Screenshot (Apr 19, 2025 5:19:06 AM) Review of the plot of Tolstoy's novel " Resurrection "

[ 'The theme for the new novel had been supplied by Tolstoy's friend Anatoly Koni. He told Tolstoy the story of a man who had come to him for legal aid. As a youth this man had seduced a pretty orphan girl of sixteen who had been taken into the home of a relative of the young man when her parents died. Once her benefactress observed the girl's pregnant condition, she drove her away. Abandoned by her seducer, the girl, after hopeless attempts to earn an honest livelihood, became a prostitute. Caught stealing money from one of her drunken "guests" in a brothel, the girl was arrested. By accident of fate, the jury that tried the case included her seducer. His conscience awakened to the injustice of his behaviour, he decided to marry the girl, who was sentenced to four months in prison. Koni concluded his story by relating that the couple did actually marry, but shortly after her sentence expired, the girl died from typhus. Tolstoy was moved by Koni's story, partly because it resembled an incident from his own life. For shortly before his death he told his biographer of two seductions in his life which he could never forget: "The second was the crime I committed with the servant Masha in my aunt's house. She was a virgin. I seduced her, and she was dismissed and perished."[2] Although actually, as Pavel Basinsky says, she worked later in the house of Tolstoy's sister.[3] In August 1898, after much deliberation and consulting with colleagues, Tolstoy decided to quickly finish, copyright and sell the novel to aid the emigration of persecuted pacifist Spiritual Christian Dukhobortsy from Russia to Canada. He completed it in December 1899.[2] The book was to be published serially simultaneously in Russia, Germany, France, England and America, to quickly raise funds and give him time to finish the story, but delayed due to contract "difficulties" requiring parts to be censored and shortened.[4] It appeared in the popular Russian weekly magazine Niva illustrated by Leonid Pasternak, and in the American monthly magazine The Cosmopolitan as The Awakening.[5] Many publishers printed their own editions because they assumed that Tolstoy had given up all copyrights as he had done with previous books. The complete text was not published in Russia until 1936, and in English in 1938.[6] Tolstoy's contribution of 34,200 roubles to the plight of Dukhobortsy[7] ($17,000)[8] had been acknowledged several times in gratitude and aid to the Tolstoy Estate "Yasnaya Polyana" by the descendants of Dukhobortsy in Canada' ]