RESURRECTION

Imagine a courtroom where a young prostitute is on trial for murder and you are a male member of the jury. Suddenly you are stunned by an instant of shocking recognition. You know the woman - isn't she that girl, the one whose virginity you took with some force - how many years ago? Could it be that your forgotten moment of self-gratification somehow set her on a downward path to where she is now - in the dock facing the most serious of all charges? Is there any way to make amends for your terrible misdeed? This is the situation at the beginning of Leo Tolstoy's last big novel, Resurrection (1899). The trial itself is a thrilling piece of theatre, one of the finest courtroom dramas in all literature and the story is intensely moving. The shabby prostitute before our 'hero' had been a reluctant 16 year old house servant whom he abandoned to pregnancy and dismissal from service, her baby adopted and now she is a wreck of a woman. After the guilty verdict, overcome with remorse, he gets permission to marry the girl, but she alas dies in prison from typhus before his spiritual resurrection through expiation could begin. Tolstoy was guilty of sexual misbehaviour just as bad and had fathered an illegitimate child. We are pitched into a hellish labyrinth of Russian courts, prisons and bureaucracy in which the author loses no opportunity for satire and bitter criticism of a state system (not confined to that country) of cruelty and injustice. Unabridged, 466 page Wordsworth Classic paperback.