8.2 /10 1 Votes
Country Russia Publication date 1899 Originally published 1899 Illustrator Leonid Pasternak | 4.1/5 Goodreads Language Russian Published in English 1900 Genre Philosophical fiction | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Original title Воскресение, Voskreseniye Publisher First published serially in Niva
then Dodd, Mead (US) Page count 483 (Oxford World's Classics edition) Adaptations Resurrection (1960), We Live Again (1934) Similar Leo Tolstoy books, Russia books, Classical Studies books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Resurrection (Russian: Воскресение, Voskreseniye), first published in 1899, was the last novel written by Leo Tolstoy. The book is the last of his major long fiction works published in his lifetime. Tolstoy intended the novel as an exposition of the injustice of man-made laws and the hypocrisy of the institutionalized church. The novel also explores the economic philosophy of Georgism, of which Tolstoy had become a very strong advocate towards the end of his life, and explains the theory in detail. It was first published serially in the popular weekly magazine Niva in an effort to raise funds for the resettlement of the Doukhobors.
Contents
Plot outline
The story is about a nobleman named Dmitri Ivanovich Nekhlyudov, who seeks redemption for a sin committed years earlier. His brief affair with a maid had resulted in her being fired and ending up in prostitution.
Ten years later, Nekhlyudov sits on a jury which sentences the maid, Maislova, to prison in Siberia for murder (poisoning a client who beat her). The book narrates his attempts to help her practically, but focuses on his personal mental and moral struggle. He goes to visit her in prison, meets other prisoners, hears their stories, and slowly comes to realize that below his gilded aristocratic world, yet invisible to it, is a much larger world of cruelty, injustice and suffering. Story after story he hears and even sees people chained without cause, beaten without cause, immured in dungeons for life without cause, and a twelve-year-old boy sleeping in a lake of human dung from an overflowing latrine because there is no other place on the prison floor, but clinging in a vain search for love to the leg of the man next to him, until the book achieves the bizarre intensity of a horrific fever dream.
Popular and critical reception
The book was eagerly awaited. "How all of us rejoiced," one critic wrote on learning that Tolstoy had decided to make his first fiction in 25 years, not a short novella but a full-length novel. "May God grant that there will be more and more!" It outsold Anna Karenina and War and Peace. Despite its early success, today Resurrection is not as famous as the works that preceded it.
Some writers have said that Resurrection has characters that are one-dimensional and that as a whole the book lacks Tolstoy's earlier attention to detail. By this point, Tolstoy was writing in a style that favored meaning over aesthetic quality.
The book faced much censorship upon publication. The complete and accurate text was not published until 1936. Many publishers printed their own editions because they assumed that Tolstoy had given up all copyrights as he had done with previous books. Instead, Tolstoy retained the copyright and donated all royalties to the Doukhobors, who were Russian pacifists hoping to emigrate to Canada.
It is said of legendary Japanese filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi that he was of the opinion that "All melodrama is based on Tolstoy's Resurrection".
Adaptations
Operatic adaptations of the novel include the Risurrezione by Italian composer Franco Alfano, Vzkriesenie by Slovak composer Ján Cikker, and Resurrection by American composer Tod Machover.
Additionally, various film adaptations, including a Russian film Katyusha Maslova of director Pyotr Chardynin (1915, the first film role of Natalya Lisenko); a 1944 Italian film Resurrection; a 1949 Chinese film version entitled "蕩婦心" (A Forgotten Woman) starring Bai Guang; a Russian film version directed by Mikhail Shveitser in 1960, with Yevgeny Matveyev, Tamara Semina and Pavel Massalsky, have been made. The best-known film version, however, is Samuel Goldwyn's English-language We Live Again, filmed in 1934 with Fredric March and Anna Sten, and directed by Rouben Mamoulian. The Italian directors Paolo and Vittorio Taviani released their TV film Resurrezione in 2001.
A 1968 BBC mini-series Resurrection, rebroadcast in the US on Masterpiece Theatre.