Winter Reading Challenge Update #2

I completed my Tolstoy tome. It was interesting...

The story of Resurrection revolves around a rich Russian prince who seduces a young serving girl, beginning a cycle of abandonment and despair for the young woman. The moment of irony comes when the Prince is placed on a jury trying this woman for a crime she didn't commit, and the prince faces the results his past actions have brought about. Long narratives detailing the squalor, injustice and cruelty of the Russian legal and penal systems ensue. Some of these passages reminded me of Dickens's Bleak House, but without any of those Dickensian characters which make the despair bearable. As the prince follows the girl to Siberia, he searches his own soul and the heart of man, and finds both wanting. He experiences a kind of conversion experience, but far from being some orthodox religious experience, this is a man-centered Utopian endeavor which stands in stark contrast to Christianity. The tenets of this new "faith" are driven home rather mercilessly, and most particularly in a long passage where the prince reads the Sermon on the Mount, and interprets it for us as teaching a variety of things I have never found there. They include but are not limited to:

• Man must not only avoid murder, but must never be angry
• Man must avoid the enjoyment of the beauty of women
• Man must forgive any and all offenses and never refuse anything another asks of him

Additionally, the prince sees this passage as justification for doing away with the court and penal systems wholesale, and allowing men to live as brothers without committing cruelty in order to repress cruelty. There are so many practical and theological questions here, I won't even get started.

That aside, Tolstoy draws stark and often beautiful pictures, but this book tends towards the preachy a bit, and that with a Marxist/Hegelian type of slant. His political prisoners are all thoughtful, compassionate and correct Communists, and the pharisees running the courts and prisons are all Orthodox Church, upper-class and establishment. I also found myself with the nebulous feeling that I had when I read the translation of Les Miserables, that the language was likely beautiful in the original, but somehow just didn't translate well. I can't imagine Shakespeare, or even Dickens, would be the same in Russian...

I am glad I read the book, but I didn't particularly enjoy it. That is mostly because I found the ending disappointing, and the theology and politics irritating. Perhaps one is better off just going ahead and tackling War and Peace, and having done with it.