Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
Published On: 1899
Genres: Adult Fiction, Classic
Source: Purchased
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The Short, Sweet, and Spoiler-Free Blurb:
Resurrection (1899) is the last of Tolstoy’s major novels. It tells the story of a nobleman’s attempt to redeem the suffering his youthful philandering inflicted on a peasant girl who ends up a prisoner in Siberia. Tolstoy’s vision of redemption, achieved through loving forgiveness and his condemnation of violence, dominate the novel.
A good introduction to Tolstoy if you don’t want to take on War and Peace, but it’s definitely not as good. The ending felt unfinished and a little vague and the characters were not as interesting as the ones in his more famous works. He seems to have a woman with a mustache in every one of his books (including this one) and it makes me laugh. Resurrection was Tolstoy’s last novel. The whole novel is pushing a moral agenda very aggressively and he kind-of hits you over the head with it. I think this novel might have been based on a true story, though I can’t say for sure where I heard that. Either way, thinking of it as a true story helps with balancing the extreme preachiness of it.
Content Rating: None.
About Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist fiction. Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world’s greatest novelists. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker and social reformer.
