"RESURRECTION"
Ten years separated _Resurrection_ from the _Kreutzer Sonata_.[1]
ten years which were more and more absorbed in moral propaganda. Ten
years also separated the former book from the end for which this
life hungered, famished as it was for the eternal. _Resurrection_ is
in a sense the artistic testament of the author. It dominates the
end of his life as _War and Peace_ crowned its maturity. It is the
last peak, perhaps the highest--if not the most stupendous--whose
invisible summit is lost in the mists. Tolstoy is seventy years old.
He contemplates the world, his life, his past mistakes, his faith, his
righteous anger.
He sees them from a height. We find the same ideals as in his previous
books; the same warring upon hypocrisy; but the spirit of the artist,
as in _War and Peace_, soars above his subject. To the sombre irony,
the mental tumult of the _Kreutzer Sonata_ and _The Death of Ivan
Ilyitch_ he adds a religious serenity, a detachment from the world,
which is faithfully reflected in himself. One is reminded, at times, of
a Christian Goethe.
All the literary characteristics which we have noted in the works
of his later period are to be found here, and of these especially
the concentration of the narrative, which is even more striking in a
long novel than in a short story. There is a wonderful unity about
the book; in which respect it differs widely from _War and Peace_
and _Anna Karenin._ There are hardly any digressions of an episodic
nature. A single train of action, tenaciously followed, is worked
out in every detail. There is the same vigorous portraiture, the
same ease and fullness of handling, as in the _Kreutzer Sonata._ The
observation is more than ever lucid, robust, pitilessly realistic,
revealing the animal in the man "the terrible persistence of the beast
in man, more terrible when this animality is not openly obvious;
when it is concealed under a so-called poetical exterior." Witness
the drawing-room conversations, which have for their object the mere
satisfaction of a physical need: "the need of stimulating the digestion
by moving the muscles of the tongue and gullet"; the crude vision of
humanity which spares no one; neither the pretty Korchagina, "with her
two false teeth, the salient bones of her elbows, and the largeness of
her finger-nails," and her _décolletage,_ which inspires in Nekhludov
a feeling of "shame and disgust, disgust and shame"; nor the herione,
Maslova, nothing of whose degradation is hidden; her look of premature
age, her vicious, ignoble expression, her provocative smile, the odour
of brandy that hangs about her, her red and swollen face. There is a
brutality of naturalistic detail: as instance, the woman who converses
while crouched over the commode. Youth and the poetic imagination
have vanished; except in the passages which deal with the memories of
first love, whose music vibrates in the reader's mind with hypnotic
intensity; the night of the Holy Saturday, and the night of Passover;
the thaw, the white mist so thick "that at five paces from the house
one saw nothing but a shadowy mass, whence glimmered the red light of
a lamp"; the crowing of the cocks in the night; the sounds from the
frozen river, where the ice cracks, snores, bubbles, and tinkles like
a breaking glass; and the young man who, from the night outside, looks
through the window at the young girl who does not see him: seated near
the table in the flickering light of the little lamp--Katusha, pensive,
dreaming, and smiling at her dreams.
The lyrical powers of the writer are given but little play. His art
has become more impersonal; more alien to his own life. The world
of criminals and revolutionaries, which he here describes, was
unfamiliar to him;[2] he enters it only by an effort of voluntary
sympathy; he even admits that before studying them at close quarters
the revolutionaries inspired him with an unconquerable aversion. All
the more admirable is his impeccable observation--a faultless mirror.
What a wealth of types, of precise details! How everything is _seen_;
baseness and virtue, without hardness, without weakness, but with a
serene understanding and a brotherly pity.... The terrible picture
of the women in the prison! They are pitiless to one another; but
the artist is the merciful God; he sees, in the heart of each, the
distress that hides beneath humiliation, and the tearful eyes beneath
the mask of effrontery. The pure, faint light which little by little
waxes within the vicious mind of Maslova, and at last illumines her
with a sacrificial flame, has the touching beauty of one of those rays
of sunshine which transfigure some humble scene painted by the brush
of Rembrandt. There is no severity here, even for the warders and
executioners. "Lord, forgive them, for they know not what they do!" ...
The worst of it is that often they do know what they do; they feel all
the pangs of remorse, yet they cannot do otherwise. There broods over
the book the sense of the crushing and inevitable fatality which weighs
upon those who suffer and those who cause that suffering: the director
of the prison, full of natural kindness, as sick of his jailer's life
as of the pianoforte exercises of the pale, sickly daughter with the
dark circles beneath her eyes, who indefatigably murders a rhapsody
of Liszt; the Governor-General of the Siberian town, intelligent
and kindly, who, in the hope of escaping the inevitable conflict
between the good he wishes to do and the evil he is forced to do, has
been steadily drinking since the age of thirty-five; who is always
sufficiently master of himself to keep up appearances, even when he is
drunk. And among these people we find the ordinary affection for wife
and children, although their calling renders them pitiless in respect
of the rest of humanity.
The only character in this book who has no objective reality is
Nekhludov himself; and this is so because Tolstoy has invested him
with his own ideas. This is a defect of several of the most notable
types in _War and Peace_ and in _Anna Karenin_; for example, Prince
Andrei, Pierre Besoukhov, Levine, and others. The fault was less
grave, however, in these earlier books; for the characters, by force
of their circumstances and their age, were nearer to the author's
actual state of mind. But in _Resurrection_ the author places in the
body of an epicurean of thirty-five the disembodied soul of an old
man of seventy. I will not say that the moral crisis through which
Nekhludov is supposed to pass is absolutely untrue and impossible;
nor even that it could not be brought about so suddenly.[3] But there
is nothing in the temperament, the character, the previous life of
the man as Tolstoy depicts him, to announce or explain this crisis;
and once it has commenced nothing interrupts it. Tolstoy has, it is
true, with profound observation, represented the impure alloy which
at the outset is mingled with the thoughts of sacrifice; the tears of
self-pity and admiration; and, later, the horror and repugnance which
seize upon Nekhludov when he is brought face to face with reality. But
his resolution never flinches. This crisis has nothing in common with
his previous crises, violent but only momentary.[4] Henceforth nothing
can arrest this weak and undecided character. A wealthy prince, much
respected, greatly enjoying the good things of the world, on the point
of marrying a charming girl who loves him and is not distasteful to
him, he suddenly decides to abandon everything--wealth, the world, and
social position--and to marry a prostitute in order to atone for a
remote offence; and his exaltation survives, without flinching, for
months; it holds out against every trial, even the news that the woman
he wishes to make his wife is continuing her life of debauchery.[5]
Here we have a saintliness of which the psychology of a Dostoyevsky
would have shown us the source, in the obscure depths of the conscience
or even in the organism of his hero. Nekhludov, however, is by no
means one of Dostoyevsky's heroes. He is the type of the average man,
commonplace, sane, who is Tolstoy's usual hero. To be exact, we are
conscious of the juxtaposition of a very materialistic[6] character
and a moral crisis which belongs to another man, and that man the aged
Tolstoy.
The same impression--one of elemental duality--is again produced at
the end of the book, where a third part, full of strictly realistic
observation, is set beside an evangelical conclusion which is not in
any way essential; it is an act of personal faith,[7] which does not
logically issue from the life under observation. This is not the first
time that Tolstoy's religion has become involved with his realism; but
in previous works the two elements have been better mingled. Here they
are not amalgamated; they simply co-exist; and the contrast is the
more striking in that Tolstoy's faith is always becoming less and less
indifferent to proof, while his realism is daily becoming more finely
whetted, more free from convention. Here is a sign, not of fatigue, but
of age; a certain stiffness, so to speak, in the joints. The religious
conclusion is not the organic development of the work. It is a _Deus
ex machinâ_. I personally am convinced that right in the depth of
Tolstoy's being--in spite of all his affirmations--the fusion between
his two diverse natures was by no means complete: between the truth of
the artist and the truth of the believer.
Although _Resurrection_ has not the harmonious fullness of the work
of his youth, and although I, for my part, prefer _War and Peace_, it
is none the less one of the most beautiful poems of human compassion;
perhaps the most truthful ever written. More than in any other book
I see through the pages of this those bright eyes of Tolstoy's,
the pale-grey, piercing eyes, "the look that goes straight to the
heart,"[8] and in each heart sees its God.
[1] _Master and Servant_ (1895) is more or less of a transition between
the gloomy novels which preceded it and _Resurrection;_ which is full
of the light of the Divine charity. But it is akin to _The Death of
Ivan Ilyitch_ and the _Popular Tales_ rather than to _Resurrection,_
which only presents, towards the end of the book, the sublime
transformation of a selfish and morally cowardly man under the stress
of an impulse of sacrifice. The greater part of the book consists
of the extremely realistic picture of a master without kindness and
a servant full of resignation, who are surprised, by night, on the
steppes, by a blizzard, in which they lose their way. The master, who
at first tries to escape, deserting his companion, returns, and finding
the latter half-frozen, throws himself upon him, covering him with his
body, gives him of his warmth, and sacrifices himself by instinct; he
does not know why, but the tears fill his eyes; it seems to him that
he has become the man he is seeking to save--Nikita--and that his life
is no longer in himself, but in Nikita. "Nikita is alive; then I am
still alive, myself." He has almost forgotten who he, Vassili, was. He
thinks: "Vassili did not know what had to be done. But I, I know!" He
hears the voice of Him whom he was awaiting (here his dream recalls one
of the _Popular Tales),_ of Him who, a little while ago, had commanded
him to lie upon Nikita. He cries, quite happy: "Lord, I am coming!" and
he feels that he is free; that nothing is keeping him back any longer.
He is dead.
[2] While on the other hand he had mixed in all the various circles
depicted in _War and Peace, Anna Karenin, The Cossacks,_ and
_Sebastopol_; the _salons_ of the nobles, the army, the life of the
country estate. He had only to remember.
[3] "Men carry in them the germ of all the human qualities, and they
manifest now one, now another, so that they often appear to be not
themselves; that is, themselves as they habitually appear. Among some
these changes are more rare; among others more rapid. To the second
class of men belongs Nekhludov. Under the influence of various physical
or moral causes sudden and complete changes are incessantly being
produced within him." (_Resurrection_.)
[4] "Many times in his life he had proceeded to _clean up his
conscience._ This was the term he used to denote those moral crises
in which he decided to sweep out the moral refuse which littered his
soul. At the conclusion of these crises he never failed to set himself
certain rules, which he swore always to keep. He kept a diary; he
began a new life. But each time it was not long before he fell once
more to the same level, or lower still, than before the crisis."
(_Resurrection.)_
[5] Upon learning that Maslova is engaged in an intrigue with a
hospital attendant, Nekhludov is more than ever decided to "sacrifice
his liberty in order to redeem the sin of this woman."
[6] Tolstoy has never drawn a character with so sure, so broad a
touch as in the beginning of _Resurrection._ Witness the admirable
description of Nekhludov's toilet and his actions of the morning before
the first session in the Palace of Justice.
[7] The word "act" to be found here and there in the text in such
phrases as "act of faith" "act of will," is used in a sense peculiar
to Catholic and Orthodox Christians. A penitent is told to perform an
"act of faith" as penance; which is usually the repetition of certain
prayers of the nature of a creed. The "act," in short, is a repetition,
a declamation, a meditation: anything but an action.--(TRANS.)
[8] Letter of Countess Tolstoy's, 1884.