he had carnal relations meant that she had, at best, no more reason to call herself his wife than Aksinya Bazykina, the housemaid Gasha and many other women, including the unknown prostitute in Kazan by whose bed the teenage Leo had wept in despair. Tolstoy, however, did not make Nekhlyudov change his mind. It is Katyusha who rejects him, preferring instead to marry a political prisoner. She loves the prince, but sacrifices her love because she does not believe he could be happy with her. At the end of the novel, Nekhlyudov reads the Gospels and discovers there the same five commandments of Christ that Tolstoy discussed in What I Believe. The final paragraph of the novel promises the dawn ‘of new life’ for its hero.
This ending and the whole story of a penitent intellectual and a good-hearted prostitute saving each other with mutual love and understanding was familiar to readers of Russian literature. In Anna Karenina Tolstoy had striven to rewrite Madame Bovary. In Resurrection he offered his own version of Crime and Punishment. In spite of his admiration for Dostoevsky as a person, Tolstoy disliked his narrative technique, ‘monotonous language’ and forced plots. He once noted, with surprise, that Dostoevsky, who had often fallen in love, could never describe love in a convincing way. He also agreed with Strakhov, who once said that Sonya in Crime and Punishment was implausible and found himself unable to believe in her.
The day he finished Resurrection, Tolstoy, in a familiar manner, remarked in his diary: ‘It is not good. Not revised. Too hurried. But I am free of it and it does not interest me any more’ (Ds., p. 345). He continued, however, to be interested. The following year he expressed his intention to continue the novel. In July 1904 he wrote of his strong desire to write ‘a second part of Nekhlyudov. His work, tiredness, nascent grand seigneurism, temptation by a woman, fall, mistakes and all against a background of the Robinson community’ (Ds, p. 378). This urge to return to the finished and published text betrays dissatisfaction. Usually Tolstoy was in need of ‘scaffolding’ while writing, but having published the work he began denigrating it to be able to liberate himself and forge ahead. This time publication of the novel did not release him.
Chekhov described Resurrection as ‘a remarkable work of art’, but thought that the story lacked a real ending, and ‘to write so much and then let everything be resolved with a text from the Gospels’ was ‘too theological’. He found the description of ‘princes, generals, aunts, peasants, prisoners, guards . . . the most interesting’, and the relations between Nekhlyudov and Katyusha ‘the least interesting’. The majority of twentieth-century readers and critics have agreed with this assessment, with the exception of the universally admired seduction scene, the erotic power of which disgusted Sofia so much that she considered it inappropriate for their grown-up daughters.