During this time of his religious conviction, Tolstoy wrote a great deal of short fiction which has the reputation of being the finest in the world: "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," "Hadji Murat," "Master and Man," "Father Sergius," "The Forged Coupon," et al. However, the one long late novel, Resurrection, is little-known and has been easily ignored as a work of Christian propaganda. It is an entirely different creature than War and Peace or Anna Karenina, and perhaps therefore an inevitable disappoint. The closest comparison really is to the hundred-page screed on the philosophy of history that either encapsulates or mars War and Peace, as much of Resurrection is only one step away from intrusive, non-dramatic sermonizing.
Some aspects of Resurrection will be familiar to anyone acquainted with the main line of the nineteenth-century novel. The injustices of the penal system had been explored in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables and Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit,the "fallen woman" had been depicted by Thomas Hardy in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and the depravity of the slums and prostitution and urbanized peasantry were exposed in Zola's Rougon-Macquart novels. And in Tolstoy's earlier work, in the figures of Pierre Bezukhov and Constantin Levin, we find antecedents for Resurrection's protagonist, Dmitri Nekhlyudov, the existentially-torn aristocrat searching for a transcendental and profound statement of "the meaning of life."
In a sense, Resurrection marks the end of the line of that style of social-critical novel, or even something past the end of the line, being almost an exit from the novel form itself.
In Chapter 38 of Part II, we read that the hero, Nekhlyudov, has seen two men, prisoners being marched to Siberia, die of sunstroke in one day. In addition, "three more men... had dropped down dead from sunstroke. One had been taken to the nearest police-station like the first two, and two more had collapsed in the station itself." At this point, Tolstoy inserts a footnote of his own (not the Penguin editor's): "In the early 1880s five male convicts died of sunstroke in a single day while being marched from Butyrsky prison to the Nizhny Novgorod railway station." Is it too much to say that this footnote marks the precise end of the realist novel? Tolstoy breaks every rule of the novelist's relation to historical verisimilitude; even that other novelist-prophet Hugo never added "And this is really true; it actually happened!" to his works. Suddenly we are in a newspaper account, or a prefatorial apparatus.
Or, as it eventually becomes clear, a Christian sermon that finally has no interest in narrative resolution, and concludes abruptly with several pages of quotation from the Gospel according to Matthew, accompanied by commentary. Whereas in War and Peace, Tolstoy confined this explicit didactic summary to an epilogue, Resurrection becomes more and more a vehicle for outright judgments and expositions of a code of moral conduct and a recapitulation of Tolstoy's institutional critique. I saw "Tolstoy's" and not "Nekhlyudov's," because there is finally no pretense of a merely-implied author, and the text merges with the non-fiction writings that Tolstoy was churning out simultaneously, like The Kingdom of God is Within You and "Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?"
Bakhtin has a word for this quality of Tolstoy's prose: monologic. At times, this is his greatest novelistic strength, as in the great Isaac Babel quote: "If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy." In his best writings, we feel that Tolstoy's characters are understood and described as from another plane of consciousness: human fragility and self-deception are not condemned so much as they are shown to be our lot, the very mode of our being and the conditions of our goodness and reason. In the early going of Resurrection, one finds this Tolstoy often, as striking as ever. After describing the freshness and gladness of a spring day, when children and the entire natural world are bathed in a free grace, Tolstoy notes that "In the office of the provincial prison nothing sacred or significant was seen in the grace and gladness of spring given to all animals and people; the sacred and the significant consisted in the arrival the previous day of a stamped and numbered document on headed paper." He observes the powerlessness of our decisions to take hold of our lives. When Nekhlyudov is planning to break with his mistress, he listens eagerly to gossipy reports that suggest (while prompting some jealousy) that she might have a new lover. He knows already that he cannot expect to raise himself out of this miserable attachment entirely on his own.
Throughout the novel, Tolstoy punctures the self-importance of rank and function, and the entire span of human vanity, but he is working on a reduced canvas. The main oddity of Resurrection is that it consists of a number of brief portraits, canned encounters, as Nekhlyudov busily tries to reform his life and free a wrongly-convicted prisoner. Officials, prisoners, bureaucrats, wives, peasants, stewards, railway men, guards--everyone is drawn with the inimitable brushstroke of Tolstoy, but the reader quickly learns that these characters will never reappear in the story, that one need not learn their names. Nekhlyudov is somewhat like Dante in the Divine Comedy, reduced to being an observer of an unstructured "bad infinity" of individual cases of justice, without being able to interfere in 9 cases out of 10, and himself standing in the safety of his aristocratic privilege.
The ostensible action of the novel is Nekhlyudov's moral transformation and personal redemption, which leads him into the thickest morass of human cruelty and abuse of power, the Russian prison system. However, Tolstoy undermines this action in several ways.
First, the "endpoint" of the novel, the spiritual resurrection of Nekhlyudov, is not a surprising and narratively-immanent one: it is simply Tolstoy's own personal code of morality, legible outside of the novel in numerous essays, speeches, and exhortations. This external Weltanschauung exercises a curious gravity on the novel and its characters. All opinions, values, and decisions in the fictional universe are evaluated against this independent, non-narrative standard. This means that the worst characters are those with the fewest resolutions in common with the late Tolstoy, while the best characters are those in progress towards a complete overlap with the author's viewpoint. And every person in the novel can be clearly mapped on this continuum.
The validity of Tolstoy's judgments, or the persuasiveness with which he argues his case, are not in question here. But these conclusions can be safely found, undiluted, in Part III, Chapter 19:
All forms of violence, cruelty and brutality are not only not proscribed, they are actually permitted by the government, when it suits, and therefore they are all the more readily accepted by these very people who are suffering imprisonment, poverty and hardship. It is almost as if these institutions had been specially invented to create the highest degree of corruption and evil, unattainable by any other means, with the specific aim of disseminating the corruption and evil over the whole of society on as wide a front as possible. "It's as if they had run a competition for corrupting the greatest number of people in the most effective and infallible way," thought Nekhlyudov, contemplating all that was being done in the prisons and at the halting-stages. Every year hundreds of thousands of people were reduced to the lowest level of depravity, and when they had been thoroughly corrupted, they were set free in order to communicate the corruption acquired in prison to the rest of the population.The problem is a narrative one. Once the reader knows that the above conclusion is where we are headed, and that the novel is constructed as an iron case against the status quo, everything is entirely predictable and undramatic. There is no tension or suspense, since the only plot is Nekhyludov's spiritual awakening. But he is only going to awaken into agreement with the narrator's voice that is present from the start.
There is another problem. Tolstoy's worldview dictates that the offenses and hard-heartedness inherent in the system stem from mystification, blindness, and a conspiracy to deceive people through religion and poor education. This is a classic anarchist position, one that derives from the Enlightenment and especially Voltaire. Tolstoy the social thinker does not have the patience for "ideology" as a set of lived practices, for the real existence of illusory relations---everything "true" can be accomplished for him by the single yanking away of a blindfold. Thus, for Tolstoy the peasants are spontaneously good and perceptive, because uncontaminated.
This is disastrous for the novel, because all of the insights into the sinfulness of the world's organization (which should take 500 pages to unpack and synthesize) all clump together and are of a piece. Tolstoy is committed to the obviousness of evil, and therefore to a sudden enlightenment rather than an arduous and complicated travail of the soul.
"Everything was now quite clear and unambiguous... What a muddle he had got himself into over these insoluble questions with their endless ramifications. He now asked himself the same questions, and was surprised how straightforward it all was. It was straightforward because he wasn't thinking about what was going to happen to him, which was irrelevant, but only about what he was duty-bound to do."
"This explanation of everything that was taking place seemed so clear and straightforward to Nekhlyudov, but the very simplicity of it all made him reluctant to accept it. Surely a complex phenomenon like this couldn't have such a simple and terrible explanation."
"Everything was clear to him. It was clear that all things considered good and important are actually useless or vile, and that behind all this glamor, all this luxury, lurked all the old familiar crimes, which not only go unpunished, they wax triumphant, embellished with every charming device the human mind can dream up."What happens to the novel form when Nekhyludov attains this almost-instant access to an undiluted truth? The story is thereby deprived of the very struggle that made Pierre and Levin so compelling. Nor does Tolstoy show Nekhyludov involved in a set of tragic commitments as in The Mayor of Casterbridge or Nostromo, where complications and responsibilities absorb and frustrate the reform of self and society.
The novel from Don Quixote onward has represented the world as impervious to idealism. Resurrection ends up resembling and confirming Don Quixote, but to its cost. Tolstoy does not show Nekhlyudov's resolutions being practically realized in the world of prisons and legislation, and the book becomes a mere series of encounters, mere reportage with an entirely arbitrary ending. And Nekhlyudov's realization that the system is organized such that grievous wrong is "nobody's fault" (the original title for Little Dorrit, by the way) is a correct description of a social pathology, but not something that Tolstoy eventually wants to explore.
At last, then, Resurrection sputters to a halt, having made its point long before. Besides the narrative consequences, there is one further drawback to Tolstoy's thinking, one which was borne out in his biography. This is the risk that, in trying to "get way, get away from all these false dealings," in turning away from society and towards a rigorous program of denunciation and critical analysis of a widespread deception, one will cut oneself off from those who love and need one's sympathy and understanding. As a man, Tolstoy failed to see this, and the book is tinged with a bitterness that urges Tolstoy to inflict only more self-denial upon Nekhlyudov. It is a hard saying, and one that threatens to pull "the truth" ever further from the other persons who are right there.
