Saints of Social Revolution

The Resurrection. By Leo Tolstoy.

Leo Tolstoy is considered by many to be the finest novelist ever to write. His novels include such monumental works as War and Peace and Anna Karenina. He was also a great and influential heretic: His avant-garde views heralded today’s liberal and relativistic Christians who reject an authoritative Church, established dogma, and the idea of sacraments, and who exalt “love” without any notion of repentance. Tolstoy embraced extreme notions of pacifism and anti-state and anti-private-property rhetoric. He deified the poor and demonized the rich — as if class, in static fashion, were vice or virtue in and of itself. One contemporary reviewer synthesized Tolstoy’s theology by coining the term “Christian anarchism” to describe it.

Tolstoy’s last fictional work, The Resurrection, published in 1899, fully worked out his religious and societal views. The forceful communication of a philosophy through fiction is a method used by many ideologues, such as Ayn Rand in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. But it goes without saying that Ayn Rand was no Leo Tolstoy. Whatever shortcomings The Resurrection has in terms of its pedantry, Tolstoy’s considerable literary gifts make this book a worthwhile read.

The Resurrection is the story of Prince Dmitri Ivano­vich Nekhlyudov’s transformation when the consequences of his sins are put directly before him. The book essentially contains two parts (though it is not so neatly divided): the man transformed and the transformed man. Stated differently, the first part of the book narrates the reason for the change wrought within Nekhlyudov; it has a searing authenticity any Catholic will recognize. The second part narrates the effects of Nekhlyudov’s transformation, which is less edifying. Tolstoy uses Nekhlyudov’s conversion to frame an awakening in terms of Tolstoy’s heretical theology.

Set in Russia in the 1880s, the novel focuses on Nekhlyudov, a pampered do-nothing living off of the toil and sweat of the impoverished peasants who work his enormous inherited estates. When we meet him, Nekh­lyudov, a former military officer and aspiring artist in his late twenties, is contemplating a marriage of social convenience while simultaneously breaking off an affair with another man’s wife.

Nekhlyudov’s vapid life is interrupted by a civil duty to which we can all relate: He is summoned to jury duty. The trial involves the poisoning and murder of a merchant. The defendants are two hotel servants and a prostitute, Katerina Maslova. The two hotel employees tricked Maslova into poisoning the merchant in order to steal from him. She was unaware that the powder would do anything other than put the lecherous merchant to sleep. Tolstoy masterfully details the seemingly irrelevant quirks of each personality in the court. Given the gravity of the task at hand, his depiction of the perfunctory judges and lawyers going through the motions in order to finish their work quickly and get on with their miserable, degenerate lives elicits disgust in the reader.

Maslova is a voluptuous woman, an object of lust. Upon her entrance into the court, Nekhlyudov, to his horror, immediately recognizes her: Years earlier she was an orphan-servant in his aunt’s home. They first met in their teens, when Nekhlyudov was a bright and idealistic student, and she an honorable and vivacious girl affectionately known as Katusha. Over the course of a season they grew very close. Tolstoy’s account of their time together parallels that of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden: young people radiating innocent goodness. They knew neither worldly malice nor what to make of their physical attraction to each other.

Nekhlyudov returns to his aunt’s home a few years later as a changed man: from a sweet adolescent to a profligate, carnal military officer. His purity is lost and, much like Adam in the Garden, he now looks on Katusha with eyes of desire. She, however, resists his advances. Symbolic of his blindness, Nekhlyudov forces himself on Katusha on Easter Sunday. As he takes his leave of her, he pushes a hundred ruble note into her hand, unwittingly converting her into a prostitute.

Katusha’s life thereafter goes into a headlong tailspin. Pregnant with Nekhlyudov’s child, she is relieved of her duties by his aunt. Their son dies a few days after birth, and she goes through a number of menial jobs — leaving many because the men employing her cannot keep their hands off her. Slowly she turns the albatross of her womanly allure into a livelihood. Tolstoy’s account of her descent into harlotry is both believable and gut-wrenching.

Back to the trial: Due to a misunderstanding of the jury procedures, Katusha is found guilty of murder and sentenced to four years of hard labor. Nekhlyudov is now tortured by both the guilt of his secret sin and his participation on a jury that has mistakenly sent her to Siberia. After unsuccessfully seeking redress from the indifferent presiding judge, Nekhlyudov leaves the court bewildered and dismayed.

At this point, Tolstoy is at his best. Nekhlyudov’s anguish hits home powerfully: It is easy to relate to a young man whose hope and good intentions become compromised by the world. Nekhlyudov’s agonizing survey of his dissolute life is both authentic and cathartic. Faced squarely with his negative impact on Katusha’s life, Nekhlyudov makes two life-changing resolutions: He will give away his extensive landholdings to the peasants, and he will marry Katusha to right the wrong he committed twelve years earlier.

The drama of their first prison visit is intense. Katusha is hardened to him and not receptive to his bizarre and untimely marriage proposal. But she realizes that he could be useful to her, and so begins their awkward new relationship. She then asks him to help other prisoners who have experienced similar arbitrary treatment. Nekhlyudov agrees, and so begins, almost accidentally, his work as an advocate for the imprisoned.

After Katusha’s appeal fails, Nekhlyudov decides to accompany her to Siberia. True to his new self, Nekhlyu­dov throws off the comforts of his class and voluntarily embraces poverty and hardship. While he opts against using his class to secure better treatment for himself on the arduous journey, he arranges through bribes or the exertion of his standing to secure better treatment for Katusha.

Slowly, Katusha too begins to change. Her transformation occurs when Nekhlyudov arranges for her to be housed and transported with the political prisoners and away from the garden-variety criminals. Influenced by their revolutionary ideas, she rediscovers the girl she was before her calamities. While Tolstoy does not categorically embrace the revolutionaries as unanimously virtuous, they are, for him, on the right side of history and foils to the self-satisfied aristocracy. He agrees wholeheartedly with their critique of Russian society — his only disagreement, if you could call it that, is over tactics. Tolstoy treats the revolutionaries with an almost religious touch, as agents of necessary social change. It is not by accident that Katusha is made new again in their “righteous” company.

Throughout Katusha and Nekhlyudov’s journey, which is often punctuated by long separation, uncertainty lingers over whether they will marry. She grows closer to him, but Tolstoy, utilizing his remarkable literary gifts, explores an unspoken tension between them that foreshadows a relationship not meant for marriage. Moreover, Katusha grows close to a revolutionary and fellow prisoner, Vladimir Simonson. Tolstoy takes great pains to explain how the revolutionaries generally (and he himself) have transcended the temptations of the flesh and disdain carnal relationships. The budding relationship between Katusha and Simonson is quasi-platonic. Thus is added an intriguing love triangle.

The novel concludes with the culmination of change in both Nekhlyudov and Katusha. Tolstoy wants us to consider them heroic — the archetypal man and woman transcending the callousness of modern society. He knows that the reader wants them together, but their marriage is not to be. Since Nekhlyudov’s resolution is to atone for his sins, he sincerely intends to marry Katusha without counting the cost. As Katusha draws closer to her decision, Nekhlyudov wistfully recalls his former refined life and longs for a future with a family and normalcy. Nonetheless, he still sacrificially seeks Katusha’s hand. Ka­tusha, however, chooses Simonson. In so doing, she releases Nekhlyudov from the hardship of a life with her in exile. Each sacrifices for the other. In separating them, Tolstoy canonizes them.

The book ends with Nekhlyudov’s reading the Bible and, not surprisingly, reaching the very same heretical insights that Tolstoy had been peddling in his nonfiction works for the previous twenty years. It is as overt an attempt an author will ever make to convince the reader of his worldview.

Throughout The Resurrection one worthwhile theme serves as its catalyst: We cannot escape our past. Whether we came to the Church later in life or were raised safely within her bosom, we all have committed sins that are, upon honest reflection, profoundly painful. Our fallen lives demonstrate that we need a Savior not in an abstract sense but in the tangle of the human relationships through which we live and breathe — we need Christ Himself. Tolstoy loses us, however, when he misuses the impetus for conversion for heretical ends. Nonetheless, even if he does not preach the proper destination of conversion, he gets the “stuff” of conversion right.

Almost all of the other themes in Tolstoy’s book are social and revolutionary. He might have claimed that “the kingdom of heaven is within you,” but his theology is properly recast as “the kingdom may be achieved on earth.” Plain and simple, his is the revolutionary social gospel of the political Left ornamented with “new age” spirituality to mask its temporality. All of the touchstones of civilization — authority, private property, traditional morality and piety, marriage and family — are condemned. Tolstoy especially rejects punishment. Indeed, Nekhlyudov’s awakening is spurred by his recognition of the rampant corruption in the Russian criminal system and its inhumane treatment of prisoners. His criticisms, however, go beyond mere penal reform: They strike at the right of a society to pass judgment at all. For Tolstoy, criminals are the creation of a corrupt society stratified by class and wealth. Tolstoy seems to tell us, naïvely, that if we were simply to love man, he would be a criminal no more.

In Tolstoy’s view, sinners and saints occupy specific social classes. The peasants are presented as uniformly virtuous people toiling under the thumb of wealthy do-nothings who spend their time speaking French, attending dinner parties, playing cards, and traveling abroad. Worse, the rich are oblivious to the suffering of the people who provide the very means of their luxurious and effete lives. When we consider that Tolstoy was himself a guilt-ridden aristocrat — apologizing for his wealth, property, and class — we can see in him the equivalent of wealthy modern-day liberals who are not merely content to give away their wealth (they seldom do in any event) but who are compelled to attack others for not reaching the same conclusions and flagellating themselves before the less fortunate. The stink of self-loathing is so fetid with these types. Unlike Dostoyevsky, who gave real substance to those who disagreed with him by creating compelling characters who articulated strong arguments against his own ultimate propositions, the adversaries of Nekhlyudov created by Tolstoy are straw men. Tolstoy refused to believe that those who disagreed with him were not knaves or malefactors.

Tolstoy’s assault on organized religion — the most problematic theme in The Resurrection — comes in the form of Nekhlyudov’s condemnation of the Russian Orthodox Church. Tolstoy positively blasphemes the Divine Liturgy and the sacraments. He dismisses the visible Church as a tool of the powerful and the state to exploit the masses and anesthetize them to the reality of their suffering. He asserts that ritual and superstition have taken the place of the Gospel message, which he reduces to the Sermon on the Mount. By his logic, we do not need baptism, confession, a creed, or even belief in the Lord. His discussion of punishment and class lays bare his denial of the concept of original sin. For Tolstoy, Heaven on earth could be attained if we were simply kind to one another.

Tolstoy’s vitriol toward the Russian Orthodox Church (and, by extension, the Roman Catholic Church) is not surprising considering that his “new age” theology is permeated by the notion of casting off divine judgment and embracing one’s inner deity. But he himself is — even more so than most modern-day liberals — a walking cauldron of judgment and pride with only the veneer of kindness, tolerance, and genuine religion. He is, after all, a dedicated apostate whose religious views are diametrically opposed to authentic Christianity — it is no wonder that he should hate the real thing.

Inasmuch as Tolstoy was obsessed with reordering man’s social relations to eradicate poverty and injustice, his heresy is not particularly new or novel. Jesus Himself rejected this type of “revolutionary” program when He chastised His disciples who objected to the “waste” of a year’s wages on fine oil used to anoint Him before He entered into His passion, money they felt should have been given to the poor. “The poor,” our Lord said, “you will always have with you.” It was after this that Judas betrayed Jesus, delivering Him into “the hands of sinners.”

On its face, the murmuring against the seeming waste of money on expensive ointment seems justified when one considers the great poverty of the disciples’ fellow Jews. So why did our Lord rebuke them sternly for this sentiment? We can speculate on two reasons. The first is that those who murmured misunderstood that our first obedience is to worship God. The woman in this passage understood that worshiping God is primary to everything, even above relieving the material suffering of mankind. By honoring our Lord in a most tender way, her priorities were rightly ordered. It is no different when a hardscrabble community scrapes its nickels together in order to build a towering edifice to the glory of God — that community intuitively understands this reality. Heretics like Tolstoy recoil at such a sacrifice. They do not consider that poverty is not an end, or that relief from poverty doesn’t guarantee man’s happiness. Only one thing does: prostration before the living God.

The second reason is that scoffers forget that poverty, and all temporal suffering, is essentially fleeting. Our home is not here; we are a pilgrim people whose true home is in Heaven, where all suffering will be rectified. We should seek to relieve the earthly suffering of our neighbor, yes; but that task is not the primary one before us. We are called first to know, love and worship the true God — and then to go into the world to do His holy will to love and serve our fellow man.

Tolstoy himself is one with those who murmured at the woman’s offering of oil to anoint our Lord. He too inverts the priority of the love of God for the love of man. Ultimately, for this inversion, Tolstoy was excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church.

The Resurrection put Tolstoy in the camp of his contemporaries on the fringes of Russian society who were dedicated to the destruction of imperial Russia — a destruction that occurred within a decade of his death. When we consider that Tolstoy was a legendary author in his own time and, further, that The Resurrection was a widely read book in Russia on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution, there can be little doubt that Tolstoy did his part to lay the groundwork for the coming Soviet regime. There is no small irony in this. Though Tolstoy rightly lamented imperial Russia’s inhumane prisons, unjust judicial system, unfair labor practices, and ineffectual bureaucracies, had he lived to read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, he would have seen just how depraved and inhumane a prison system could really be. He would have seen how the Soviet Union turned the whole of Russia (and its national neighbors) into one giant forced-labor prison. If only he could have known that his book would contribute to those bloodstained pages of history!

It goes without saying that The Resurrection is not for everyone — perhaps it is not for anyone. But it is an extremely well-written story with engaging characters and all the attributes of an excellent novel. It is a testament to the real-world power of literature and the social destruction that seductive heresies can reap.

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Decree of Excommunication of Count Leo Tolstoy

Russian Orthodox Church, February 22, 1901:

In our days, God has permitted a new false teacher to appear — Count Leo Tolstoy. A writer well known to the world, Russian by birth, Orthodox by baptism and education, Count Tolstoy, under the seduction of his intellectual pride, has insolently risen against the Lord and His Christ and against His holy heritage, and has publicly, in the sight of all men, repudiated the Orthodox Mother Church, which reared and educated him, and has devoted his literary activity, and the talent given to him by God, to disseminating among the people teachings repugnant to Christ and the Church, and to destroying in the minds and hearts of men their national faith, the Orthodox faith….

Therefore the Church does not reckon him as its member, and cannot so reckon him, until he repents and resumes his communion with her. To this we bear witness today before the whole Church, for the confirmation of the faithful and the reproof of those who have gone astray, especially for the fresh reproof of Count Tolstoy himself. Many of those near to him, retaining their faith, reflect with sorrow that he, at the end of his days, remains without faith in God and in our Lord and Savior, having rejected the blessings and prayers of the Church and all communion with her.