Resurrection, Book 1

In the suffocating atmosphere of a Russian criminal court, Prince Dmitri Nekhlyudov watches a prostitute stand trial for murder, and recognizes her as the servant girl he seduced and abandoned years ago. What follows is one of literature's most relentless examinations of guilt and moral reckoning. As Nekhlyudov battles to save Katyusha Maslova from penal servitude, Tolstoy dissects an empire built on the bodies of the poor: its corrupt courts, its hypocritical church, its imprisoned masses. This was Tolstoy's final and most radical novel, written to raise funds for the persecuted Dukhobors and intended as an unshackling of his own conscience. It asks an unbearable question: can a man truly redeem himself, or only witness his own complicity in the suffering he has caused?