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=Q be ſlºessage of
COUNT TO L STOI’S
“TResurrection "
AXEL E. GIBSON.



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*** * - 194/4 -/74//
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A ºl- lºse
THE MESSAGE OF
COUNT TOLSTOPS
“RESURRECTION.”
A Review
By
Axel D. GibSon
El-L-is printino Company
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too-


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|\rologue
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BROTHERHOOD.
Oh, noble word! sound high, sound wide;
Through ever wider circles ring!
Arouse mankind, and side by side
The human race together bring;
The sleeping soul in man awake—
The soul awake!
Why doubt the powers of the soul?
Why doubt a reign of final good,
When life shall win its cherished goal–
A universal brotherhood–
A union of human hearts,
Of heads and hearts?
Alone, no man, however strong,
The tide of human ills can stay
And stop that old, appalling wrong
Which holds its place on earth today.
Man stands and falls and hopes with man,
And wins with man.
United stand; divided fall!
United, love shall rule the world
And girt it with a guardian wall,
'Gainst which all malice might be hurled
In harmless rage, for love stands guard—
A sleepless guard!
Alone! What terror in that word!
What hopelessness and grim despair
Shall seize the heart with anguish stirred,
When cut away from friendship's care,
Deserted on the battle-field—
Life's battle-field!

4.
Oh, universal brotherhood!
Thy truth shall conquer mankind yet
And yield a reign of untold good,
When parted hearts no more shall fret,
When fate shall charge the weak with strength,
For faith gives strength.
What truly great was yet achieved
Not wrought in union and love?
What universal good received,
For human welfare from above
Which did not spring from love for man,
And work for man?
Give heed to life's eternal needs
Of ceaseless sympathy and love—
Not but in man, but all that breathes!
This need is felt from spheres above,
Impelling action, strength and growth–
Harmonic growth.
Like when the gods of ancient days
Gave virtues to the child new-born,
Gave strength and wealth, in divers ways,
The young one fitly to adorn—
Athena, wisdom; Venus, love—
Celestial love!
So likewise nature, at each birth,
Equips her lives with royal gifts;
Gives from the virtues held by earth
Her mineral wealth in rapid shifts.
The sea gives moisture, sun gives warmth,
And light with warmth.
Grand nature rears her commonwealth
With equal care and love for all,
Dispensing energy and health
To all who listen to her call.
Eternal justice marks her rule—
Supports her rule.

5
For brotherhood but justice is,
Expressed and lived in word and deed;
Expressed in noble sympathies,
From thoughts of hate and envy freed.
Justice and love make brotherhood–
True brotherhood!
Out from the central heart of all
Whose rythmic beating rules the world,
Life-bearing waves in silence roll,
The burden of a love unfurled—
A love that stirs in human hearts,
To conquer hearts.
If brotherhood be not its base,
Equality is but a dream;
The differences of mind and race
Can brotherhood alone redeem.
While men not all may think alike,
All love alike.
We cry for liberty in vain
As long as men are ruled by vice,
For not till then shall freedom reign,
When men from moral serfdom rise.
True freedom means control of self,
Not slave of self.
Be equal, then, to serve the true;
Be free in battling for the good.
Enlarge thy sight to catch the view
Of life's grand vision—Brotherhood!
The promised land of all men's good
Is brotherhood.


7
WESSAGE OF THE “RESURRECTION
“The mind may ponder its intellect for ages
and yet not gain so much self-knowledge as
the passion of love will teach it in a day."-
Emerson.
As a novelist Count Tolstoi is undoubtedly one of the bold-
est realists of the age. Thus, while in no way less realistic in
his portrayal of human nature than a Dumas fils, Paul de
Koch or Emile Zola, yet the character of Tolstoi's realism
differs widely and fundamentally with the realism of the French
authors. The realism of the Russian sage is dominated by a high
moral purpose, systematic and vital, and may be termed a phys-
ology of the soul, while the realism of the French sensationalists
is moved by accident, and external impulse—and therefore a
pathology of the soul. The author of “Anna Kareina” is
realistic, because his subject demands it; the authors of “La
Dame Camille” and “Nana", because they demand it of their
subjects; the realism of the former, being the unsought-for
expression of natural conditions, reveals a pure motive and
appeals solely to the moral nature of man; while the realism
of the latter is the result of artificially created conditions,
untrue to the natural order of life and not infrequently based
on impure motive. Descriptions of scenes and objects, which,
if penned by an author actuated by less sincere motives, would
tend to arouse sensual instincts, becomes, under the inspiring
genius of a Tolstoi, and impelled by the tremendous serious-
ness of his motive, divested of every vestige of obscenity and
indelicacy. Tolstoi's realism is stirring into action, not the
animal, but the God in man. He is a Shakespeare in prose-
fiction, striking terror in the souls of the wicked and compas-
sion and love in the souls of the good. The scenes of the
swift-moving panorama of his narrative are freighted with that
heart-rending expression of human tragedy, which "man's
inhumanity to man” alone is capable of producing. Sine ira
et studio, calm, serene and dispassionate, this large-hearted,
deep-sighted philosopher, sage and seer, lays bare the horrify-
ing, almost incredible inner workings of the Russian govern-
ment—that terrible monster which, like a bloated, boneless
giant, is placed under the relentless sway of degenerating and
dissolving forces. He adds no coloring to the lurid scenes
he depicts, construes no forced situations, to heighten their
impressiveness—the author's love for truth breathes unmis-
takably through every sentence—and yet all the confidence his
noble life is capable of inspiring is required for a belief in the
reality of the picture-gallery of moral monsters he throws open
before us.

8
“Resurrection” is Tolstoi's latest contribution to the liter-
ature of the world. The title of the book refers to its hero
and heroine who both, each in their peculiar manner, pass
through a moral crucifixion and death, followed by the birth-
giving in their souls to a new life, peopled with new and
loftier ideals. And as the author, with keen, observing eye and
steady hand, proceeds to trace the fall and rise of those two
souls, he simultaneously invites the whole civilized world in
general, and the uncivilized world of the Tzar in particular,
to witness the operation of maxims and principles underlying
the official rules and practices of that ill-starred country.
The book, outside its value as a moral agent, possesses,
as a work of fiction, all the interest necessary to fascinate the
ordinary novel reader. The plot is carefully laid and worked
out, and the action throughout the whole volume is intense.
There is not to be found a page which does not furnish some
new stimulus for the attention and sympathy of the reader.
The book is written for all classes of humanity, young and old,
cultured and uncultured, moral and immoral.
The life of Prince Nekhludoff–the hero of the book—
dramatizes the struggles and shifting fortunes between the
higher and lower natures of man. His early youth is spent in
the purity and innocence of inexperience; his winter months in
college and summer months in happy forgetfulness in the
country homes of some relative. “He is an honest, unselfish
lad, ready to sacrifice himself for any good cause”–and “God’s
world seems to him a mystery which he tries enthusiastically
and joyfully to solve.”
But the storms of life over take him and sweep down the
pedestal on which the youth has reared his ideals. Having
finished his course in college he is assigned to a regiment in
the interior where the influence of unworthy examples speedily
changes his whole philosophy of life. The purity and simple
faith of former days give way to feelings and modes of sensa-
tions which not improperly may be compared to that over-ripe
condition of growth so often observed among plants which
receive too much nourishment and sunshine, and too little
proper gardening. Prior to this moral metamorphosis he
“feels the need of intercourse with Nature”, and loves to muse
in the books of philosophers and poets; afterwards the impor-
tance of human institutions puts Nature into the shade, and
the sages and singers have to give way to the society of his
new comrades. “Before, women seemed mysterious and
charming—charming by the very mystery that enveloped them;
now the purpose of women, all women except those of his
own family, and those of his friends, was a very definite one;
women were the best means to an already experienced enjoy-
ment. * * * Before he looked upon his spirit as the I;
now it was his healthy, strong, animal I he looked upon as
himself.”

9
The author tells us that all this horrible change comes about
by the youth losing belief in himself and substituting it with
a belief in others—it being “too difficult to live, believing one's
self". For the belief in one's self requires that the questions
of our moral activities be not decided “in favor of one's own
animal life, which is always seeking for easy gratifications, but
almost in every case against it. Believing in others there is
nothing to decide; everything has been decided already, and
always decided in favor of the animal I and against the spirit-
ual. Nor is this all. Believing in his own self, he was always
exposing himself to the censure of those around him; believ-
ing in others he had their approval. So when Nekhludoff had
talked of the serious matters of life, of God, truth, riches and
poverty, all around him thought it out of place, and even
rather funny; and his mother and aunts called him with kindly
irony notre chere philosophet But when he read novels, told
improper anecdotes, went to see funny vaudevilles in the
French theatre and gaily repeated the jokes, everybody ad-
mired and encouraged him.”
And though. Nekhludoff at first struggles bravely against
the tide, it finally overcomes him, and, shifting his center of
gravity from his own individuality to that of others, he loses
the sense of moral responsibility. The leaders of society
become his gauge of conduct, and he judges the movements
of his animal I according to the standard of morals accepted
by this society. The result could but be disastrous. Placing
his lower nature under the administration of irresponsible
rulers, he soon becomes the sport and victim of every passing
gust of animal appetites.
In the hands of such maxims he decides to pay a visit to
one of his aunts at her country estate, where for some three
years ago he spent a very happy vacation. What made his
stay at that time particularly pleasant was the presence in the
household of a young girl, Katusha Maslova, whose simple
faith and pure, innocent nature attracted the corresponding
qualities in his own nature and made her society interesting
and dear to him. He was at that time in a mental and moral
condition which permitted him to enjoy purity of soul in every
form it manifested. At his present visit he looks upon Katusha
and her virtues from another point of view, measuring his
conduct towards her with quite other standards of value. The
feelings that give lustre and warmth to his first acquaintance
with her, expressed chaste admiration and love, while those
with which he is at present actuated express sensual admira-
tion and passion.
His present visit is short-only two or three days. Yet
these few hours are big with destiny. They serve as material
for the author to paint a picture of life more bold than Byron's
“Don Juan”, more irresistible in its awful fascination than the
nocturnal tragedies set in scene by the morbid imagination of
a Zola–and yet, withal, more morally edifying and strengthen-

IO
ing than a chapter of Bunyan’s “Pilgrim's Progress”.
It is on the eve of the second day of Nekhludoff's visit—
the eve of Easter. ... Darkness reigns on earth. Something
demoniacal is brooding in the air; the spirit of the second
act of Macbeth passes through the night. Macbeth—Nekhlu-
doff paces up and down the dark back yard, waiting for his
victim. He is fortified by a consciousness of sure and easy
victory. One first glance at Katusha, sufficed for him to realize
that the impressions left on her from three years ago have not
weakened during his absence. Impatient of waiting he de-
terminedly enters the house, and makes his way to Katusha’s
room. He finds the girl sitting at the table with her head
resting in her hands, and with eyes bathed in tears. She weeps
because the young man has acted so strangely towards her
during his present visit. She feels the presence of a great fear
and of approaching calamity.
Stepping quickly over to her place as she makes signs of
º the room, the Prince “caught her up and kissed her
11eck .
“This kiss was very different from that first thoughtless
kiss behind the lilac bush, and very different from the kiss this
º in the churchyard. This was a dreadful kiss, and she
elt it.”
“‘Oh, what are you doing?' she cried, in a tone as if she
had irreparably broken something of priceless value’”—
We let the curtain drop over the rest of the scene of this
infinite tragedy where innocence and love fight against the
heavy odds of passion and desire.
Nature outside is in a state of turmoil. Laborious efforts
are made to break the bonds and fetters forged by Winter.
“There on the river, beneath the white mist the unceasing
labor went on, and sounds as something sobbing, cracking,
dropping, being shattered to pieces, mixed with the tinkling of
the thin bits of ice as they broke against each other as bits
of glass.”
The description of this Nature's turmoil intensifies the
impressiveness and dramatic force of the hour, producing the
same feeling of anguish and horror as experienced the moment
Macbeth enters the sleeping-chamber of the King to “murder
sleep.”
And truly, Dmitri Ivanowitch Nekhludoff “murders sleep".
This episode constitutes the nucleus to the entire narrative.
Principally and ethically all the subsequent events have their
incipiency and root in this scene. It occurs on the Easter eve,
the emblematical day which in Christian minds points out the
two pivotal points of faith; the crucifixion and resurrection.
Since that first great crucifixion of Christendom innumerable
others have followed, and to Nekhludoff and Katusha this
eve is the crucifixion of the soul by the lower instincts of their
natºres. What follows of the book leads up to their resur-
rection.

The day following, Prince Nekhludoff returns to his regi-
ment and in the swirl of social events and orgies he has soon
forgotten all about the poor Katusha and the wreck and ruin
he left in his wake in the quiet and peaceful country home.
Katusha, however, goes to face sterner realities. In a let-
ter written to Nekhludoff by his aunt the latter tells him that
the girl "had been confined somewhere or other and had gone
quite bad.” Her fate is terrible and swift. The descent of life
is steep and rapid. Once a “fallen woman”, her self-respect is
gone, and vice—the canker-growth, pestering on every mind
which lost faith in its own moral strength and integrity–
swallows her up in its hovels, and soon she finds herself an
inmate in a house of ill-fame.
The threads, linking together human destinies are wrapped
up in mystery, yet as effect follows cause, so punishment fol-
lows crime. “Punishment,” says Emerson, “is a fruit that un-
suspected ripens within the flower of the pleasure which con-
cealed it.” For several years they two have lost sight of each
other. Yet invisible and inscrutable ties have held their souls
inseparably connected. Under the mysterious rule of fate and
destiny their orbits again cross each other. The workings of
the implacable law of recompensation, veiled for a few years,
suddenly unfolds into broad daylight.
Katusha is arraigned in the court of justice for having
poisoned and robbed a rich traveling merchant, and, as fate
will have it, Prince Nehkludoff is serving as juryman in that
very court. Though time and circumstances have wrought
changes in her looks, the Prince at once recognizes her, and,
overcome by memories of the past and not without feelings
of regret, he proceeds to fill his duty as a juryman. The trial
seems to have proven to the satisfaction of the entire jury that
the woman is innocent of the crime for which she is ac-
cused. The powder she administered to the merchant was
handed her by her mistress under the pretext that it was a
mere sleep medicine. Owing, however, to a confusion of terms
amongst the jurors they pass the verdict “Guilty” but without
attempt to rob—by mistake putting the word rob in place of
kill. As the court in Russia never examines a case on its
merits the result is that Katusha, innocent as she is, finds her-
self sentenced to the horrible punishment of fifteen years penal
service in Siberia!
Convinced of her innocence, Nekhludoff, when this atro-
cious sentence is passed, feels a rude electric shock leap
through his conscience. The inner man awakes. His moral
nature is thrown wide open, and the currents of pity, compas-
sion, sympathy and desire to help at any cost, springs up in
his heart. A healthy action of his moral consciousness being
thus brought about, Nekhludoff begins to recognize himself as
the real cause to the whole calamity, the evil genius of that
unfortunate woman's life. Captured by this new force, he
follows its injunctions unreservedly and resolves to spend all

12
his time and energy in effecting a reconsideration of her jury
trial and restore her womanhood and self-respect. -
- Thus having "cleansed his soul”, as he terms it, he sets
himself rigorously to his new task, which brings him in im-
mediate touch with the fearful and wonderful machinery of
Russian jurisdiction, furnishing the author a well employed
opportunity to lay open before the world the incredible care-
lessness and criminality—not of the prisoners as much as of
the very authorities themselves. With keen, observing eye
and steady hand he moves the pieces in this ghastly game of
chess in which the issues involve the lives and fortunes of in-
numerable human beings.
Nekhludoff's first move is a visit to the prison in which
Katusha, together with a host of other convicts, is kept await-
ing the departure of the train which is to carry them to far-
off Siberia. Here he readily becomes acquainted with the char-
acter of a Russian prison, and the mission which that institu-
tion performs in the fashioning of the Russian society and
general state of culture. * * * “The solitary cells were
a row of dark closets locked from outside, and there were
neither beds nor chairs nor tables in them, so that the inmate
had to sit or lie down on the dirty floor, while the rats, of
which there were a great many in those cells, ran across them.
The rats were so bold that they stole the bread from the
prisoners, and even attacked them if they stopped moving.”
* * * “As he passes along the dark, musty corridor, on
either side of which the cells are lined, separated by heavy
iron bars, the prisoners yell like hungry dogs in a pen, drown-
ing each other's voices in their attempts to state their griev-
ances in hope to get him to assist them. From the accounts
they give of themselves he finds to his amazement and horror
that most of these poor, ill-fated wretches have beeen arrested
either on mistake or on loose suspicion. A young peasant,
whose wife had been abducted by a wealthy saloonkeeper, has
been arrested on a suspicion of having put fire to the saloon-
keeper's house, while every person in the village has positive
reasons to believe that the deed was done by the owner him-
self, who was known to be a bad character, and besides had his
property heavily insured immediately prior to the accident.
The poor, outraged peasant did his best to prove his inno-
cence. “‘I tried to get justice by all sorts of means, but every-
where the saloonkeeper managed to bribe the officials and was
acquitted.’ And there he is, his wife enticed and himself inno-
cently imprisoned to feed the vermins’.”
“Can this be true?” Nekhludoff asked.
“God is my witness, it is true. Oh, sir, be so good!” and
Nekhludoff had some difficulty in preventing him from bowing
down to the ground. “You see I am perishing without rea-
son”. His face quivered and he turned up the sleeve of his
cloak and began to cry, wiping his tears with the sleeve of his
dirty shirt”. * * *

I3
Advancing a few steps and Nekhludoff is stopped again by
another set of victims. There are some forty or fifty men
held in prison because of their passports being a fortnight
overdue. Such an occurrence amongst travelers, however, is
not infrequent. Often before they have happened to omit the
renewing of their passports, and no one has ever said any-
thing; but this year they are taken up and kept in prison, now
on the third month, being dealt with and treated as ordinary
criminals. They should have been sent back to their native
government somewhere in South Russia, but the prison there
is burned, and the local authorities care not to receive them.
Now they are lingering in prison, having been forgotten by the
officials and left hopelessly to waste away in the terrible cell.
The one who tells the story is an old man, and Nekhludoff
listens to his tale of sorrow, while hardly able to fully under-
stand him, as his attention has been riveted to “a large, dark-
gray, many-legged louse which was creeping along the good-
looking man's cheek”.
“‘How is that? Is it possible for such a reason?' Nekhlu-
doff said, turning to the assistant official”. -
“‘Yes, they should have been sent off and taken back to
their homes, calmly said the assistant, but they seemed to
have been forgotten or somehow.’”
Nekhludoff hardly has time to realize the whole bearing of
this grim statement, for new scenes of increasing woe and
misery stare him from all sides in the face. A small, nervous
man presses himself through the crowd of the fenced-in con-
victs, and “strangely contorting his mouth he begins to say
that they were being ill-used for nothing.” -
“Worse than dogs.” he began,—
‘Now, now; not too much of this. Hold your tongue, or
you know'.
‘What do I know?” screamed the little man, desperately,
‘what is our crime!’
‘Silence,” shouted the assistants, and the little man was
silent.”
Through the openings of the gratings hundreds of eyes
are anxiously fixed on him, sending a storm of emotion and
bewilderment across his mind, and he moves out of the way
with a feeling very much like that of “running the gauntlet.”
The pages are crowded with incidents of similar kind and
character. Hundreds of guiltless people are brought to suffer-
ing and disgrace, brutalized by inhuman jailers, “simply be-
cause something was not written on paper as it should have
been.” All the prisoners here are sentenced to Siberia, and
as soon as the cells are full, the inmates are marched off to
the railway station to start their via dolorosa towards that
Russian inferno the name of which alone, even at a distance
of thousands of miles, produces a shudder. -
Every day occur separations of wives from their husbands,
and the merciless breaking up of whole families, scattering

I4
the members in all directions. Wives and husbands thus sep-
arated are frequently forced into the most mortifying relations
with other separated husbands and wives, and habit and custom
gradually wear off the resistance and propriety of shame, and
pure, faithful lives are thrown open to vice and wickedness—
followed either by utter apathy and indifference or heart-
fretting despair. Young, innocent people are brought to-
gether with old convicts, hardened in sin and crime, and partly
from the infections of such comradeship, partly from the
consciousness of being unjustly treated, this young people are
º a fair chance to develop themselves into real crim-
111als.
The very possibility of such a state of affairs has, according
to Count Tolstoi, its explanation in the complex sliding scale
of authority through which the orders have to travel from the
highest to the lowest officials, the burden of responsibility
thus being shirked by each individual in turn. Mere wheels
in a huge juggernaut-machine—these officials are unsusceptible
to any compunctious visitings of nature” and can with easy
consciences inflict the most excruciating tortures for mere
trifling offenses. The Crown vested with Divine authority
extends absolution for any and all such ill-deeds. If these offi-
cials, cruel and brutalized as they are, were to act as private
individuals, performing their official duties, not gauged by the
judgment and conscience of the State, but by their own, their
conduct towards the convicts would soon change. Their inner
nature would at once assert itself, and make them realize that
men are more than things and must be handled with com-
passion and sympathy.
“It all lies in the fact that men think there are circum-
stances when one may deal with human beings without love.
One may deal with things without love; one may cut down
trees, make bricks, hammer iron without love; but you cannot
handle men without it. * * * If you feel no love, sit still,
occupy yourself with things, with yourself, with anything you
like, only not with men. You can only eat without injury to
yourself when you feel the need of food, so you can only deal
with men usefully when you love them.”
For Tolstoi, love is the saving genius of humanity, the
only legitimate manifestation of life, and the only safe guide in
social perturbations. “Love cannot be stupid". To demon-
strate its great force as a morally constructive factor, capable
of transforming and transfiguring the lives and motives of
humanity, is the object of this narrative.
Terrible, indeed, are the struggles fought and won in
Nekhludoff's breast. His determination to redeem the victim
of his youth has to face and to overcome almost superhuman
trials. His family and aristocratic friends and relatives cover
him with ridicule. Nor is Katusha more the innocent, trusting
girl of the past. The years spent in ill-fame have not passed
by without leaving ravaging changes both in her soul and

I5
body. His first meeting with her is a terrible humiliation. He
has to talk to her through an iron grating, with a number
of rude prisoners listening to the conversation. He asks
forgiveness for the past. She scorns him. He pleads; she is
immovable, and looks at him with distrust. Finally a thought
strikes her; she will utilize the opportunity. Nekhludoff is a
rich man, and she will ask him for money. She wants money
to buy drinks.
“Ten rubles. I don't want more”.
“ ‘Yes, yes, Nekhludoff said, with a sense of confusion and
felt for his purse. * * * *
“This woman is dead,” Nekhludoff thought, looking at this
once sweet and now defiled, puffy face, now lit up by an evil
glitter in the black, squinting eyes which were gleaming at
the hand in which he held the purse.
At this moment conflicting voices are heard in his soul. A
whisper reaches him. “You can do nothing with this woman;
you will only tie a stone round your neck which will help to
drown you, and hinder you from being useful to others. Is
it not better to give her all the money there is here, say good-
bye, and finish with her forever?”
The situation is critical. Certainly a host of persuasions
can be brought up in favor of taking such a step. Nekhludoff,
like once Hercules, stands at the parting roads; the nymph
has pleaded and he has listened.
“But here he felt that now, at this moment, something
most important was taking place in his soul—that his inner
life was, as it were, wavering in the balance, so that the slight-
est efforts would make it sink to this or the other. And he
made this effort by calling to his assistance that God whom
he had felt in his soul the day before, and that God instantly
responded. He resolved to tell her everything now at once."
And then he tells her that he determined to atone for his
sin not by mere words but in deed, and that if she consents he
will marry her.
“An expression of fear suddenly came over her face. Her
squinting eyes remained fixed on him.
‘What's that for?' she said with an angry frown."
“I feel that it is my duty before God to do it.' -
‘What God have you found now? You are not saying
what you ought to. God, indeed! What God? You ought to
have remembered God then, she said and stopped with her
mouth open. It was only then that Nekhludoff noticed that
her breath smelled of spirits.” “ ” ”
‘You do not believe me?" he said.
‘That you mean to marry me? It will never be. I would
rather hang myself, so there!’
*Well, I shall still go on serving you.'
Nekhludoff can stand this humiliation, for the day before
he prayed and asked God to help him, and the powers of his
divine self awakened in his consciousness. “He felt himself
--

16
one with Him, and therefore felt not only the freedom, full-
ness and joy of life, but all the power of righteousness. All
the best a man can do, he felt capable of doing.”
From now on he does not waver. The angel conquered,
the demon fled. His resolve to devote himself in the service
of this woman is unshakable. He has already determined that
if his petition to the Court of Appeals for the reconsideration
or Katusha's trial is left unheeded, he will follow her to Si-
beria and to share all the hardships there awaiting her.
The feelings prompting this sacrifice are of no ordinary
character. Purged from everything personal, and from every-
thing that could cater to his own personal interests, his sole
object is to change the unfortunate woman's nature and re-
store her to that state of purity and self-respect in which he
once found her. “He knew that he must waken her soul, that
this was terribly difficult, but the task attracted him.”
He loves her soul; loves her as he remembers her, and as
he resolves to restore her, and this love fills him with courage
and joy, and turns his thought and mind full of overflowing
love towards everybody. He realizes with a sensation of
strange, never-before experienced peace, serenity and lofty
triumph, that nothing can turn his affections from his volun-
tary assumed charge. “He loves her not for his sake, but for
her sake and for God’s.”
“Katusha,” he whispers to her through the iron bars some
time afterwards when he somewhat succeeded in softening her
heart, “Katusha, you are more to me than a sister.”
“That’s odd,” she said, and turned away from the grating.
Love is like fire; it turns everything it touches into a char-
acter and nature of its own. Love is a miracle-worker. Sub-
jected to its sacred flame, earth has no baseness which does not
yield to its purging influence, and even Katusha has to yield to
the noble, unselfish affection streaming out from Nekhludoff's
whole nature. Gradually she feels the grosser elements within
her melt down and give room for feelings of nobler birth.
Katusha is on the verge of being born anew—approaching the
resurrection from a moral death.
And as the master-hand of love shows the effects of its
grand strokes in the increasing refinement in Katusha's nature,
its work is not less visible in the moral changes springing up
within the Prince himself. He is caught by a sudden passion
for doing good. Humanity looms up before him with a new
significance and meaning. Formerly all his joys and interests
were centered in himself, depending for their strength and
endurance on the alertness of his senses. With less the latter
were constantly toned up with new sensations, their action be-
came dull and the joys edgeless and weary. At present his
interests are related to the suffering world around him—the
poor outraged prisoners, for whom he tries to arouse the inter-
est and sympathy of the prison authorities. The joy and
happiness his work affords him is something never before

17
experienced. New worlds swing into existence; from being
morose and irritable, he becomes glad, joyous, obliging—a
bliss to himself as well as to others. Working unselfishly for
others he feels the reaction on himself of all the hopes and
delights aroused in those he helps. And it is through his un-
selfish love for Katusha that all this marvelous change, with
its exquisite delights, is brought about.
“Love took up the harp of life
And smote its chords with all its might;
Smote the chord of Self, which, trembling,
Passed in music out of sight.”
However, the departure to Siberia is approaching, and
Nekhludkoff starts to arrange his affairs in view of his volun-
tary exile. A landed proprietor and owner of large estates, his
first step is to make satisfactory arrangements with his peas-
ants. Having, after patient study, come to the conclusion that
the Henry George single-tax system is the only true solvent to
the aggrarian question, he decides to turn the whole of his
landed property over to his peasants, and agree upon a fixed
tax to be paid for its use. But here he is met by a difficulty.
The poor peasants who had never been used to anything else
than oppression and abuse, looked upon Nekhludoff's propo-
sition with suspicion. Unable to realize that a man can do any-
thing for his fellow-beings without being urged by selfish
motives, they refused to listen to their would-be benefactor, and
referred to remain in their wretched, half-starved condition.
heir ignorance and slavish dejection render all attempts of
rational reform of their condition impossible.
Returning to the city, he resumes at once his mission of
assisting those who were innocently kept in prison. One of
the prisoners interests him particularly. It is a peasant who is
in prison because of having read and discussed the Gospels
publicly. Suspecting a mistake to lay back of this, Nekhludoff
went to see a prominent lawyer—a personal acquaintance of
his—for whom he reports the case. The lawyer, however,
gives him scant hope.
“Do laws really exist that can condemn a man to Siberia
for reading the Bible to his friends?”
“Not only to be exiled to the least remote parts of Siberia,
but even to the mines, if you can only prove that in reading
the Bible he took the liberty of explaining it to others not
according to orders given by the Church. Blaming the Greek
orthodox religion in the presence of the common people
means, according to statute—the mines.”
“Impossible.”
“I assure you it is so. I always tell these gentlemen, the
judges—the advocate continued—that I cannot look at them
without gratitude, because if I am not in prison, and you and

18
all of us, it is only owing to their kindness. To deprive us of
our privileges and send us all to Siberia would be an easy thing
for them.”
The lawyer advises him to visit Toporoff–the Minister of
Public Worship—and try to win the attention of that gentle-
man. Nekhludoff makes the visit, only to find that the case
is hopeless. Toporoff, like the rest of the officials, is a part of
the governmental machine, and sees every occurrence in the
light of established, time-honored order. The idea of spiritual
equality and brotherhod of man has no meaning to him. His
feelings towards the religion he was keeping up were the same
as those of the poultry-keeper towards the carrion he fed his
fowls on. “Carrion is very disgusting, but the fowls liked it;
therefore it was right to feed the fowls on carrion. Of course,
all this worship of the images of the Iberian, Kasan and
Smolensk Mothers of God was a gross superstition, but the
people liked it and believed in it, and therefore the superstition
must be kept up.”
Instructive indeed is Nekhludoff's conversations with some
of the leading heads of Tzardom. Katusha's case demands a
call at the President of the Senate, Count Ivan Michaelowitch,
who holds a great influence in the Imperial Court. The Count
has once been Minister of State, and the “chief qualities that en-
abled him to reach this position were his capacity of understand-
ing the meaning of documents and laws, and of drawing up,
though clumsily, intelligible state's papers, and of spelling them
correctly—and the absence of the general principles or rules,
either of personal or administrative morality which made it
possible for him to agree or disagree with anybody, according
to what was wanted at the time. * * * As for his actions
being moral or not in themselves, or whether they were going
to result in the highest welfare or the greatest evils for the
whole of the Russian Empire, or even the entire world, that
was quite indifferent to him”.
Having stated the case for the Count and received a very
uncertain promise, Nekhludoff makes his way to the next in
degree influential authority, Senator Wolf, of whom Tolstoi
furnishes another excellent pen-picture. “Vladimir Vasilievitch
Wolf was certainly un homme tres comme il faut, and prized
this quality very highly, and from that elevation he looked
down on everybody else. He could not but esteem this quality
of his very highly, because it was, thanks to it alone, that he
made a brilliant career. * * * By honor he understood
not accepting secret bribes from private persons, but he did
not consider it dishonest to beg money for payment of fares
and all sorts of travelling expenses from the Crown, and to
do anything the Government required of him in return. To
ruin hundreds of innocent people, to cause them to be impris-
oned, to be exiled because of their love of their people and the
religion of their fathers, as he had done in one of the govern-
ments of Poland when he was Governor there; he did not con-

I9
sider it dishonorable, but even thought it noble, manly and
patriotic action.”
The Senator listens attentively to Prince Nekhludoff's state-
ment concerning the misunderstanding on which Katusha's
sentence was founded, but evinces not the slightest sign of
astonishment or emotion.
Looking seriously at the ashes of his cigar, he remarks
that the senate cannot decide the case on its merits. The
senate only considers “the exactness of the application of the
laws and their right interpretation”. As to the justice or
injustice of a case, however open and unmistakably clear to
every sane mind, this august body takes no measure whatever,
even—as in this case—several years of a person's life be spent
in Siberia, depends on it.
Belonging by birth and rank to the Russian aristocracy,
Prince Nekhludoff is by force of circumstances again and again
brought in touch with this gilded class. His relation with
Katusha has brought him down to a lower level of life and
placed him between the two extremes of human society. A
few steps take him from the one to the other; from depths of
incredible wretchedness and squalor up to gilded palaces
flooded with insane luxury and profuseness. But though the
outer attire and costume presents such impassable barriers
between these two levels of life, their inner natures, when
divested of their elusive veneer, reveals very much the same
fundamental characteristics. One of the most widespread
superstitions—Tolstoi argues—lies in the belief that every man
has his own special definite qualities. He contends that in no
human nature either unmingled good or unmingled bad is to
be found. One may be more good or more bad than another,
but they all spring out from the same root. Comparing the
minds of men to the flow of a river in which the water is every-
where the same, yet differing in rapidity of flow, in degrees of
temperature, in size of channels, etc.—he finds similar charac-
teristics among men. “Every man carries within himself the
germs of every human quality, and sometimes one manifests
himself, sometimes another, and the man often becomes unlike
himself, while still remaining the same man.” The man on the
top of the social ladder indulges in the same vices as the man
at its foot, only the former cloaks with an outer decency which
the latter disregards. Immorality in all its guises, love-
intrigues, side-wives and side-husbands constitute the theme in
the ever-varying melodrama of all classes of society in Russia,
as well as in all the rest of the world—but when these vices
masquerade in gilded attire and enticing mien, they are doubly
demoralizing and destructive to character. Vice in squalor
shows its own grim features and pretends not to be anything
but what it is. “This woman” Nekhludoff soliloquizes, referr-
ing to two incidents happening to him one night returning
from the theatre, “this woman of the street was like smelling,
stagnant water offered to those whose thirst was greater than

2O
their disgust; that other one in the theatre was like the poison
which, unnoticed, poisons everything it gets into—" "The
animalism of the brute nature in man is disgusting, but as long
as it remains in its naked form we observe it from the height
of our spiritual life and despise it; and—whether one has fallen
or resisted—one remains what one was before. But when that
same animalism hides under a cloak of poetry and aesthetic
feeling, and demands our worship—then we are swallowed up
by it completely, and worship animalism, no longer distinguish-
ing good from evil. Then it is awful.” + “ ”
True to his resolve, Nekhludoff escorts Katusha on her way
to Siberia. During the journey he forms acquaintance with a
large number of convicts—especially among those who belong
to the political class. Readily he gains their confidence and
their histories. When one reads those plain, simple statements
of indubitable facts; when one reads of the infinite trials and
hardships suffered by these unfortunate men and women—which
for years have been escorted in chains from one prison to
another, often for no other reason originally than the mere
shadow of an unsubstantiated suspicion, until finally, after
their lives have been wholly poisoned by wrongs done to them
by the Government, the force of their righteous indignation,
no longer governable, sends them into the arena of active
agitation and plotting against existing order; when one reads
of how, one after another of these once so promising, innocent,
pure souls, through reasonless, unscrupulous, all order and
justice-defying prosecutions by a cruel, heartless, inhuman
governmental machine–one becomes overpowered by the con-
viction that this government of the Tzar has tremendous ac-
counts to settle with the moral forces of the world.
In this sombre train of exiles proceeding along their via
dolorosa towards the abode of indescribable, unmatched trag-
edy, are found characters, male and female, of infinite beauty—
true, loving, unselfish hearts, ready to sacrifice themselves for
the ill-treated and oppressed. Few types of noble womanhood
have ever surpassed the exquisite sweetness and self-forgetting
devotion to her fellow sufferers as the one portrayed in the
character-sketch of Mary Pavlovna. She is tireless in her
cares of the sick and ill-treated in the gang, and, as the author
expresses it, “devotes herself to philanthropic recreations”.
The moment we form the acquaintance with her, she is busy
nursing a little child separated from its father, who, because of
the chains around his wrists—put on by a caprice of the jailer–
is rendered unable to carry it.
Though having always been in sympathy with the revolu-
tionists, because of her affections for the unjustly-treated of all
classes, Mary Povlovna has never taken part in their propaga-
ganda. A club of the revolutionists met in the same house
where she was rooming, and one evening, when the police
broke in, she was present. A shot was fired in the dark, and

21
Pavlovna pleaded guilty. The sentence is labor in the mines
in Siberia. - -
One after another the actors in this wierd, soul-stirring
drama is introduced to the reader. With a few exceptions, they
all hold strong claim on our sympathy. Here is Kryltzoff, a
young consumptive idealist whose original crime consisted in
having lent money to a friend, who, without the lender's knowl:
edge, used it for revolutionary propaganda. A note is found
signed by Kryltzoff's name. Sentenced to imprisonment in
Moskwa, the wanton ill-usage of his fellow prisoners so re-
volted his sense of justice that on his release he became an
active propagandist. Two years later, when implicated anew,
he was sentenced to life-long labor in Siberia. He succumbs,
however, to the hardships of the transport and dies of quick
consumption on the road.
Here is Voldemar Simonson, a calm, stoic philosopher, who
subjects every occurrence in the life of his fellow-convicts to
a mental analysis for the purpose of constructing a true philos-
ophy of life. He falls in love with the reformed and “resur-
rected” Katusha, gains her affections in return, and thus re-
leases Nekhludoff from his noble resolve.
Here we meet Amily Rantzowa, a young, pleasant, highly
educated and refined lady of noble birth; Marikel Kondratieff,
who “would not alter the elementary forms of life of the peo-
ple, should not break down the whole edifice, but only alter the
inner walls of the beautiful, strong, enormous old structure he
loved so dearly”; Nabatoff, who, in spite of the terrible
earnestness of the situation, always finds a word and a way to
cheer up the heart-broken and downcast.
With few exceptions these men and women are true, good,
thoughtful, unselfish souls, who never aimed at the destruction
and cessation of government, but merely its remodelling. They
do not belong to the anarchist category of reformers; they are
inspired in their propaganda work not so much of hatred for
the oppressors, as of love for the oppressed. And the scenes
by which they are constantly surrounded are not of a nature
to cool off the white heat of their enthusiasm for “the great
cause”. They see all around how human beings are subjected
to every mode and manner of shame and humiliation; see how
all sense of modesty and bashfulness as to sex is violated; see
how the sense of manhood is crushed out of the poor wretches
by arranging their bodies in shameful clothing and by shaving
the one side of their heads; see them “deprived of the chief
motives that induce the weak to live good lives—the regard for
public opinion, the sense of shame and the consciousness of
human dignity”. Furthermore, as if determined to undermine
and infect the moral consciousness of the nature of the entire
people, the authorities force convicts of good character and
morally healthy minds, to associate with others who were par-
ticularly depraved, partly by life, and partly by the wrongs
inflicted on them by governmental institutions; forces them to

22
live with rakes, villains, murderers, to act upon and exert their
baneful influence over the not yet corrupted “as leaven acts on
dough”.
“This people were dealt with as fishes caught in a net;
everything that gets into the net is pulled ashore, and then the
big fish which are required are sorted out, and the little ones are
left to perish, unheeded, on the shore. Having captured hun-
dreds that were evidently guiltless, and that could not be
dangerous to the government, they kept them in prison for
years, where they became consumptive, went out of their
minds or committed suicide, and kept them only because they
had no inducement to set them free. The fate of these persons,
often innocent, even from the Government's point of view,
depended upon the whim, the humor or the amount of leisure
at the disposal of some police officer or spy, or public prose-
cutor or magistrate, or governor, or minister”.
To the reader, brought up under and surrounded by the
benificent sway of republican institutions, these statements read
like fragments of a nightmare tale. Yet we must believe them.
The unimpeachable character, the love for truth and justice of
the man who stands back of them offers sufficient guaranty,
even to the most skeptic.
The author admits freely that the Rusian Government, like
all others, is not without its large contingent of really desper-
ate criminals, but the way this government tries to remedy the
evil rather increases than decreases its size. All the dreadful
wickedness displayed in prisons and goals, and the quiet, self-
satisfaction, of the real perpetrators of it, is, according to the
author, “the consequences of men trying to do what is
impossible; trying to correct evil, while being evil themselves”.
In this serious predicament our noble, warm-hearted author
sees only one way out; to fall back on the old heart-doctrine,
and to bring into living practice the spiritual injuncton of the
great Nazarene: “Love thy neighbor as thyself”. A devout
believer in the Bible, Tolstoi draws from its sacred text the
theme for his entire philosophy. Four statements collected
from the Bible serve him at once for motto for his present
work, and as remedy for the evil described in it:
“Then came Peter and said to Him: Lord, how oft shall my
brother sin against me and I forgive him 2 Until seven times 2
Jesus saith unto him: I say not unto thee, until seven times; but
until seventy times seven.”
“And why beholdest thou the mote in thy brother's eye, but con-
sidereth not the beam in thine own eye?”
“He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone.”
“The desciple is not above his master, but everyone, when per-
fected, shall be as his master.”
These maxims, if properly understood and practiced, will
illumine the understanding and open the mind for a higher
consciousness, able to grasp and solve all the appalling intric-

23
acies and disorders rising up in the lives and relations of hu-
manity. Here in this simple statement he finds deeper
thoughts, clearer arguments and sharper logic than in all the
elaborate philosophies of Lombroso, Gorofalo, Ferry, List,
Maudsley, Tard and others. In this statement of Christ he
finds the key to the social mystery; finds the word, the sound
of which shall roll the stone from the tomb in which our better,
our truer selves lie buried, to call the Christ-ideal of life
within us; which means the resurrection of the true life of
humanity. It is the adherence to the principles contained in
these statements that resurrects Nekhludoff, changing his per-
sonal life into a life universal and eternal, awakening within
him a sense of calm and serene certitude as to the realities of
life, and as to what this life demands of him. A peace such
as he never felt before fills his soul as he proceeds to prac-
tically develop the seeds of truth thus sown in his soul.
“And a perfectly new life dawned that night for Nekhludoff,
not because he had entered into new conditions of life, but
because everything he did after that night had a new and quite
different significance.”