by A. N. Wilson
Many of Tolstoy’s biographers, as well as his wife, believed that in refashioning Koni’s story into a novel, Tolstoy was in fact reliving some guilt-ridden complex about an actual girl he had seduced in his youth. Then they usually go on to point out that the girl, or girls, in question (housemaids from Yasnaya, Moscow and Kazan have all been brought forward to substantiate the theory) did not go on to become prostitutes. This is advanced as evidence of Tolstoy’s tormented attitude to sex. In real life, it is repeated, these girls had their babies (or not) and settled down as perfectly contented servants, either in the same house or in some other. No shock. No disgrace. No mud and slime, except in the imagination of the novelist. But the time had long since passed – and with it the nervous crisis following Anna Karenina – when Tolstoy simply used art as a laundry for his own personal experiences. Resurrection appears dislocated and disjointed, at this imaginative level, only if we are forced to view it as a piece of autobiography. But it is not on this level that it has touched those millions of readers who have found in it things deeper, both disturbing and consoling, than anything in Tolstoy’s œuvre except War and Peace.
A rougher and more off-key attempt to set the book into some sort of biographical framework is found in Strakhov’s comment, in 1895, when he heard of the story and Tolstoy’s interest in it: ‘One way or another it will be the story of Chertkov.’45 Nekhlyudov, as exquisite in his personal manners as in his morality, is in every way more like Chertkov than he is like Tolstoy. As most Russian readers of the story have recognised, the humourlessness of Nekhlyudov’s campaigning zeal is much more Chertkovian than Tolstoyan. Viktor Shklovsky points out that we are always on Maslova’s side against Nekhlyudov; in this novel, we always see what is ridiculous about his moral poses. A survey of the chronology of Tolstoy’s life, moreover, shows that the periods when he worked on the novel with the most intense bursts of energy all correspond to periods of Chertkov’s absence. Had Chertkov not been exiled in 1897, Tolstoy might never have finished the book at all.
We have considered Tolstoy’s interest in the Dukhobors, and told the part which he played in establishing the means by which these poor people escaped the tyranny of the Tsars and found a new life abroad. When St. John’s plans for them in Cyprus fell through, the possibility arose of the Dukhobors emigrating en masse to Canada. Four thousand of them set out to Canada by way of Cyprus, their island sojourn claiming a quarter through dysentery and malaria. The enterprise cost some forty thousand dollars. Sixteen and a half thousand of this was raised by the Dukhobors themselves, who were able to realise the value of property. Five thousand was supplied by the Tolstoyans at Purleigh. A further fourteen hundred was contributed by the Society of Friends. But the bulk of the expense – seventeen thousand dollars – was borne by Tolstoy himself, who agreed to waive his principle of not accepting money for what he wrote, and to donate the proceeds of Resurrection to the Dukhobor appeal. When the bedraggled exiles arrived at the Canadian prairies, they were greeted by a delegate of the local Labour Organisation with these words: ‘I do not know the name of your Emperor, but the name of your patron and friend, Count Tolstoy, is as well known in Canada as in Russia, and I hope that one of the boys now listening to me, fifty years hence, will fill, like him, with honour to his country, the literary throne of the world.’46
Fifty years later, as it happened, the Canadian authorities were having untold trouble with the Dukhobors who enjoyed an enthusiastic spell of reviving their traditional customs of nudism and arson; but that is another story.
We have not really asked ourselves the question: Why? Why the Dukhobors? The ‘reasons’ only make sense because Tolstoy gave them sense. He could have raised an appeal, as he did in the case of the famine victims in 1891. He could have sold land, or given them inherited money of his own. When he announced his intention of giving the royalties of Resurrection to the Spirit Wrestlers, his wife moaned that he was giving a fortune to cranks while ‘black bread will do for his children and grandchildren’. His Soviet biographer points out that at this date, Tolstoy’s children and grandchildren had a fortune conservatively estimated at half a million roubles. ‘White bread cost four kopecks a pound, and they could buy a trainload of the best’.47
It is on one level absurd to suggest that he ‘had’ to write a novel to save a handful of religious eccentrics, particularly a novel on this scale, and a novel which involved such labour. It was not something casually thrown together to raise money. Three intensive periods of work (1889–90, 1895–96 and the final dynamic period of composition in 1898 and 1899) created the book. As with the great works, there was limitless patience and energy displayed to get things right (of which perhaps the most notorious is the no less than fifty rewritings of the first description of Maslova’s eyes. They went through every colour in the spectrum.) He had not been working on this expansive scale since Anna Karenina. The impulse came from inside. It was only the notion of doing it for the Dukhobors which released his daemon into a freedom which it had not known for twenty years. The mature Tolstoy (like Sir Walter Scott who kept the very identity of the author of Waverley a secret) could only write fiction because he disapproved of it. The head and the guts were at war. But at its finest moments in this story, they fuse. If we want the whole Tolstoy, he is here. In the letters, the diaries, the tracts, the essays, the short stories, he is only present in bits.
Resurrection’s power as a work of art and its effectiveness as a piece of political propaganda both stem from the same source. In Anna Karenina, life itself, the knowledge that the world was teeming with life of which our own personalities are but a part, became a torment for the heroine, a torment which is not rationally explained in the story and only makes sense in terms of some sort of brainstorm in the author; hence the disconcertingness of Anna Karenina as an artwork in its last few hundred pages. In Resurrection, this Angst has vanished completely. Life – what Henry James would call ‘clumsy life at her stupid work’48 – is in effect the heroine of the story. We feel it in the very opening paragraph, where nature is too strong even for the modern industrialised city which is trying to suppress the spring. ‘Spring was still spring, even in the town,’ we are told, as grass and leaves defy stones, paving, bricks. This life, which the earth has of itself, is felt beneath the surface of almost every page. Its first really dramatic appearance comes on the Easter night of Maslova Katyusha’s seduction. The church service at midnight has been wonderfully joyful. For Nekhlyudov, it has been all of a piece with his as yet innocent love for the girl. ‘The golden iconostasis glittered for her; the tapers in the candelabra and the candle stands burnt for her; these joyful chants were for her sake: “The Easter [Passover] of the Lord, Rejoice O ye people!” And everything, just everything which was good upon earth was for the sake of her.’49
There in the nimbus and Comper tracery,
Gold Myfanwy blesses us all.50
This scene, incidentally, could easily have been penned by the most pious Orthodox believer, and it is not always mentioned by those who find offence in the later, much more notorious description of a religious service in the prison chapel. But the two services are deliberately juxtaposed. Here, religion, sex, the classes, all are at one. The voice of love and the voice of nature, the voice of the individual and the voice of old Russia rise in a unified chorus. It is a ‘natural’ scene. Nature itself is ambivalent when it comes to questions of sexual morality.
That night, when they have exchanged their traditional Easter greetings – ‘Christ is risen!’ ‘He is risen indeed!’ – they are aware of the thaw and the coming of the spring. Nekhlyudov hears it from the porch of the dacha: ‘There, on the river, in the fog, there was going on some sort of tireless, slow work. . . .’51 When, a few pages later, the seduction happens, Katyusha resists with her lips, but her whole being says ‘I am all yours.’ Nekhlyudov, having made love to her, goes out into the porch and hears the ice cracking on the river with greater speed – a Lawrentian moment, but Tolstoy does not spo
il it with any heaviness. ‘So what [Chto zh]?’ Nekhlyudov asks himself. ‘Is it a great happiness or a great disaster which has befallen me?’52
No Lawrentian hero asked any such post-coital question. Sex has a natural ambivalence in Tolstoy’s artistic world, something close to the idea of original sin in the Augustinian world view. Katyusha – or Maslova as we best know her, her name in the later part of her career – has made her living by it, with her marvellously attractive squint, eyes as glistening as currants and large breasts. She cannot really escape. She exudes sex and, even in the foetid conditions of city prisons or in the transit camps, the men can’t keep away from her. Like the spring, which is still spring even in the town, Maslova’s sexuality keeps her in touch with a natural world with which it is possible for some of the men in the story, whether benign, liberal intellectuals, lounge lizards, priests or petty officials, to lose touch altogether.
Nekhlyudov’s friends, the Korchagins, for example (who in an early story by Tolstoy might be presented as merely silly, with their smart clothes, new paintings, newspapers and delicate food), are creatures of such artifice. Life of the spirit – the life of the river and its thaw, the life of natural enjoyment which leads to Maslova’s undoing, the life of moral awakening which saves Nekhlyudov – would be impossible for them.
Those who entertain the simple view that Tolstoy ‘just’ wanted to ‘get back to nature’ or ‘just’ wanted to lead ‘a simple life’ should look again at the universal cohesion of Resurrection. By the time we read the last sections, it seems to have achieved its effect almost without effort. In the first half of the book, we find the world out of joint: prisons, law courts, armies, tortures, modern cities, modern class distinction, religion all form part of the same farcical mumbo-jumbo, just as sex is reduced to a drunken, commercial transaction in a sordid hotel bedroom. In this first half of the book we are confronted with a world which is manifestly and hopelessly unnatural. It has not even been troubled by Nekhlyudov’s question: when the power of sex makes him nature’s servant, is this a good thing or a bad thing? Conscience itself, which for the Rousseauesque Tolstoy was always natural to man, has been silenced. Conscience is dead, not just in this or that individual but, as we realise with such force in the second half of the book, for an entire nation.
There could be no clearer indication of the way in which Tolstoy’s introspective artistic method had moved on since the ‘laundry’ days up to and including Anna Karenina. Many of the most powerful scenes in Resurrection are those set in Siberia among the prisoners, a world of which Tolstoy had absolutely no direct experience. Many of the more vivid details are lifted from his reading.
The snapshot of the officer supervising the prison convoy is a good example of Tolstoy’s eye being as sharp as ever: ‘When the carts were filled with sacks on which those who were allowed were seated, the officer of the convoy took off his cap and, having wiped his forehead, his bald head and his fat nose, made the sign of the cross. “Forward march!” he commanded. . . .’53 Compare that account with that of the American journalist George Kennan, whose book on Siberia and the exile system was published in New York in 1891: ‘When the sick and infirm had all taken the places assigned them in the invalid carts, Captain Gurgiss took off his cap, crossed himself, and bowed in the direction of the parish church, and then, turning to the convicts, cried, “Well, boys, go ahead!”’54 Tolstoy adds (quite typically) the wiping of a sweaty forehead; he makes the head bald and the nose flat. Kennan’s Captain Gurgiss is made more vividly physical, and is realised in sharper focus. Tolstoy’s use of Kennan (and it is extensive) is one of the supreme examples of a great imagination transforming neutral material into literature, equivalent to Shakespeare’s use of Holinshed or Proust’s of the Goncourt Journals. Prosaically, one could say that the essence of Resurrection in its second half is all in Kennan. Tradition even imagines that the good ‘Englishman’ at the end of the story is Kennan himself, though this figure with his Bibles and his embarrassing sermons in prison cells seems more like Chertkov’s old hero Lord Radstock than the intelligent (and secular) American. Russian scholars have found a third ‘original’ in the figure of a German preacher called Doctor Baedeker who felt called to preach to the convicts of Siberia.55
What no reader of the novel will ever forget is the vividness of those convicts and the conversations they have among themselves. In the first half of the book, we know that spring will come, that the ice will break, that Nekhlyudov will seduce Maslova. It is all natural and inevitable. In the second half of the book, we know with the same certainty that something will happen to Russia. Things cannot go on in this crazy, barbarous way. And it is one of the mysterious features of the book, finished seventeen years before Lenin’s train pulled into the Finland Station, that we have no doubt at all that the oppressors are less strong than their prisoners. It is not just hindsight which makes us say this. The ‘resurrection’ which is in store for them is as certain as the return of spring to the earth. The question merely remains, when we have finished the novel, of how the ice will break on the river, and how change will come to Russia.
To the virtuous political prisoner Kryltsov, talking with Nekhlyudov, it is unfortunate that the ‘politicals’ are kept separate from the criminals in their long journey to Siberia. After all, it is the class from which those criminals have grown that the intellectuals seek to liberate. ‘And yet,’ Kryltsov says, ‘not only do we not know them, but we do not want to know them, and worse than this, they hate us and think of us as their enemies. And that is terrible.’56
At this point they are interrupted by the hard-line revolutionary figure of Novodvorov – (Newcourt, the name means; by implication, New Regime). ‘ “There’s nothing terrible about it,” said Novodvorov, who had been listening to the conversation. “The masses always revere just power,” he said with his rasping voice. “At present the Government has power and so they revere it and hate us; tomorrow we shall be in power – and they will revere us.”’57
Tolstoy was not such a fool that he could not see that the Novodvorovs would one day exercise power, simply because it was they who most wanted it. But there is another figure at the end of Resurrection who haunts us no less. We do not get the full measure of Tolstoy unless we realise, even now, seventy years after Lenin, that this voice is even stronger than that of Novodvorov. Whether we consider that it is so will depend more on us than on the novel. This figure, like so much in the later part of the book, is a trouvaille of Tolstoy’s, an invention in the truest sense of the word. Into the mouth of the little old man whom Nekhlyudov meets on the ferry, Tolstoy puts a speech which is directly based on a letter which he received in October 1899 from an anonymous correspondent in Baku. The correspondent was a free man. He had no name. He was simply an individual, a chelovek. In his brilliant use of this figure, Tolstoy offers the clue, if they could only read it, to the innumerable people whom this novel offended.
As is notorious, his wife was offended by it, which was one of the impulses which kept him writing. So were all ‘decent’ people in Russian society. In Paris, the book was rejected by several publishers on the grounds of impropriety which, considering it was the decade and city which published Zola, was not bad going. Passages about large breasts and beguiling eyes were no less abhorrent to Tolstoy’s Quaker friends and his many other goody-goody fellow travellers abroad. Mudie’s, the lending library in London, at first refused to stock the book when it appeared in translation. In the first U.S. edition of the book, Chapter Seventeen of Part I was actually cut out altogether. In Russia itself, the bureaucracy could not be expected to like the Dickensian satire on the law, nor the depiction of brutality in prisons, nor the suggestion that draconian punishments were not merely barbaric but also ineffectual. Likewise, Orthodox fellow travellers, of whom there were many, could enjoy being shocked by Tolstoy’s deliberately blasphemous account of Mass in the prison chapel, for ‘to not one of those present, from the priest and the superintendent down to Maslova, did
it occur that this Jesus, whose name the priest repeated in wheezy tones such an endless number of times, praising Him with outlandish words, had expressly forbidden everything that was done there’.58
And in each of these cases, the objection is a collective one. If you write thus, you cannot be one of us; anathema, anathema, anathema. For Tolstoy, however, as for all great Christian artists, there is something ludicrous about believing that we can journey towards the truth collectively. Though, upon our arrival, we find ourselves together, we shall always have made the journey alone. That is the truth embodied in the nameless Melchisidech encountered on the ferry.
‘I have absolutely no faith, because I believe no one; no one but myself,’ the old man replied, just as quickly and decisively.
‘But how can you believe in yourself?’ said Nekhlyudov, joining the conversation. ‘It is possible to be mistaken.’
Shaking his head the old man replied decisively: ‘Not in life.’
‘Then,’ asked Nekhlyudov, ‘why are there different faiths?’
‘There are different faiths because they believe in other people and not in themselves. I believed in other people and I wandered about as if I was in a swamp. And I got so lost that I did not hope to get out of the swamp. Old Believers and New Believers and Sabbatarians, and all those other sects like the Molokans and the Castraters. Each faith just praises itself and so there they all are, crawling about like blind puppies. There are many faiths but One Spirit [Dukh]. Both in you, and in me and in him. That means if everyone believes in the spirit in himself, everyone will be united.’59
This man who believes so much in Dukh, Spirit, might strike us at first as a bit of a Dukhobor; but Tolstoy doubtless knew by now that the followers of Peter the Lordly, like the Tolstoyans of the Croydon Brotherhood, were no longer listening to the voice of the spirit within them, and attending instead to some new-made orthodoxy as interpreted by someone else. New Dukhobor was but old priest writ large. It may be thought that the old Melchisidech with no name carries individualism to the point of lunacy, as Tolstoy himself wished to do. But it is an essential part of the Christian inheritance that individualism can’t be taken too far. All men, since Christ, are islands, entire of themselves.
