Novel: Resurrection

Overview
Resurrection, published in 1899, is Tolstoy’s final major novel and a fierce moral reckoning with late imperial Russia. It follows Prince Dmitri Nekhlyudov, a privileged nobleman whose routine service as a juror forces him to confront a past sin and the vast machinery of social and legal injustice. The encounter sparks a spiritual and ethical awakening that Tolstoy uses to challenge the courts, the church, the aristocracy, and the carceral state, while probing the possibility of personal redemption in a corrupted world.

Plot
As a juror in a murder trial, Nekhlyudov recognizes the defendant: Katerina Maslova, once a sincere and hopeful maid on his aunts’ estate, whom he seduced and abandoned years earlier. The seduction ruined her reputation and prospects; after bearing a child who died, she fell into prostitution. Now accused of poisoning a client, she is convicted through a technical error in the jury’s verdict and sentenced to penal servitude in Siberia. The shock of her fate and his complicity pierce Nekhlyudov’s complacency, igniting a crisis of conscience.

Determined to make amends, he hires lawyers, petitions officials, and struggles through the Russian bureaucracy to revise her sentence. He commits to rectifying his past more broadly, seeking to transfer his land to the peasants and to live more simply. His efforts bring him into prisons and court offices where he witnesses overcrowding, cruelty, and the indifference of officials who, though not uniformly malicious, perpetuate suffering through obedience to procedure. Maslova, hardened by necessity yet fundamentally humane, is swept from one cell to another toward Siberia, where Nekhlyudov chooses to follow her.

On the arduous journey, Maslova encounters political prisoners whose discipline and mutual care offer a contrast to the demoralization of the criminal wards. Among them is Simonson, an idealistic revolutionary who respects her dignity without judgment. Nekhlyudov proposes marriage as an act of atonement; Maslova, wary of being turned into the instrument of his redemption, wavers. When an appeal modestly mitigates but does not erase her punishment, she ultimately chooses to marry Simonson. Nekhlyudov accepts her decision and, in reading the Gospels, especially the Sermon on the Mount, finds a new moral orientation grounded in compassion, nonresistance, and personal responsibility.

Themes
Tolstoy’s title names both the hope of individual moral rebirth and the possibility of a societal awakening. Nekhlyudov’s transformation is not a romantic triumph but a hard-won recognition that true repentance requires action, sacrifice, and attention to the humanity of those most harmed by social systems. Maslova’s arc exposes the gendered double standards of sexual morality and the ease with which a poor woman can be forced from innocence into degradation.

The novel is a sustained indictment of institutions that claim to uphold justice and faith while perpetuating violence. Tolstoy shows how bureaucracy and ritual, legal formalities, prison routines, religious observances, mask cruelty and stifle conscience. Against both retributive punishment and revolutionary coercion, he sets a Christian ethic of love and nonviolence, insisting that social salvation begins with inward change and concrete acts of mercy.

Style and Legacy
Resurrection blends courtroom drama, documentary realism, and moral parable. Its panoramas of jails, etape marches, and ministerial offices have the texture of reportage, while its dialogues and interior monologues bear Tolstoy’s didactic force. The work was censored in Russia; Tolstoy devoted its proceeds to aid the persecuted Doukhobors. Though more overtly polemical than his earlier epics, it deepened debates over penal reform, land, and the authority of church and state, and it endures as a stark portrait of conscience striving for renewal amid pervasive injustice.