Resurrection

Resurrection opens in a Russian courtroom where Prince Dmitri Nekhludoff, serving as a juror, suddenly recognizes the accused woman on trial. She is Katusha Maslova - the servant girl he seduced and abandoned a decade earlier. Her life crumbled after he used her and discarded her, and now she stands accused of murder. What follows is Tolstoy's devastating meditation on guilt, redemption, and whether any amount of penance can possibly balance the scales of human suffering. Nekhludoff surrenders his estate and follows Katusha into Siberian exile, determined to earn forgiveness for the ruin he brought upon her. Yet Tolstoy asks the harder question: can a man truly make amends for destroying a life, or does the harm echo beyond any remedy? Combining intimate psychological depth with a panoramic critique of Russian injustice - its prisons, its courts, its casual cruelty toward the poor - Resurrection stands as Tolstoy's most uncompromising moral novel, a book that refuses to let either its characters or its readers off the hook.