Source: https://tolstoy-lit.ru/tolstoy/bio/biryukov/biografiya-biryukov-3-22.htm
Text: P. I. Biryukov (1860–1931), Biography of L. N. Tolstoy, Volume III. Public domain.
Translation: English translation for the tolstoy.life research platform (2026-05-26), from the continuous Russian capture in ../ru/chapter-22.md.
At the end of 1898, as is well known, there appeared the manifesto of Nicholas II concerning the convocation of the Hague peace conference. This unexpected pronouncement called forth an enormous quantity of talk and comment. As was to be expected, it led to nothing; but the benefit it brought consisted in this — that the question of peace and of war was once more subjected to international discussion, and, of course, many waited to hear what L. N. Tolstoy would say to it.
That same year L. N. had occasion to express himself publicly, in brief, upon this matter. The American journal World inquired of him by telegraph for his opinion of the manifesto of Nicholas II. L. N. answered in English as follows:
“The consequence of this manifesto will be words. Universal peace can be attained only through self-respect and through disobedience to a government that demands taxes and military service for organized violence and murder.”
At the beginning of 1899 a group of advanced Swedish men addressed themselves to L. N. with a letter in which they expressed their doubts as to the usefulness of the Hague conference and communicated to L. N. their own opinions.
L. N. answered with a long letter, published in all languages, the substance of which is as follows.
At the beginning of the letter L. N., summing up the questions of the writers of the letter and his own answer in general form, says this:
“The thought expressed in your beautiful letter — that universal disarmament may be attained by the easiest and surest path by means of the refusal of individual persons to take part in military service — is altogether just. I even think that this is the sole path to the deliverance of men from the ever-intensifying and ever-increasing, most dreadful calamities of the military system. But your thought that the question of replacing military service, for persons who refuse to perform it, by public works might be examined at the conference which is, on the proposal of the Tsar, to assemble — that thought seems to me altogether mistaken, if only because the conference itself cannot be anything other than one of those hypocritical institutions whose aim is not the attainment of peace but, on the contrary, the concealment from men of that sole means of attaining universal peace which advanced men are already beginning to perceive.”
Then L. N. develops these general propositions. The chief difficulty he sees in this — that the international organ which would have to carry out the decisions of the court will not possess the force necessary for that. He expresses this thought in the following words:
“They say: the conflicts of governments will be decided by a court of arbitration. But — to say nothing of the fact that the affairs will be decided not by representatives of the peoples, but by representatives of the governments, so that there is no guarantee whatever that these decisions will be just — who is to carry out the decisions of this court? The armies. Whose armies? Those of all the powers. But the strength of these powers is unequal. Who, for example, will carry out on the Continent a decision which, let us suppose, should prove disadvantageous to Germany, Russia, or France, joined together in an alliance? Or who will carry out at sea a decision contrary to the interests of England, America, France? The decision of a court of arbitration against the military violence of states will be carried out by military violence — that is, the very thing that needs to be limited will become the means of limiting it. To catch a bird, you must sprinkle salt on its tail.”
Holding this whole proposal to be the work of diplomats grown thoroughly false, L. N. concludes his letter with this assertion:
“Armies can be diminished and abolished only against the will of governments, and in no wise by their will. Armies will be diminished and abolished only when men cease to trust governments and themselves seek deliverance from the calamities that oppress them, and seek this deliverance not in the complex and refined combinations of diplomats, but in the simple fulfilment of that law, obligatory upon every man, written in all the religious teachings and in the heart of every man — the law that one should not do to another what one would not have done to oneself, and still more that one should not kill one’s neighbour.
Armies will be diminished, and then altogether abolished, only when public opinion shall brand with shame those men who, out of fear or for gain, sell their freedom and take their places in the ranks of murderers called an army; while those men — now unknown and even condemned — who, in spite of all the persecutions and sufferings they endure for it, refuse, having given their freedom into the hands of other men, to become once more instruments of murder, will be set forth as that which they are: the foremost champions and benefactors of mankind.
Only then will armies first be diminished, and afterwards altogether abolished, and a new era will dawn in the life of mankind.”
Notwithstanding the fact that throughout this whole year L. N. was absorbed in his work upon Resurrection, he wrote a whole series of articles and letters on various questions. We give the chief of them:
In answer to the question of one of his correspondents, L. N. wrote the letter “On Suicide,” in which, with extraordinary simplicity and clearness, he sets forth this complex question. This letter is not long, and we give it here in full, since any abridgements would only obscure its sense:
“Your question — whether you, and a man in general, have the right to kill yourself — is wrongly put. Of right there can be no talk. If a man can, then he has the right. I think that the possibility of killing oneself is a saving valve. With this possibility a man has no right (here the expression ‘to have the right’ is apt) to say that life is unbearable to him. If it is impossible to live, then you will kill yourself, and so there will be no one left to speak of the unbearableness of life. Man has been given the possibility of killing himself, and therefore he can (has the right to) kill himself, and unceasingly makes use of this right, killing himself in duels, in war, in factories, by debauchery, by vodka, by tobacco, by opium, and so forth.
The question can only be whether it is reasonable and moral (the reasonable and the moral always coincide) to kill oneself.
No, it is not reasonable — just as unreasonable as to cut off the shoots of a plant which one wishes to destroy: it will not perish, but will only begin to grow awry; life is indestructible — it is outside time and space, and therefore death can only alter its form, can only put an end to its manifestation in this world. And having put an end to it in this world, I, in the first place, do not know whether the manifestation in another world will be more pleasant to me; and, in the second place, I deprive myself of the possibility of experiencing and of acquiring for my own self all that it might have acquired in this world. Besides this, and chiefly — it is unreasonable, because, in putting an end to my life on the ground that it seems unpleasant to me, I thereby show that I have a perverted notion of the destination of my life, supposing that its destination is my pleasure, whereas its destination is, on the one hand, personal perfecting, and on the other, the service of that work which is being accomplished by the whole life of the world. By this same it is also immoral: man has been given his whole life, and the possibility of making use of it until his natural death, only on the condition of his service to the life of the world; and he, having made use of his life so far as it was pleasant to him, renounces serving the world by it as soon as it becomes unpleasant to him: whereas in all probability this service was beginning precisely from the time when life began to seem unpleasant. Every work seems unpleasant at first.
At the Optina Monastery there lay upon the floor, for more than thirty years, a monk stricken with paralysis, who had the use only of his left hand. The doctors said that he must suffer greatly; but he not only did not complain of his condition — he, continually crossing himself, gazing at the icons, and smiling, expressed his gratitude to God and his joy at that spark of life which still glowed within him. Tens of thousands of visitors came to him, and it is hard to imagine all the good which spread out into the world from this man, deprived of every possibility of activity. Surely this man did more good than thousands of healthy men who imagine that, in various institutions, they are serving the world.”
In another long letter of this time, to a student, D., L. N. speaks of the teaching of religion to a child. One must teach the true religion, says L. N. in this letter, whereas with us a falsehood is forcibly imposed.
From that very time, twenty years ago, says L. N., when I clearly saw how mankind ought to live, and might live, in happiness, and how senselessly, tormenting itself, it ruins generation after generation, I have ever further and further pushed back the root cause of this madness and of this ruin: at first this cause seemed to me to be the false economic order; but now I have come to the conviction that the fundamental cause of all is the false religious teaching imparted by education.
The sense of the letter consists in this — that the teaching of the so-called “Law of God” corrupts the impressionable child-soul with a manifest falsehood. The chief thing in dealings with children is truthfulness, sincerity; in the child there are already implanted the needs of a consciousness of the beginning of the world.
The child has a dim conception of the existence of that which is the beginning of all, the cause of its own being, the power in whose dominion it finds itself; and it has that loftiest, indefinite conception, inexpressible in words but apprehended with the whole being, of this beginning — the very conception that is proper to reasonable men.
And suddenly, instead of this, it is told that this Beginning is nothing other than some sort of personal, willful, and terribly wicked being — the Jewish god.
“It is well if we can clearly recount to him what we know of this; but since in the majority of cases we ourselves know nothing of it, it is better to tell the children plainly that this is unknown to us.
Every sincere man,” says L. N., “knows the good in whose name he lives. Let him tell this to the child, or let life show it to him, and he will do good and assuredly will do the child no harm.
If it were necessary for me at this moment to convey to a child the essence of the religious teaching which I hold to be the truth, I should tell him that we have come into this world and live in it not by our own will, but by the will of That which we call God, and that therefore it will be well with us only when we fulfil that will.
And this will consists in this — that we should all be truly happy. And in order that we should all be truly happy, there is but one means: every man must act toward others as he would wish that others should act toward him.
But to the questions of how the world came into being, of what awaits us after death, I should answer: to the first — by the acknowledgement of my own ignorance, and in general of the irregularity of such a question (in the whole Buddhist world this question does not exist); and to the second I should answer by the supposition that the will which called us into this life for our good leads us somewhere through death, probably for the same purpose.”
By a particular sharpness in the exposure both of ecclesiastical falsehood and of the ecclesiastical violence bound up with it, there is distinguished the so-called “Letter to a Sergeant-Major.” In it L. N. confirms the doubt that had arisen in the soldier’s mind as to the truth of the teaching imparted to him, in view of its complete disagreement with the practice of life; he discloses the deceit that hinders the application of this teaching to life, and once more sets forth the essence of the new teaching in a form similar to that in which he had set it forth in the letter to the student D.
But more than by all his other works that year, L. N. was absorbed by the working-out of the novel Resurrection.
As is well known, the subject for this novel was given to L. N. by his friend Anatoly Fyodorovich Koni, who had borrowed it from his own judicial practice. And when L. N. heard this story, related to him by Anatoly Fyodorovich with the talent of a narrator peculiar to him, he began to entreat him by all means to write down this story and to give it for publication by Posrednik (The Intermediary). But the subject not only pleased L. N. by its complex and interesting moral-psychological moment — it touched the artistic chord in L. N. himself, and he, ceasing not to think of it, at last resolved to ask Anatoly Fyodorovich to yield him this theme, since he himself wished to work it out. And, of course, he received his full consent. The chief theme of the novel, representing a fact of real life, consists in this — that a juryman recognizes, in the woman on trial, a girl whom he had once seduced. Repentance for the deed he had committed works in him a spiritual upheaval, and he resolves upon marriage with the prisoner.
L. N. transferred this subject into the sphere familiar to him, on the one hand, of the lordly aristocratic life, and on the other, of the no less familiar life of the common people; and, finally, for the first time in his work, he depicted the newly arisen class of the protesting revolutionary intelligentsia.
Besides this knot of the novel, taken from real life, there are in it also autobiographical features from the life of L. N. himself, and there have found their reflection in it certain events of contemporary life, and the characters of contemporary statesmen and public men, both, are portrayed.
In order to mark out the autobiographical part of the novel, I must tell of one meeting of mine with L. N., and thereby fulfil the charge he laid upon me. In August 1910 — that is, three months before his death — I visited L. N. at Yasnaya Polyana. The feeling of reverence with which I regarded him often hindered me from troubling him with questions about his life for a biographical purpose. His sensitive soul divined my feelings, and he would often himself begin to recount, adding: “Now this will be useful to you for your work.” I listened eagerly and swallowed up his words, but, unhappily, I noted down little, and therefore there remained in my memory only the very chief things.
And so, on this visit, I once saw him taking his morning walk, before breakfast, in his beloved old avenues of lime-trees. He often prayed there in the mornings, and I called those vast vaults of lime, with the azure of the sky showing through the bright foliage, the temple of Lev Nikolaevich.
Noticing me, he called me to him, and we walked along together. Having exchanged a few words of greeting, he began to question me about my work, and then, in a serious, calm voice that pierced the soul, he said:
“Here you are, writing all that is good about me. That is untrue and incomplete. One must write the bad as well. In my youth I led a very bad life, and two events of that life torment me especially, even to this day. And I tell you this, as my biographer, and ask you to write it in my biography. These events were: a liaison with a peasant woman of our village, before my marriage. There is a hint of this in my story The Devil. The second is a crime which I committed with the maidservant Gasha, who lived in the house of my aunt. She was innocent; I seduced her; she was turned out, and she perished.”
Hearing this confession with a trembling heart, I could not, of course, by further questioning, irritate the spiritual wound of this confession. We walked on for some time in silence, and then the appearance of one of the family members put an end to our conversation.
Setting this short narrative side by side with what is described in Resurrection, we may conclude that the relations of Nekhlyudov to Katyusha are precisely the portrayal of this event. By this may be explained both the passion with which Lev Nikolaevich regarded this subject and the fervour with which he hastened to finish and to publish, before all the rest, this tale out of the many he had begun. May this confession be not to the condemnation of the departed, but to the cleansing of his bright memory.
An important place in the novel is occupied by the application to the land question of the theory of Henry George. As is well known, L. N. shared these views, and he wished to make use of the attractive form of the novel for the spreading of them. In its original form, still more space was allotted to this question in the novel. According to this original version, Nekhlyudov entered into lawful marriage with Katyusha and settled in Siberia. Nekhlyudov’s chief occupation in this new family life was the drawing-up of a memorandum to the Sovereign concerning an important state reform proposed by him — the nationalization of the land and the establishment of a single tax on the system of Henry George.
The theoretical part of the novel — the fundamental idea upon which the scenes of everyday life are strung — consists in the exposure of state violence and of ecclesiastical deceit, and in setting up, by way of counterweight to them, the positive force of life according to one’s own conscience, guided by reason and by love.
The exposure of bureaucratism is expressed by the portrayal of the important official Toporov, in whom the late Pobedonostsev is easily recognized. And his conversation with Nekhlyudov is a reproduction of the conversation of L. N.’s daughter, Tatyana Lvovna, with Pobedonostsev, to whom she had applied concerning the taking away of the children of the Molokans, and which we have given in the original in its proper place. As is also depicted in the novel, Pobedonostsev at once gave orders that the children should be returned.
We shall point out yet one type very closely copied from nature. This is the peasant Dissenter whom Nekhlyudov met upon a ferry, in Siberia. This is a complex type. Into it there entered two living types of Dissenter-Old-Believers of a most extreme tendency.
One of them used to wander about central Russia, and had been in Moscow too, and many of our circle knew him and conversed with him. He often uttered original and bold thoughts. He greatly loved to denounce the government for permitting the sale of tobacco, and called it the “tobacco power”; this man was known among us under the very name of the “tobacco power.” Sometimes his speech seemed very confused, because he employed many apocalyptic expressions.
The other type, the Dissenter Andrei Vas. Vlasov, was in correspondence with L. N. precisely at the time of his writing Resurrection, and L. N. borrowed many forceful expressions from his letters.
Many of the descriptions of nature, of the life of the landed gentry, bear likewise an autobiographical character. The world of the prisoners, criminal and revolutionary, is described partly from the personal impressions of L. N., who often visited prisons, and partly from documents furnished to L. N. by his revolutionary friends. L. N. himself had never been in Siberia; the more astonishing, then, is the power of his artistic creation, which reproduced with such reality the life of the stages, of the prison, and of Siberia in general.
The hero of the tale, Prince Nekhlyudov, is, of course, that same person whom we saw, while yet a youth, in Youth, then in A Landowner’s Morning, in Lucerne, in A Meeting in the Detachment; it is that person who was to have played the chief part in the Novel of a Russian Landowner, planned but never written by L. N., of which there have remained only some sketches.
Into him L. N. puts his own best dreams, makes him live through his own passions, his own vices and enthusiasms, and in him also he opens to us his own soul, purified and full of the highest aspirations.
As is well known, the novel ends with this — that Prince Nekhlyudov, living through within himself all the impressions of life, falls to pondering the question: what is to be done, in order to struggle against all this evil that triumphs in the world and floods the world? The answer to this Nekhlyudov finds in the Gospel, in the parable “of the unmerciful creditor,” and especially in the last words of this parable: “Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellow-servant, even as I had pity on thee?”
Infinite is our guilt before the eternal truth, and yet we reckon up, we take vengeance and punish, we do not forgive men for their comparatively trifling offences which they commit against us.
This was confirmed to him also by the words of Christ addressed to Peter, that one must forgive not up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven — that is, always; and L. N. thus concludes the reasonings of Nekhlyudov:
“Thus there became clear to him now the thought that the sole indubitable means of salvation from that terrible evil from which men suffer consisted only in this — that men should always acknowledge themselves guilty before God, and therefore incapable either of punishing or of correcting other men.”
L. N. concludes his novel with words to the effect that a new path of life had opened to Nekhlyudov. “But how it would end, the future would show.”
The creative genius who created this great work departed into eternity, without giving us the portrayal of this new period of life. Let us wait in hope that men imbued with the ideas expressed in the novel will give us, in actual life, that which was marked out by L. N. in his artistic work.
Many readers, struck and overcome by the power of artistic insight in the reading of this work, were to a certain degree disappointed by the end of the novel: “all so good, so deep, and suddenly the scriptural texts and the ending.”
When these disappointments reached L. N., he answered them: “If I permitted myself to devote so much time to artistic work — that is, to a game unworthy of my years — it was only in order to compel men to read those passages of the Gospel, forgotten by them, with which I closed the novel.”
We have already spoken of the personal element of this novel, which undoubtedly played its part in the enthusiasm with which L. N. worked upon this work. On the other hand, the wide field for the brush of the artist — the portrayal of the sated, the idle, and the predatory on the one side, and, on the other, of those who suffer meekly and bear within themselves the seeds of life — in the presence of a new view of life, could not but captivate the long-unemployed artistic instinct of L. N. L. N. took up this work many times and again abandoned it. Two forces struggled within him: the artist and the moralist. He abandoned the works of art in order to utter words of naked truth, to call men to salvation, since he saw them already on the brink of ruin, when there is no longer time to delight them with beautiful images.
Why, then, did L. N. at last finish and work out his artistic production? Can it be that the aesthete once more conquered the moralist in him? No; but onto that scale of the balance on which his artistic inclinations lay there was laid a new weight, which outweighed the rest. This was a benevolent aim — the saving of several thousand of the best of men from sickness and death, the possibility of giving these men the chance to work freely under better conditions. This lofty, disinterested aim made it possible for Lev Nikolaevich to give himself up to his artistic genius, and then he summoned all the powers of that genius and showed these men the truth of life with that force of which the art of words alone is capable, illumined by the highest religious consciousness.
In the same manner as we have done with the other large works of L. N., we hold it our duty to make a brief survey of the critical literature on Resurrection.
The critical literature on Resurrection is very large, and will probably go on growing still further in the course of time, since the questions touched upon in this work belong to eternity. In this brief sketch of ours we shall give only a few typical specimens, indicating the various sides of human life that are touched upon by this novel, and giving us a general picture of the impression which the appearance of this work produced upon the reading public.
Here is how the critic of Nedelya (The Week), Pl. N. Krasnov, describes this impression:
“It will be no exaggeration to say that Resurrection was received by the public with greater interest than any other work of Count L. N. Tolstoy. Not a little to this was contributed by the already firmly established reputation of the author as a great artist and an original thinker; but most of all this interest was conditioned by the truly enormous merits of Count L. N. Tolstoy’s latest work, which, in its dimensions, in the depth of its conception, and in the fineness of its finish, far surpasses all the works written after Anna Karenina, and perhaps, in certain respects, even that last novel and War and Peace itself.”
Further on, the critic speaks of the external devices which L. N. employs in the portrayal of events and persons:
“Resurrection is written by the devices of a peculiar, graphic realism. Count L. N. Tolstoy endeavours to describe objects and events using the simplest of words, not resorting to the terms generally accepted in conversation which mask and justify events. He does not say, for example, that the floors in Nekhlyudov’s apartment were waxed by floor-polishers, but indicates that they were cleaned by peasants; in describing church or judicial rites, Count L. N. Tolstoy does not make use of technical expressions, but employs the simplest words, describing the gestures and actions of these persons. By such a device there is attained, in the first place, a greater attentiveness of the reader to the essence of the matter, impossible with the use of the generally accepted terms, which are met with as familiar symbols over which there is no need to ponder; in the second place, there is gained a greater vividness of description; and in the third place, there is gained the impression of a spectator regarding contemporary life from the outside; we look upon our life as we should look upon the life of an inhabitant of some other planet.”
Further on in his article, Pl. N. Krasnov points out, among other things, a characteristic peculiarity in the choice of the heroine of the novel:
“As regards the choice of the heroine, we have already had occasion to meet, in the criticism, reproaches against Count L. N. Tolstoy for having chosen his heroine from the very lowest stratum. It was said that our best artists made their heroines such women as each of their women readers might imitate; the same was expected from the heroine of Count L. N. Tolstoy; but can one imitate Katyusha Maslova? In a word, there was raised upon the scene the eternal question of positive types. But the naturalistic novel differs from the idealistic precisely in this — that it portrays not the ideals of contemporary society, but actual life such as it is. And if Count L. N. Tolstoy turned his attention precisely to this phenomenon of life, the explanation for this lies in a certain moral elevation of society in the last years precisely in the domain of these light relations toward woman. Count L. N. Tolstoy himself, by other works — less artistic and more tendentious, even didactic — contributed to the moral growth of society in this respect. But it is interesting and important to know not only how young men ought to act in regard to women, but also how the matter stands in reality.”
N. K. Mikhailovsky remarks a new feature in the author of Resurrection — this is his opposition to the very milieu in which he himself lives and in which he makes his hero live. The critic says:
“…in Resurrection Count Tolstoy wages war against an invisible but quite definite enemy. It is not the senile General Krigsmuth, not the Siberian convoy officer who recalls some Hungarian woman with Persian eyes, not the wooden husband of Nekhlyudov’s sister, not the vulgar liar Mariette, not the judge with the catarrh of the stomach, nor that judge who before the session occupies himself with gymnastics; not, in general, any one definite person. The clever and the stupid, the sick and the healthy, the absurd and the vile — these characters of the narrative blend, for the author, into one grey background, and each of them taken separately suffers no powerful blows from him: he calmly records their stupidities, their vilenesses, and their banalities. His enemy is ‘all,’ that terrible force of ‘all’ of a given society, which smothers the best impulses of the soul of the individual, foisting upon it its own ready-made solutions of the questions of life…”
A new characterization of the hero of Resurrection is given by the critic of Niva, R. I. Sementkovsky; it seems to him that Nekhlyudov is a familiar hero, already many times portrayed by Russian writers in their best works, but this type is for R. I. Sementkovsky rather a negative one. He characterizes him thus:
“How near and how comprehensible to us is this Prince Nekhlyudov! He has in literature his celebrated predecessor, who likewise thundered, from the height of his theoretical grandeur and of his awakened conscience, against all his surroundings. This predecessor was called Chatsky, and his ‘woe’ came from ‘wit.’ From what wit? From a wit hovering in airless space, from a wit to which there are no barriers, because in airless space, as Schiller put it, ‘ideas dwell peaceably together, whereas in reality things collide sharply…’ True, between Chatsky and Prince Nekhlyudov there exists this difference, that the first holds forth, while the second only reflects; but then Chatsky too delivers monologues — that is, he carries on an inner conversation with himself. They are berries of one field, and we may add to them many other types well known to us: Manilov, Rudin, Raisky, and so on. There is something kindred among these acquaintances of ours, and no one will confound them with Kostanzhoglo, with Insarov, or with Solomin. These latter did not appear in the role of inexorable judges of the existing order, but instead did very much to change the existing order for the better. But the Chatskys, the Rudins, the Nekhlyudovs all condemn and do nothing.”
But the significance of the novel, in the critic’s opinion, does not suffer from this, and at the end of his article he says this:
“The enormous significance of the new novel of Count L. N. Tolstoy consists in this — that Russian educated society ought to recognize itself in Nekhlyudov, to see in him the reflection of its own uncomely ‘self.’ We are all so inclined to reason, to condemn, to construct the most radical theories, and so little capable of realizing our ideals in the work of life. We are heroes in the sphere of bold phrases, of sharp condemnation, perhaps even of self-flagellation, but in life itself we are by no means heroes. To create an image in which society sees itself as in a mirror, in which there is reflected the chief social malady — that only a great gift can do.”
Of a different opinion about this work is the severe critic of Russkaya Mysl (Russian Thought), Mr. Protopopov. He acknowledges only the one external success of the work, and says that the novel brought the most benefit of all to the publisher Marx. Indeed, he even finds that Resurrection cannot be called a novel at all. Happily, his voice rings out quite alone, if one leaves out of account the attacks of the Black-Hundred press. The originality of his opinion deserves that we should adduce certain extracts from his article:
Here is what he says of the success of Resurrection:
“The external success of the novel corresponds entirely to the world-wide reputation of the author: the novel was snapped up, came out in countless editions, was translated into all languages, and set talking of itself well-nigh all the literary organs and all the literary critics of the world. But success of another kind, the inner success, that which is determined by the force of the impression produced and by the durability of the influence? This success Tolstoy’s novel did not have, will never have, and this is not only natural, in the order of things, but also quite reasonable and quite just. Here is the point which, it seems to me, it is necessary to make clear.”
Having made it clear, and having satisfied himself with his “demolition” of Resurrection, the critic raises this objection against himself:
“The reader has, of course, noticed that I say nothing of the psychological side of the novel, having concentrated all my attention upon its social tendencies. Who, then, is risen in Resurrection? What sort of people are Nekhlyudov and Katya Maslova, and in what was their moral regeneration expressed, if it is precisely they who are to be understood as the risen ones? But the fact is that there is no psychology whatever in the novel; nor is there, indeed, any novel at all, but rather a passionate social-moral pamphlet, directed against our cultural-social ideals and aspirations. Nekhlyudov and Maslova are by no means characteristic, are not types — they are no more than marionettes, manufactured by the author solely for the uttering of the words he requires, for the performing of the deeds he requires.”
With Mr. Protopopov there disagree not only the Russian but also the European critics; the French critic Pellissier speaks thus of Resurrection:
“With Resurrection Tolstoy returns to art. Resurrection is a genuine novel, and not a treatise of a particular kind.” And further he reasons thus:
“Resurrection is, before all, a beautiful work by the truthfulness of its scenes and pictures. We can compare Tolstoy with our realists only by setting him in opposition to them. Not seldom did they get it severely from him. What he does not like in them is, before all, their moral indifference, in some of them even an affected contempt for men. He does not like, either, their predominant striving to show us the very worst in life and in the world. But even as an artist he little resembles them. The latter do violence to nature, in order to fit it into frames marked out beforehand; in the whole they leave out all that is not closely connected with the subject, in each picture all that does not contribute to the general impression.
Tolstoy’s art is broader, more flexible, nearer to reality. Hence certain defects, to which I shall presently return — particularly a diffuseness which shocks our Latin habits. But it must be confessed that this art, less rigorous and less concentrated, gives us a better sensation of life itself.”
Let us adduce one more characteristic passage from the article of the French critic:
“The subject of the novel comes down entirely to two principal personages. Both the one and the other are analyzed with a fine and profound truthfulness. Let us rather say that the author does not give us an analysis; he does not proceed as do those novelists called psychologists who, not knowing how to impart life to their images, replace action by ponderous commentaries. In his book there is a beautiful chapter of ‘psychology,’ where he shows the inner work taking place during the crisis in Nekhlyudov. This chapter is too long to convey it whole and entire, too beautiful for abridgement. But you will see, in reading it, that even when the matter concerns, as there, a question of conscience, the psychology of the novelist does not resemble the anatomical. There is nothing more pathetic in the whole book. The author does not set himself up in the place of the personage: the personage himself lives before our eyes; in place of analysis we have a true drama.”
Let us here adduce also the opinion of Resurrection held by the well-known French historian and publicist Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu. He held it to be a rarest literary event: “Resurrection is a novel written upon a moral thesis set in advance, and at the same time it was raised by the author to the rank of a greatest artistic work, striking the reader by its vitality and its truth.”
A serious and penetrating article on Resurrection was written by the late A. Bogdanovich in Mir Bozhy (God’s World). We permit ourselves to make from his article more extensive extracts:
“Before all,” says the critic, “an involuntary amazement seizes the reader at the sight of this unfading power of creation, displayed by the great writer whose seventieth birthday had so recently been celebrated by literature, both in Russia and abroad. Notwithstanding the evident damage to which the novel has undoubtedly been subjected in various places, both its whole conception and its separate passages of wonderful beauty fully recall that Tolstoy whom we know in War and Peace or Anna Karenina. The same breadth in the grasp of life, the lightness and the natural simplicity with which the gifted author carries us from prison to the courtroom, from the court into high society, from the village to the capital, from a minister’s reception-room to a cell of a Siberian stage. And in all this there is not felt the least artificiality, as though life itself were unfolding before us in all its variety.
And how it unfolds! You experience at once both a shock at the visible horror, and the injustice of human relations, and tenderness, and joy at the unquenchable thirst for truth that is felt all the time in every moment of these relations. Even in the scenes of the wildest orgy of violence and untruth there is heard the unceasing voice of the unsleeping conscience, to which the author hearkens keenly and which he conveys to the reader with shattering force. Thanks to this feeling of tenderness, at the sight of the triumph of conscience over the visible dominion of falsehood, savagery, arbitrariness, and the burdensome and needless cruelties with which the life of mankind is so entangled, one carries away a sensation of bracing freshness and of a joyful mood. This general impression might be compared with that produced by the ancient legends of the martyrdom of the righteous. As in those legends, so here, all this power of brute force and falsehood seems something unreal, rootless, something that is unstable, has no inner development, but is only temporary and transient, that falls away like husks when the ‘fullness of times’ shall come.”
Analyzing various moments of the novel, the critic comes to this conclusion:
“The history of Katyusha is the history of a thousand thousand Katyushas, perishing at the dawn of life and never rising again. The history of Nekhlyudov is likewise the ordinary history of the gradual fall of the enormous mass of once good and pure youths, who turn into sated, self-satisfied animals, in the madness of egoism not perceiving this fall. And the whole setting amid which the drama of these two people is played out — life in prison, the court, the stage, the higher bureaucracy — is not this reality itself, that ‘real life’ to which we are so accustomed that we no longer even perceive all its horrors? And there is need of so enormous a talent as Tolstoy’s to compel us to come to ourselves and to ponder over it.
This result Tolstoy undoubtedly attained. No single great artistic work was so widely spread as Resurrection, so read and so discussed. It penetrated into the most distant corners, whither a book rarely penetrates, and there it aroused a still greater attention than upon the surface of life. The enormous significance of this fact will tell, in one form or another, in its own time. For the present one may say that the result will be of the most beneficial kind, for both the thoughts and the feelings aroused by the novel cleanse the soul and will resurrect not one Nekhlyudov, will save not one Katyusha.”
Let us conclude our brief survey with extracts from the article of the well-known critic and publicist Andreyevich (Solovyov).
Here is what opinion he expresses of the new work of Lev Nikolaevich:
“Tolstoy’s Resurrection proves better than anything how indefatigably his critical thought works, how he endeavours to lay open the sores of our life, to bury the dead, and once more to remind men that ‘the sabbath is for man, and not man for the sabbath,’ that ‘the plants, the birds, the insects, and the children are merry, but men — grown, adult men — never cease to deceive and to torment one another,’ that they reckon as important not this spring morning, not this beauty of God’s world, given for the good of all beings — a beauty disposing to peace, to concord, and to love — but as sacred and important that which we ourselves have devised, in order to lord it over men…
Tolstoy, in his novel, enumerates all those sabbaths in sacrifice to which men offer up the kingdom of God that lives in their souls. These are the sabbaths of conventions, of customs, and of proprieties, of cruelty and of power over others, the sabbaths of formalism, of routine, and of rules, the desire to set oneself above others and to show one’s superiority over them. In this lies the meaning of the truly inspired novel…”
And further the same critic says this:
“Tolstoy’s Resurrection is the noblest work which it has fallen to me to read. Whole generations will, and ought to, draw from it strength for the struggle with their own self-deception and self-satisfaction.”
Finally, the worthy critic turns his attention also to the language of the work. He adduces the opinion on language of the well-known English judge of art, John Ruskin; the substance of his opinion consists in this — that in language there is expressed the character of the soul of the speaker. “The secret of speech,” says Ruskin, “is the secret of sympathy, and the full charm of it is accessible only to the noble. Thus the rules of beautiful speech all come down to the presence in speech of sincerity and of kindness.”
In adducing this opinion of the English critic, Mr. Andreyevich passes on to the appraisal of the language of Tolstoy, and says:
“The ‘presence of sincerity and of kindness’ is in truth felt in every phrase of Tolstoy. There is anguish for men, there is pity for their undeserved sufferings, there is a deep hatred of the cruelty of the strong, and a wondrous, deadly-striking contempt for their self-satisfaction.
I like also the grave, somewhat heightened tone of the speech, behind which you see an enormous work of thought and of feeling. ‘Writing’ in this case has a clear and definite aim, which is dear to Tolstoy. This is not a play of the intellect, not a fairy-spectacle of creation; it is a passionate striving to penetrate into those deaf and deep recesses of life where the root of all evils is hidden — it is a mighty appeal to regeneration, to a simple life near to nature, ‘the beauty of which disposes to peace, to concord, and to love.’”
And the critic concludes his article with a phrase which sums up all that has been said above:
“This is in truth a great work.”
The English translator of Resurrection, A. Maude, who was in continual communication with L. N., gives, with regard to this translation, interesting information about the vicissitudes of the publication of Resurrection in his article entitled “How Tolstoy Wrote Resurrection.”
Among other things, he says this:
“The work was sold to Marx, the publisher of a St. Petersburg illustrated weekly newspaper, and, by the terms of the agreement, the publisher paid the money in advance. But here the author had to encounter new obstacles. For twenty years he had refused to work for payment, and had declared that he renounced henceforth his author’s rights: all that he printed might be freely reprinted by anyone. Besides this, he avoided work to a deadline — that is, the delivery of a certain portion, fully corrected, by a definite date. And now all that was repugnant to him fell upon him at once. The matter was further complicated by the fact that Marx, in paying out money, like every publisher, wished to define his rights exactly. He gave 30,000 roubles if the rights of selling the novel were granted to him alone, if only for a few weeks after the conclusion of its printing in Niva, and only 12,000 roubles for the right of printing it in Niva. Tolstoy, after a brief hesitation, agreed to take the smaller sum. But here again unpleasantnesses began. Other publishers took to reprinting the novel as fast as it appeared in Niva. Marx protested, saying that he had hoped he would be protected against reprints until the conclusion of the novel. Tolstoy had to print an open letter, in which he appealed to the good feelings of the publishers, asking them to refrain from reprinting until the conclusion of the novel. This side of the matter was settled, but new complications floated up.
First of all, of course, the cavilling on the part of the St. Petersburg censorship began. Everything that ‘undermined the authority of the Church and the State,’ and in general everything that seemed dangerous to the censor, was struck out. It is understandable that Part III, in which is described the treatment of the prisoners on the road to Siberia and in Siberia itself, suffered the most. But in general, throughout the whole book, entire chapters, pages, and separate phrases fell under the red pencil of the censor.
In the first part, of chapters XXXIX and XI there remained only the words: ‘The church service began’; likewise the whole of chapter XIII, describing the influence of military service, vanished. In Part II, chapter XXVIII, in which is described the visit to Toporov, the over-procurator of the Holy Synod, was also cut down. One may say that if such a book had belonged to another author, and not to Tolstoy, such a true-to-life portrayal of the arch-persecutor Pobedonostsev would have called forth the prohibition of the whole book and the arrest of the author. Among the other chapters, there suffered especially, in the second part, chapter XIX, describing the commandant of the Peter-and-Paul Fortress, chapter XXX, describing the classification of the criminals, and chapter XXXVIII, describing the departure of the prisoners’ train from Moscow.
The foreign translations, too, proved incomplete.
Thus, for example, the French translator Wyzewa, an excellent master of the French language, not content with polishing Tolstoy’s simple and direct style and turning it into an extremely smooth bookish speech, threw out, from fear of offending the Catholics, the description of the church service, and the attacks upon the army, from fear of arousing the displeasure of the anti-Dreyfusards.
But besides the Russian censorship and the foreign translators, one had still to reckon with the editors and publishers.
The Echo de Paris, in which Resurrection was appearing, began to receive a mass of letters from readers, who complained that Nekhlyudov, in their opinion, ‘occupies himself too little with Katyusha.’ In general, in their opinion, there was in the novel too little of the element of love. The editor, knowing that it was his business to gratify the demands and tastes of the public, left out several chapters and passed straight on to the scene where Nekhlyudov once more ‘occupies himself with Katyusha,’ though, perhaps, in a manner not desirable for the readers of the newspaper.
As is well known, in America too Resurrection suffered not a little at the hands of hypocritical editors. The novel was mutilated by the exclusion of passages speaking against militarism and against landed property. The whole of chapter XVII, portraying the fall of Katyusha, was excluded, and so forth.
In the German edition (the translation of Hauff), there was likewise excluded everything ‘offensive’ to the Church and the army.
It is characteristic that things did not pass off without comic episodes in England too, where there also proved to be virtuous gentlemen who found Tolstoy’s book ‘immoral.’ One worthy Quaker, having read the scene of Katyusha’s fall, hastened to burn the book…
When at last it was decided to print Resurrection, Tolstoy energetically set about the final working-out of the novel. This ‘working-out’ consisted in the complete reshaping of the whole book; certain parts of the novel were several times made over anew. Tolstoy so far enlarged his work that Marx voluntarily added a further 10,000 roubles to the honorarium.
Tolstoy was never satisfied with what he had written. Every proof was returned with ever new alterations, so that the translators could not obtain in good time the final version of certain chapters until they had appeared in Niva. This increased the danger of the appearance of unauthorized translations, which would have brought no monetary advantage to the cause that had prompted Tolstoy to permit the appearance of the book in print.
Tolstoy was so exacting toward himself, and so lavish in ‘corrections,’ that several times, after the ‘final’ version of certain chapters had been received, which had already been translated and even set up in type, ever new versions arrived, so that the translators and the compositors had to begin the work anew.”
Much trouble and distress was brought to L. N. by his relations with the publishers, Russian and foreign, whose claims, often contradicting one another, it was very hard to satisfy.
But all the same, in the end, the novel was printed in a mutilated form. In Germany the novel enjoyed an enormous success and ran through about a dozen editions. In France there came out a new complete edition. The full Russian text of the novel was published in German in Germany, and in England in the edition of Svobodnoye Slovo (The Free Word) in Russian and English, in the translation of Maude.
Soon there appeared also dramatic adaptations of Resurrection in Russian and in French, which were performed with success upon the stage.
In general, this novel became one of the most popular works of L. N. To this there contributed, in the first place, the fact that it appeared during the full bloom of L. N.’s fame, to say nothing of the gripping interest of its content. Besides this, the renunciation of literary property made it possible for all manner of firms to print it, and soon after the conclusion of its printing in Niva in Russia the novel came out in forty different editions, and, of course, the quantity of its circulation must be reckoned in millions.
Things did not pass off without lampoons either. There was found a man who envied Tolstoy’s fame and published a small brochure under the title Monday, a Novel by Count Khudoy; this proved to be the most pitiful, absurd, and uninteresting parody upon the work of L. N., raising the question: to what end, and to whom, was this unproductive labour needful?
But the critical work contained in the novel did not pass away in vain. It extremely irritated the representatives of the official religion and, as is well known, led to the excommunication of L. N. from the state church. The consequences of this event were enormous. One may say that with it there begins a new epoch in the life of L. N., to the description of which we hope to devote the fourth and last volume of the biography.
28 October 1915.