Here's what I wrote in 2008 about this read: "Very nice Tolstoy. Final major novel of his life (unfinished Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth is the absolute final), dealing with guilt and redeemption, society (church, state, the rich & privledged) poor handling of the lowly. Tolstoy is outraged." Not considered his finest by any means (of course it's not). ( )

I’m surprised I haven’t written anything about this yet that I’ve kept, yet not surprised because I’ve had a lot of confused emotions about this book in the past.

Although Count Leo’s more conventional hits certainly have their charms, I would say that his third and last full-length novel is, more than his other work, classic lit for people who don’t like classic lit. It is most emphatically not about being snobby or conventional. It’s also not about making the “safe” choice in life, which since I’m an Enneagram Six made me feel an exaggerated dis-ease about the whole thing. Also, Shakespeare snobs tend to be offended by the Late Tolstoy, and sometimes by the early one, too. Not that I care, especially. But again, I’ve had a lot of trouble turning my big //thoughts about life// into concrete improvements for myself and other people, so “Resurrection” made me uneasy. I remember not vibrating at all on the same wavelength as the passage with his dismissive take on metaphysical speculation, which he basically saw as a useless toy, and although I wouldn’t go quite that far even now, I feel like now I get it, so to speak. Metaphysical speculation is not a substitute for the life well lived, and concrete answers to concrete problems. Count Leo could be very practical, at least in an aspirational sense—I mean, we wouldn’t remember him if he really wrote that book on scientific agriculture, but there are also a lot of Shakespeare snobs, for lack of a better word, who are and should be forgotten, having contributed nothing but clutter at an admittedly—IMO—at least potentially helpful sub-genre of writing…. But then, that is a bad sort of thing to do, to clutter out the good with your greedy mind….

Yeah, Leo certainly could be quite the firebrand, the partisan that those set against the Late Victorian Radical might resent and work against, possibly even as they try to canonize-yet-forget him. Of course, Tolstie //could// be a moralist at his worst, even if he was also a moralist who believed in love and mercy, too, and he could set up standards that would be difficult if not perhaps almost impossible for anyone else to fully satisfy, including himself. Of course, like everything else, it’s true that there are gender roles—the radicals-rescued-from-whoring crusade of the Good Radical Christian, the man and the woman often separated by the realities of the time into the woman talking about gender oppression and the man talking about business and law repression…. In a sense, you have to remember that novelists in a sense //do not// create their characters and //do not// decide what happens to them. (They’re like journalists who deal in the fictional, you know.) I’m reading this 21st century teen romance now about Pakistanis in a California school—so of course, there’s no choice except that the people running the American school are…. You know: fist! 👊 boom! 🤯 punishment!, because that’s how our schools work, just like the alcoholic parent has no choice except to drink, and the teenagers have no choice except to fall in love and make their own mistakes…. And so too the ex-tavern master or whatever he was, radical, and the ex-whore radical, never quite play the same parts, and like many—really almost all— ex-lecherous moral revolution of peace and truth people, they’re not terribly romantic, even if they do believe in love, after a fashion….

Again, in the end, this is not //my book// in a lot of ways, and in a lot of ways it’s not the set of choices I would make now, but I do feel like I sort of get it, and I do feel like if we are not ascetic peace and truth revolutionaries, we ought to still somehow exceed them in justice and love, basically.

“Always forgive, forgive everyone and infinite number of times, because there are no guiltless people who might be qualified to punish or correct.” ( )

It's as if Tolstoy had a window into my mind when he wrote this, for his views on bureaucracy, the prisons, the rich/corrupt and religion. For this book, Tolstoy was excommunicated, was estranged from his wife, and was shunned by many of his fellow wealthy-class. Bravo for you, Tolstoy, for waking up and using your platform to set People straight. Small price to pay. ( )

"Resurrection" arrived on my reading pile at just the right time. I had just been disappointed by Goncharov's "Malinovka Heights". Tolstoy's work restored my faith in the Russian literary tradition. "Resurrection" is an entertaining portrait of one man's journey to address the consequences of morally questionable behaviors earlier in his life. Along the way we get a detailed picture of the Russian penal system of the time and it's impact on the lives of the Russian people.

The novel lays out struggles with morally ambiguous personal and societal situations. Clearly, Tolstoy has an agenda. However, he presents it in an appealing and non-pedantic fashion. The novel is well-written and an enjoyable read. ( )