TOLSTOPS
RESURREO ||ON
A Review, by Gaston Deschamps
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- Tolstoi’s
RESURRECTION ''
A REVIEW
By Gaston Deschamps



TOLSTOI’s “RESURRECTION.” +
The new novel which the vigorous old age of Count Leo
Tolstoi reserved for the admirers of a genius which seems
inexhaustible, deals from the start with a painful question
which Edmond de Goncourt had already touched, not without
courage, in his monograph of “La Fille Elisa.”
Hassociety the right to shut up in quasi-official dens a herd
of young women who in the beginnings of their degradation
had no other fault than that of being pretty and unfortunate?
European nations pretend to be civilized. One would greatly
astonish an Englishman, a German, a Russian, a Frenchman,
were he to point out brutalities, in their laws and in their cus-
toms, comparable to the worst excesses of the Frisians, the Ger-
mans, the Scythians, and the Sicambrians. Nevertheless each
of these illustrious nations, which believe themselves the depos-
itaries of modern law or of Christian charity, drags after it,
as formerly did the barbarian hordes, the mournful train of
captives. While the females of animals can escape the beset-
ments of the male by flight or by struggle, thousands and
thousands of women, sold in slave-bazars, given up defence-
less to all the ignominies of masculine vice, are condemned,
by our laws and by our police regulations, to the forced labor
of love.
One must have the courage to bend over this abyss of hor-
rors and to gaze fixedly on this monstrous violation of all
laws, divine and human. We should run the risk, unnerved
as we are by dilettantism, spoiled by pornography, besieged
by clap-trap and obscenity, we should run the risk of view-
ing this odious trade in suffering flesh with a very stupid air
3

4. Tolstoi's “RESURRECTION.”
of banter, if a Tolstoi did not come from time to time to draw
us away, by the imperious call of his genius and his good-
ness, from the ridiculous rhapsodies, the burlesque puppet-
shows, and the tiresome parlors, where our languishing souls
find a sad diversion.
Here (at last!) is a book of pity, of wrath, and of anguish,
in which are agitated problems more pressing than the ques-
tion of knowing whether one should shake hands elbow in air,
in the fashion of snobs, or whether the merchant’s daughter
(well wrapped in chinchilla) will go, between five and seven,
to the old viscount’s bachelor’s hall. -
Oh! the adventure which Tolstoi relates is very simple,
even commonplace (are not the worst trials of life common-
places in the eyes of those who are not bruised by them?).
A girl of eighteen years, born, by chance, of a poor mother
and (according to the phraseology of the registry department)
of an “unknown father,’” serves as maid-of-all-work in the
chateau of two old ladies who do not joke about morality.
These ladies have a nephew, an officer. This young lord, of
course, seduces the servant-girl. While this high-born
youth, returning to his regiment, pursues other amours, the
servant-girl, pregnant, is thrown out of doors by the old ladies
in their virtuous indignation. Here begins for this victim
the lamentable road which in Russia conducts the abandoned
to houses where they meet, by a singular coincidence, the most
respectable representatives of the aristocracy, the magistracy,
and the army.
Though she was frequented every evening by gentlemen who
belonged to good society, she was not long in growing
depraved.
Here I ask leave to interrupt the reading of “Resurrec-
tion” that I may turn to an instructive and heart-rending

TOLSTOI’s “RESURRECTION.” 5
book which Messrs. Lombroso and Ferrero have entitled:
** The Criminal Woman and the Prostitute.” Nor will this
reference be a digression, since Tolstoi’s recital is often an
imaged commentary on the truths set forth in clear light by
Messrs. Lombroso and Ferrero. These two criminalist schol-
ars, studying “ the sad phenomena of modern prostitution,”
say, in their technical and sufficiently expressive language:
“In woman the equivalent of inborn criminality is (much
more than crime or misdemeanor) prostitution, which neverthe-
less ought logically not to exist in a being so little subject to
erotic paroxysms.”
This illogical thing has, however, entered into our customs.
There are in Paris, at the lowest figure, 5, 183 women con-
fined by the police in the official jails where, according to M.
Paul Bourget’s expression, “all the sins of the world” go.
Among this herd must be counted 1,440 poor girls whom
excessive poverty has thrown into the gutter; 1,255 orphans
who have sought there for bread and a shelter; 89 “supports
of the family;” 280 provincial widows who came to Paris to
find resources, and are tired of looking in vain; 404 young
girls brought to Paris by soldiers, clerks, or students; 289
domestics seduced and discharged by their masters; 1,425
concubines “dropped '' by their lovers. It has been re-
marked that these figures, already scandalous, increase notably
after Universal Expositions.
I call the attention of persons who desire to inform them-
--
selves about these sad “lower strata'' of society to Senator
Roussel’s report, entitled: “An Examination of Orphan Asy-
lums and Other Charitable Establishments for the Young.”
For the rest, Paris is not more soiled than the other capitals
or great cities of Europe. Statistics have noted in the lower
districts of London the presence of 2,700 unfortunates aged

6 TOLSTOI’s “RESURRECTION.”
from eleven to sixteen years. Berlin, St. Petersburg, Brus-
sels, even Geneva, display with an almost cynical frankness
the “illogicality’’ pointed out by Messrs. Lombroso and
Ferrero. Vienna, Naples, Buda-Pesth, have acquired in
travelers’ reports a celebrity far from honorable. I do not
speak of Constantinople. In the “Journal des Goncourt,”
under date of Sunday, October 21, 1888, one reads: “ Huys-
mans tells us of having passed eighteen days as a curiosity-
seeker at Hamburg in witnessing a prostitution such as exists
nowhere else. . . . A prostitution for bankers, recruited
among Hungarian girls of fifteen or sixteen years. . . . And
it is amusing to hear him describe this city, with the lilac
sea and the blotting-paper sky, this city absorbed in business
all day, transforming itself every evening into a kermess
which lasts all the year, and where the money gained all
through the day is poured out and scattered at night.” And
we veil our faces with an air of shame when they tell us of the
slave-merchants who carry on the traffic in negresses in the
domains of Sultan Rabah.
The most eminent sociologists have shown how the social
hell which stirs in our basements, and above which “proper’’
people continue to laugh, to dance, to pay compliments, is a
permanent laboratory of crimes and misdemeanors. Edmond
de Goncourt has shown us the girl Elisa in the process of trans-
formation (as the criminalists say) from a “prostitute’’ into
a “delinquent.” From the depths of the galley-slave quar-
ters, whether sordid or gilded, which the paternal tolerance of
governments offers every evening to passers-by, one hears
arise a clamor of hysteria, an uproar of alcoholism, a breath
of insanity, all the precursory signs of murder, theft, assassi- -
nation. Every one knows that the jails of love, approved by
the police, often disgorge the waste of their stock upon the

TOLSTOI’s “RESURRECTION.” 7
prison of St. Lazare. No one can be ignorant of these
exoduses, since society people listen without flinching, in
their most elegant reunions, to the complaint of La Gigolette
or the lay of La Marmite.
Thieves, poisoners, incendiaries, abortionists, are in all
civilized countries brought before a jury which tries criminal
cases. The jurors are drawn by lot from honorable citizens.
Consequently one needs no romancer’s imagination to foresee
the case in which the jury-list will comprise one or two of the
289 masters who, according to the table above referred to,
have corrupted their servant-girls; one or two of the 1,425
--
‘‘ lovers’’ who have thrown their mistresses into the sewer,
without counting the students who have gallantly abandoned
their companions. A serious embarrassment for the man who
meets again, in this position, the companion of his pleasant
hours, and who must on behalf of the law take a justice’s
attitude toward her whose favors he once so tenderly
solicited. Will he dare to look with a severe eye on the
poor girl who returns to him between two policemen, and on
whom his dastardly abandonment inflicted the first stigmas of
infamy? If he is not altogether a scamp, he will repent of
his bad action, he will feel the goad of remorse. Who is, in
fact, the principal author of the crime brought before the
social tribunal? He? or she? And by what right should he
judge this woman who, without doubt, would never have been
dragged before his judgment-seat if he had not–he, the
judge—imposed on this human creature an existence which
puts her outside the pale of humanity?
Such are the thoughts which came to the mind of Prince
Nekhludoff while the police were seating on the bench of the
accused before him a woman, still young, whose blighted face
and wearied body were ennobled by a remnant of beauty. He

8 TOLSTOI’s “RESURRECTION.”
recognized this woman. It was certainly—despite the
injuries of nine years of misery—that blonde and graceful
Maslova whose supple waist, white arms, fresh lips, and
laughing eyes he had loved in the country, at the home of
his old aunts. What a sad return of an agreeable recollec-
tion! He was then an officer in the guards. She was maid-
of-all-work. He believed that he did his duty by her in
giving her a hundred roubles. Others, in his place, perhaps
would not have been so generous! And then he had thought
no more of it. One has so many anxieties in one’s head at
St. Petersburg, when one is a gentleman and a handsome
young fellow! The cares of the toilet, the reading of Paris-
ian novels, visits, the theatre, the ceremonies of the court,
take a considerable time. One has no leisure. In truth, it
is a pity! Poor Maslova!
Nekhludoff put his glasses to his nose: “It is impossible!”
he said to himself. “But already he had ceased to doubt ;
he was certain that it was she, the chambermaid whom he had
loved, truly loved, and whom later he had seduced in a moment
of folly, and then abandoned, and whom since then he had
always avoided thinking of, because the recollection of her was
too painful, too humiliating to him, showing him that he, so
proud of his rectitude, had behaved dastardly, basely, toward
this woman.”
The presiding judge of the court of sessions, questioning the
accused, asked her:
“What was your trade?”
Maslova was silent.
“What was your trade 2" repeated the judge.
"I was in a house ! ” said she.
“In what house?” sternly asked the judge in eye-glasses.
“You know well yourself what house I-was in tº replied Maslova. And,
after having turned her eyes away for an instant, she began gazing at the

TOLSTOI’s “RESURRECTION.” 9
judge again. A flush rose to his face. There was something so extraor-
dinary in the expression of her face, something so terrible and so heart-rend-
ing in the swift look with which she had taken in the by-standers, that the
president lowered his head and that for an instant a general silence reigned
in the court-room. This silence was broken by a laugh, coming from the
lower part of the room, where the public stood. The sheriff's officer
whistled to command silence. The judge raised his head again, and pursued
his course of questions.
The case was commonplace. A wealthy tradesman had
forgotten himself till a late hour of the night in the house
where Maslova was shut up. Very much taken with her, and
drunk besides, he made the mistake of taking this girl to a
hotel-room where he had left a valise containing about three
thousand roubles. At the instigation of a porter and a
chambermaid Maslova had put a pinch of arsenic into the
merchant’s liqueur-glass. The merchant, though found dead,
was nevertheless buried, because a doctor had diagnosed a
prolonged syncope, normally “ due to a stoppage of the
heart.” But the disappearance of the roubles, and of a
jewel set with diamonds, roused the attention of the police.
The rich merchant was disinterred. Traces of the poison were
found in his intestines. Maslova, the hotel porter, and the
chambermaid, were arrested. -
The case was so simple that the court dispatched it in a few
hours. Maslova, found guilty of complicity in poisoning,
was condemned to four years of hard labor.
Then began a new life for Prince Nekhludoff. He could
not divert his thoughts from this outcast who, in starting for
Siberia, was on the whole only changing her prison. He
sincerely judged himself ignoble, and his opinion of most of
his fellows did not differ from the judgment he passed on
himself.
He afterward came to know very positively that Maslova

10 TOLSTOI’s “RESURRECTION.”
was innocent of the crime she was expiating. The poor girl
had indeed thrown into the merchant's glass a powder which
the hotel porter had given her. But the porter had told her
that this powder was a soporific; she had meant simply to
quiet the merchant, to deliver herself from his repulsive beset-
ments. . . . Prince Nekhludoff satisfied himself that all the
statements made by his victim were correct.
He resolved to work for the reparation of this judicial error.
But the authority of the res judicata, in Russia, is inviolable.
The repentant prince ran against impassable barriers.
Maslova’s appeal was rejected by the imperial senate.
Nekhludoff resolved then to follow Maslova to all the places
of deportation to which the authorities were preparing to take
her. He renounced the receptions of the “dear madams’’
whose conversation he formerly had sought. When he
thought of the condemned girl, the very idea of marrying a
society girl sickened him.
His relations with Maslova, which he took up again, and
this time very honorably, procured for him an opportunity of
studying the people who are in prison. He found there
‘‘ many unfortunates toward whom society was infinitely more
blameworthy than they themselves were toward society.”
Going further in his desire for moral reparation, Nekhludoff
decided to marry Maslova, provided she would forgive him.
The prince was at the prison-gate when the train of
convicts began its march to the railway station from which
they were to start for Siberia. He smiled from afar at her
who through his fault was walking in that dismal procession.
He entered the train which followed that of the prisoners.
The sequel will be told in Tolstoi’s next book.
To sum up, this book is an arraignment of the brutal
customs which in present society crush the weak, and particu-

TOLSTOI’s “RESURRECTION.” 11
larly women. It is also, incidentally, an indictment of
judges, jurors, Russian senators, a multitude of institutions
and dignitaries that we were accustomed to respect. Even
the Russian staff is not spared. From the innumerable
figures with which this strangely living and moving book
swarms, I detach this physiognomy of a soldier-jailer:
The man in whose hands was placed the lot of the prisoners confined at the
fortress was an old general said to be a little brutalized, who none the less had
a very brilliant record; he possessed innumerable decorations, which, how-
ever, he disdained to wear, with the exception of a little white cross in his but-
ton-hole. He had earned this cross at the Caucasus by having forced young
Russian peasants, placed under his orders, to kill thousands of the people of
the country, who were defending their liberties, their homes, and their fam-
ilies. He had afterward served in Poland, where he had again forced young
Russian peasants to commit the same acts, which thing had won him new
honors. . . . Now, old and fatigued, he was employed in this post of
inspector of the fortress. . . . His duties consisted in keeping in dark
cells political prisoners of both sexes, and in keeping them there in such a
manner that in ten years half of them were sure to die: some lost their
reason; others became consumptive; and a great number killed themselves
by voluntary starvation, or by opening their veins with a bit of glass, or by
hanging themselves to the bars of a window.
Evidently, here is a very subversive picture. I might
show by other examples Tolstoi’s incorrigible discontent.
The illustrious author of ‘‘ Anna Karenina ’’ and of “Resur-
rection '' does not think that all is for the best in the best of
Russias. And he extends his anathema to all the artifices
of government, to all the instruments of tyranny which Max
Nordau calls “ the conventional lies of civilization.” If I
were a mandarin or a minister, perhaps I should say that the
prodigious poet of “The Power of Darkness” is a bad spirit,
and I should never award him the academic palms. But men
of genius do not need these. They do their work, which
consists principally in protesting against the numberless evils

12 TOLSTOI’s “RESURRECTION.”
of which the frightful total of human misery is composed.
An invincible bent inclines them to take the part of the weak
against the strong, of the oppressed against the oppressors, of
the poor against the rich, of the victims against the execu-
tioners. It is the part customarily played by great writers.
They are sent on earth, like messengers of the divine Neme-
sis, to strike down the pride of the mighty, to disturb the
brazen-faced optimism of the satisfied, to call to the insolent
“Look out!” and to raise hue and cry against the rapacious.
Victor Hugo—whom we miss much in the sad interregnum of
our literature—Victor Hugo, whom we have not replaced, long
held this post of surly benefactor and sublime grumbler. He
often rewrote magnificently that parable of the bad rich man
which is at the foundation of the religious, poetical, and
social gospel of unhappy humanity. He preached, like Bos-
suet, on the eminent dignity of the poor. He displeased the
prosecuting attorneys by recounting “The Last Day of a Man
under Sentence.” He rehabilitated Claude Gueux. He sang
the sorrows of “Les Misérables.” It is well known with
what sweetness he consoled the pain of the sacrificed women
whom social savagery abandons to the debauchery and con-
tempt of well-to-do people: -
Oh! n'insultez jamais une femme quitombe
Quisait sous quelfardeau sa volonté succombe 2
Quisait combien de temps sa faim a combattu ?
Tolstoi continues the glorious tradition which seems inter-
rupted among us, for the moment, by an absence of great
poets for which I find no precedent in our literary history.
If we had more and better than the honest versifiers with whom
the echoes of our bourgeois Parnassus resound, one would still
hear in France voices harmoniously exasperated against injus-

TOLSTOI’s “RESURRECTION.” 13
tice. Humble prose-writers would not be obliged to dis-
charge an office which better befits the genius of lyric poets.
Hitherto we have not been accustomed to see poets bow
respectfully before the digestion of heavy eaters, go into
ecstasies before the expansiveness of rubicund faces, associate
themselves with the witticisms of galley-overseers, make them-
selves gay between the pear and the cheese over the frugal
regimen of penitentiaries, and put on a policeman’s hat at
dessert by way of pleasantry.
Let us read Tolstoi, were it only to avoid sinking into the
quicksand of routine, falling a prey to the contagion of
selfishness, and acquiring that dryness of heart which, for
individuals as well as for societies, is a symptom of death.
Let us read Tolstoi because he makes us weep. All his work
is a passionate commentary on that word of the Gospel: “I
have compassion on the multitude.”
This pleading of a simple and good man who judges every-
thing without irony is a marvelous antidote of which we have
need in order to combat the inveterate dilettantism which has
vitiated our blood. This call to the fraternal union of all
men is more useful than ever in this stern season when so
many bad mouths are breathing hatred.
Assuredly objections throng in our mind when we hear, at
one breath and at full speed, the uncompromising apostle of
Tula. His hymns in honor of the primitive life—renewed
from Rousseau—are a magnificent negation of progress.
Contradictions abound in his work and in his words. By turns
he demonstrates the superiority of crowds over the individual,
and recommends to our neurasthenes a cure of silence and iso-
lation. He thinks himself a Buddhist; he sanctifies the fakir
squatting in immobility; and yet he is a man of action and
of initiative. He rises early, he goes to bed late. He cul-

14 “TOLSTOI’s RESURRECTION.”
tivates his field. He takes the sickle to help his peasants in
the harvest time.
Great writers are subject to these contradictions, because
life, whose interpreters they are, is full of contrasts. No one
possesses to the same degree as Tolstoi the feeling of life.
He loves men, he loves things. He seizes their forms. He
understands their souls. The pages of “Resurrection” are all
palpitating with movement and reality. At every instant the
weft of the recital is complicated and enriched with episodes
where we meet, as in a journey through real life, people
whom we cannot forget. The illusion is so complete that we
catch ourselves loving and hating these imaginary person-
ages as if they were alive. And how many pictures worthy
to figure eternally in the catalogue of masterpieces! As long
as there are men and women on earth, they will open this
book to look at Nekhludoff and Maslova at the Easter mass in
the prison chapel. The scenes of love and disenchantment
which follow this interview are touching in their simplicity.
Even in the eyes of those persons whom the thesis contained
in “Resurrection’’ displeases, it is certain that these two
unfortunates have entered forever into the category of those
doers and sufferers of wrong for whom the tears of posterity
are reserved.

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