Resurrection

A nobleman seduces a servant girl. She is convicted of murder. He follows her to Siberia. And everything he believed about justice, God, and himself collapses.

Leo Tolstoy's last novel is his most direct assault on the institutions of Russian society—the church, the courts, the prisons, the government. It is a novel about one man's attempt to save one woman, and his discovery that he cannot save her without saving himself.

Prince Dmitri Nekhlyudov, a wealthy aristocrat, serves on a jury. He recognizes the accused: Katusha Maslova, a prostitute on trial for poisoning a merchant. Ten years earlier, he seduced her when she was a servant in his aunts' house. He abandoned her. She fell into ruin. Now she is being sent to Siberia for a crime she did not commit. Nekhlyudov follows her. He tries to marry her. He witnesses the brutality of Russian prisons, the hypocrisy of the church, the indifference of the powerful. Katusha refuses to marry him—she has fallen in love with a political prisoner. The novel ends with Nekhlyudov reading the Gospels, searching for a way to live.

This is Tolstoy at his most angry and utopian: a novel about the possibility of redemption, the impossibility of justice, and the belief that the only resurrection that matters is the one that happens inside a single human heart.

• Tolstoy's last novel, published in 1899, after his religious conversion

• Based on a true story told to Tolstoy by the lawyer and writer Anatoly Koni

• The novel was censored in Russia, and Tolstoy was excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901

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A beautifully crafted edition for your shelf, your device, or your ears, or the perfect gift for anyone who knows that the hardest person to forgive is yourself.

About the Author

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, and moral philosopher, widely regarded as one of the greatest writers in world literature. Born into Russian aristocracy, he served as an artillery officer in the Crimean War. After completing Anna Karenina (1877), Tolstoy underwent a profound spiritual crisis, rejecting his earlier works and embracing a radical form of Christian anarchism. He gave away his wealth, wore peasant clothes, and became a vegetarian and pacifist. Resurrection was his first major novel after his conversion. It was a massive international success—the proceeds funded the resettlement of the Doukhobors, a persecuted religious sect, in Canada. The novel's portrayal of the Russian Orthodox Church was so scathing that Tolstoy was excommunicated in 1901. He died of pneumonia in 1910 at the Astapovo railway station, after fleeing his home in a desperate attempt to escape his fame and his family. He is buried at Yasnaya Polyana, his family estate.