quence of the psychological impulses of his spokesman; and once it has begun, it proceeds with mechanical regularity.
To hide his uneasiness at this arbitrary aspect of the revelation, Tolstoy makes lavish use of overdramatic expressions. When he first sees Katyusha Mazlova at the court hearing, Nekhlyudov "feels he is a dog who should be ashamed to look people in the face." Later, "he felt all the cruelty and indignity not only of that one deed, but of his entire idle, debauched, spiteful and arrogant existence." Returning home after the trial, he repeats to himself, "Shame and loathing! Loathing and shameft And when he sees a portrait of his mother in a black gown with shoulders bared and swelling bosom, he chokes with revulsion for all that is "flesh." He remembers that he had seen Missy, his fiancee, similarly revealed a few days before. "I shall tell Missy the truth: that I am a profligate, that 1 cannot marry her and have troubled her for nothing. ... I shall tell Katyusha that I am a filthy wretch, that I am guilty toward her and shall do everything in my power to lighten her burden." Having made this decision, nothing can move him from it. He is wealthy, enjoys a good reputation and is about to marry Missy —but he abandons everything to atone for an error made in the distant past; and not for one moment during the months of his calvary with Katyusha Mazlova, a care-worn woman with a vicious tongue and foul breath, does he question the choice he has made. Even when he learns she is about to relapse into sin, he does not entertain one moment of regret or discouragement.
How is it that Tolstoy, whose own convictions and feelings fluctuated so wildly, did not try to "shade" his hero a little? Nekhlyudov would have seemed so much more plausible to us had lie been a little less sure of himself! Moreover, he and Katyusha Mazlova follow different paths to illumination. Katyusha is reborn when she places herself at the serv ice of a political prisoner whom she does not love; she abandons Nekhlyudov, who has given up everything to save her, perhaps because she senses that a man like him must find his salvation alone. And so it is: Nekhlyudov, feeling that "his dealings with Katyusha are at an end," opens the New Testament and chances upon a passage that enlightens him. In a matter of minutes he is turned inside out, renewed, cleansed. Eor the reader, this conversion in extremis is hardly convincing. It docs not follow naturally from the story and it bears the mark of Holy Scripture less than that of the fatigue of an author who is in a hurry to dispose of his characters. After reading the book, Chekhov wrote to Menshikov, on January 28, 1900, "A11 admirable work of art!
♦ Here and in following quote, Trovat's italics.
The most interesting parts are the passages on the relations between Nekhlyudov and Katyusha, and even more, those on all those princes and generals and aunts and muzhiks and convicts and guards. The scene with the spiritualist general in command of the Sts. Peter and Paul Fortress took my breath away, it is so powerful! And Mrs. Korchagin in her armchair, and Fyodosya's peasant husband . . . the one who said his wife was clutching. It's Tolstoy's pen that is clutching. But the novel has no end, or rather what ends it cannot be called an ending. To write and write, and then suddenly to throw it all away on a piece of scripture, is a little too theological!"
In fact, the end of Resurrection is astonishingly like that of Father Sergey and also like that which Tolstoy, in his diary, hoped would be his own: the departure, the break with society to mingle with the hordes of the lowly and be lost in the flood.
Ilis refusal to live in the world is even more singular when one thinks that his perception of it has never been sharper. It is not loss of appetite that drives him away from the table, but fear of his own gluttony. At seventy as at twenty, he writes with nostrils flaring, eyes alert and ears pricked; he told Sergeyenko, "No detail must be neglected in art, for a button half-undone may explain a whole side of a person's character. It is absolutely essential to mention that button. But it has to be described in terms of the person's inner life, and attention must not be diverted from important things to focus on accessories and trivia."12 Applying this principle, he notes the physical peculiarities of his people in passing, characterizes old Korchagin by his "bull's ncck," Mazlenikov by his "white, fat fist," Katyusha Mazlova by her eyes as dark as wet black currants and her slight squint, Missy by her tapered thumbnail. He gives to each his own way of speaking: socialites, high public officials, muzhiks and guards, revolutionary theoreticians and convicts. For the latter, he uses the pungent expressions he noted during his prison tours. Even the inner monologues are in keeping with the characters' physical type and social rank. All in all, he never wrote with greater violence and less "artistry." He takes even less pains than usual with his style because he is not trying to tell a story: he is trying to stigmatize those who are responsible for the present plight of society. The crudencss of naturalistic detail is intended to convince the reader of the extent of the evil that must be remedied: the gabbling woman squatting over the garbage trough, the old man with a huge gray louse crawling across his cheek, the convicts' wrangling around the faucet during their washing-up period . . . The reminiscences of Nekhlyudov's and Katyusha's distant past are the only moments that contain any poetry. There is the unforgettable snowy Easter night, the
church filled with peasants in their best finery, Katyusha looking so pretty with a red ribbon in her hair; and the thaw, the white fog; and the vision of the girl sitting quietly behind a window; and the swell of desire in Nekhlyudov'S veins, while, "from the stream, strange snortings and cracklings came to him, the rattle of breaking ice" and the crow of the cock leaps out of the mist. All the grace and loveliness of the long-ago time of innocence merely deepen the squalor of the present. Tolstoy colors his drawing with his adjectives. His brush skims, adding a stroke here and there, deepening a shadow, encircling a silhouette: "There were four judges: Nikitin, the president, a waxen, smooth- shaven man with steel gray eyes in a narrow face; Wolff, with lips tightly compressed, leafing through the brief with his little white hands; then Skovorodnikov, tall and heavy with a pockmarked face, a learned jurist; the fourth, Bey, wearing a patriarchal air, came in last. The clerk and the State representative, a young man of medium height, dry and close-shaven with a swarthy complexion and black, mournful eyes, had come in at the same time as the judges."