Tolstoi Leo - Voskreseniye

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

RESURRECTION

COUNT LEO NIKOLAYEVICH TOLSTOY, the youngest of four brothers, was born in 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana, his fathers estate in Tula province, about two hundred miles from Moscow. His mother died when he was two, and his father when he was nine. He revered their memory, and they were the inspiration for his portraits of Princess Mary and Nicholas Rostov in War and Peace. Both his mother and father belonged to the Russian nobility, and Tolstoy always remained highly conscious of his aristocratic status, even when towards the end of his life he embraced and taught doctrines of Christian equality and the brotherhood of man.

He served in the army in the Caucasus and the Crimea, where as an artillery officer at the siege of Sevastopol he wrote his first stories and impressions. After leaving the army he travelled and studied educational theories, which deeply interested him. In 1862 he married Sophia Behrs and for the next fifteen years lived a tranquil and productive life as a country gentleman and author. War and Peace was finished in 1869 and Anna Karenina in 1877. He had thirteen children. In 1879, after undergoing a severe spiritual crisis, he wrote the autobiographical A Confession, and from then on he became a Tolstoy n, seeking to propagate his views on religion, morality, non-violence, and renunciation of the flesh. He continued to write, but chiefly in the form of parables, tracts, and morality playswritten with the left hand of Tolstoy as a Russian critic has put itthough he also composed a late novel, Resurrection, and one of his finest tales, Hadji Murat. Because of his new beliefs and disciples, and his international fame as pacifist and sage, relations with his wife became strained and family life increasingly difficult. At last in 1910, at the age of 82, he left his home and died of pneumonia at a local railway station.

RICHARD F. GUSTAFSON, Professor of Russian at Barnard College, Columbia University, is a specialist in Russian literature and religious philosophy. He is the author of Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger (1986) and has edited a collection of Tolstoys short stories for Oxford Worlds Classics, The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories (1997).

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

LEO TOLSTOY

Translated by
LOUISE MAUDE
With an Introduction and Notes by
RICHARD F. GUSTAFSON

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Introduction, Select Bibliography, and Notes
Richard F. Gustafson 1994
Chronology Henry Gifford 1983

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Resurrection first published 1899
This translation first published 1916
First published as a Worlds Classics paperback 1994
Reissued as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 1999

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Tolstoy, Leo, Graf, 18281910.
[Voskresenie. English]
Resurrection/Leo Tolstoy; translated by Louise Maude; with an
introduction by Richard F. Gustafson.
p. cm.(Oxford worlds classics)
Includes bibliographical references.
I. Maude, Louise Shanks, 18551939. II. Gustafson, Richard F.
III. Title. IV. Series.
PG3366.V7 1994 891.733 dc20 93 1694
ISBN 0192836420

3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Typeset by Datix International Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed in Great Britain by
Cox & Wyman Ltd.
Reading, Berkshire

TEN years after having completed Anna Karenina and beginning A Confession, a work which inaugurated a period of intense involvement in social, moral, and religious issues, Tolstoy set out to write what was to become another ten years later (1899) his last novel, Resurrection. The first impulse to return to the novel form came with a story he heard from his lawyer friend Koni in 1887. An orphan girl, brought up by a wealthy lady, was seduced and then abandoned by a visiting relative of her benefactor. Upon hearing of her pregnancy, the lady drove the young girl from her house. The girl, who was forced to turn to prostitution, was subsequently charged with stealing money in a brothel and brought to trial. One of the members of the jury turned out to be her seducer who, his conscience now awakened, offered to marry her, but her death from typhoid made this impossible.

This tale moved Tolstoy because it resonated with his own past sexual indiscretions, the liaison with a peasant girl which he explored in 1889 in his story The Devil and especially his seduction of Gasha, his aunts maid, who was then driven out of the house and came to grief. Psychologically Resurrection began with the authors guilt, the noblemans repentance over his sexual violation of an innocent peasant woman. His first plan to write the Koni tale in 1890 focused on that guilt, his subsequent many failed attempts to write the novel continued to pursue just that theme, and the final novel thrusts Prince Nekhlyudov into a quest for redemption from his original sin with Katusha Maslova.