In the administrative hierarchy, the subordinates are no better than their masters. At every level, the "function" transforms the man into a monster. This rogues' gallery is reminiscent of that in Gogol's Dead
Souls. Like Gogol's Chiehikov, on each successive occasion Tolstoy's Nekhlyudov discovers some new facet of human baseness, lechery, stupidity, cruelty or malpractice. Gogol had wanted to contrast the black creatures in the first part of Dead Sovb with white ones, who would incarnate the hopes of the human race in the second part, before emerging as virtually full-fledged angels in the third part of his Russian Divine Comedy. But try as he would, he could not add a Purgatorio or a Paradiso to the Inferno he had so masterfully portrayed. Tolstoy chose to combine his figures of light and darkness in the same story. Opposite the repulsive gang of authorities—ministers, judges, priests, police, prison warders—he aligns the people, simple and resigned. In his previous novels, the laboring masses had been represented only by peasants, but in Resurrection there are, in addition to the muzhiks on Nckhlyudov's estate, cobblers, masons, house painters, factory' hands, laundresses, servants and common criminals. For these underlings, the victims of a misbegotten society, the author has nothing but esteem and affection. He describes them with the same realism as he does persons of high degree, but is never sarcastic toward them. How could he sneer at them, the salt of the earth? He paints their external filth in the blackcst of hues, but sees nothing but light in their souls. There is Fyodosya, with her "gentle voice" and "limpid eyes," and Taras, who has "kindly blue eyes," following his unjustly sentenced wife to Siberia; and the peasant Menshov, who also has eyes full of light and a heart of gold. Even the drunkards and brutes have the excuse of their immense poverty. Hundreds of silhouettes file past the reader—mere sketches, but when superposed, they form a single collective character whose presence dominates the book. A "barefoot peasant in a torn caftan, holding the tatters of his hat with dignity in the crook of his arm"; a "muzhik dressed in rags and bark shoes, with a beard that had never been combed"; Anisya, "a gaunt woman with a bloodless but smiling face." Further on Nekhlyudov sees, in a sort of hallucination, "those cobblers he had watched working behind a basement grille; those thin, pale, unkempt laundresses with bare bony arms, ironing in front of gaping windows from which thick scrolls of soapy steam poured out; those two dyer's boys in aprons whom he had recently met, shoeless, wearing only linen rags wrapped around their feet, stained with dye from head to toe. With their shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow, they were carrying dye pails that were too heavy for them, making the big veins swell out on their scrawny arms, and snapping incessantly at each other. Their sullen faces showed profound lassitude. The same expression could be seen on the dusty, black faces of the wagoners lurching about on their carts, the bloated faces of the
men and women begging alms at the street comers with their children, the features of the drinkers glimpsed through caf6 windows. There, around tiny tables cluttered with bottles and glasses of tea, in the ceaseless bustle of the waiters in white aprons, sat creatures with bnitish faces, inflamed by alcohol, covered with sweat, shouting and singing."
Between the gray horde of the victims and the glittering little clan of their executioners stand those who want to overthrow the established order: the revolutionaries. Tolstoy studies them here for the first time. As a partisan of non-violence, he should have felt nothing but aversion for them. And yet he draws and animates them with compassion. Among them arc aristocrats, bourgeois intellectuals, civil servants, a peasant, a laborer who is a great reader of Karl Marx. The more fanatical of these agitators are mistaken, to be sure, when they proclaim that one must "work for the masses and expect nothing from them," overthrow the government by force, impose a constitution upon an ignorant people to make them happy in spite of themselves. But their motives are never base. They are ready to suffer and die for others. Therefore they are entitled to the author's respect. Katyusha Mazlova herself admits that she "never knew or could imagine men more wonderful than those with whom she was walking now."
Nekhlyudov had tried to cany out a bloodless revolution among the peasants on his own estate. Thus, after lending his agricultural theories of one period to Levin in Anna Karenina, Tolstoy now bestows his latest views on the subject upon the hero of Resurrection. Inspired by the American socialist Ilcnry George, Nekhlyudov favors a single land tax, high enough to compel the large owners to cede their land to the State. The tax would abolish private property and the State would redistribute the nationalized land among all the peasants who cultivated it. It is odd that Nekhlyudov (alias Tolstoy) should have been so hypnotized by this pseudo-communistic Utopia that he failed to realize that in order to carry out such a redistribution it would first be necessary to change the government, or in other words, to make a radical and presumably bloody political reform. When Nekhlyudov finally decides to abandon his land to the peasants in return for a token rent, he has to struggle with their skepticism. With his usual honesty, the author recognizes the gulf between even the best-intentioned landowner and the people. "It all seemed perfect and yet Nekhlyudov had misgivings. lie saw that in spite of the profuse expressions of thanks uttered by some of them, the peasants were in fact dissatisfied and expected something more from him. ... He climbed into the steward's troika with a disagreeable sensation of having left the job unfinished." Moraclass="underline" the lord's half-measures arc useless and even harmful; as long
as he has not given his muzhiks everything, he has given them nothing; one clay he will give up all his possessions, less in order to make them happy than to appease his own conscience. Then, without money, attachments or worries, he can set out, illuminated, for Siberia with Katyusha Mazlova at this side.
Most of Tolstoy's novels are dominated by the idea that a man's real life begins when the spiritual forces in him triumph over his animal nature. But in War and Peace and Anna Karenina this quest for perfection was not the only mainspring. The movement of those stories and their highpoints of interest were in the love affairs that swept the main characters along (Prince Andrey and Natasha; Pierre Bezukhov and Elena, then Natasha; Nicholas Rostov and Sonya, then Princcss Bolkonsky; Levin and Kitty; Anna Karenina and Vronsky, etc.). In Resurrection Nckhlyudov's love for Katyusha Mazlova is the preface to the novel, rather than the substance of it. Their love is the past. It is seen through mirrors. But since the reader does not have to follow several intermingled plot-lines at once, as in the great works that preceded it, the story gains in unity and drive. The action of the book actually begins when Nckhlyudov, looking at the prostitute being tried for theft, recognizes the little servant-girl he had seduccd in his youth. Later, he never feels involved with her in the ordinary way. He follows her out of pity, not passion, and out of a need to expiate, a desire to elevate himself by joining forccs with those who are most lowly. It is not sentiment that gives rhythm and warmth to this couple's story, but the denunciation of social injustice and the search for a remedy that will cure mankind's ills.
And therein, perhaps, lies the weakness in this beautiful book. All that is "reporting"—the courts, prisons, convicts' travels, life in a prison colony—is compcllingly convincing, but the saga of Nckhlyudov and Katyusha Mazlova seems rather trite alongside it. Like Nikolenka Irtenyev in Childhood, Boyhood and Youth, Nckhlyudov in A Landlords Morning, Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace and Levin in Anna Karenina, the Nckhlyudov of Resurrection is Leo Tolstoy. But the gap between protagonist and author has widened with age. The writer has put the ideas of a solitary thinker of seventy-two into the head of a hale and hearty man of thirty-five, high-living, lusty and frivolous. As Romain Rolland points out, one feels here "the juxtaposition of one very real person going through the moral crisis of another one, and the other one is the aged Tolstoy." To be sure, a moral crisis of this sort is conccivablc at any age. But here there has been nothing in what we know of the hero's character and life to prepare for it; it arrives on command, more, it would seem, at the author's will than as the conse-