Resurrection (Readings Classics)

Resurrection is a fierce novel of conscience and social critique. Summoned for jury duty in a murder trial, Prince Dmitri Nekhlyudov is stunned to find that the defendant is Katyusha Maslova, a maid he had once seduced and abandoned. The shock forces him to confront his past. What begins as private shame becomes a demanding moral quest. Determined to make amends, he vows to give up comfort and status, help restore Katyusha's life, and challenge the institutions that helped destroy it. Part love story and part spiritual inquiry, Resurrection takes the reader from courtrooms to prisons and on to Siberian exile, revealing a bureaucracy both petty and cruel, a church weakened by empty ritual, and an aristocracy numbed by habit. Its power lies in Tolstoy's precise attention to human motives and behaviour. A masterwork of storytelling, it turns one man's guilt into a searching examination of justice, responsibility, and compassion.