_Resurrection_, the last of Tolstoy's great novels, was written after he had, as he thought, definitely resigned fiction. Wishing to help the Doukhobors, he took up and completed the unfinished manuscript of this book, which shows that his hand had in no way lost its cunning. Less purely a work of art because far more didactic than _War and Peace_ or _Anna Karénina_, it is in every way worthy of the author of both. It tells a single story of the most wonderful and moving pathos. We are introduced to the hero--Prince Dmitri Nekhlúdof--at the moment when he is summoned to take his place on a jury. The first case is one of murder; three people are accused, among them a prostitute named Máslova, and in her Nekhlúdof recognises to his horror a certain Katusha whom he had first known as a pure and innocent girl, and whom he himself had seduced. He tries to stifle his conscience; he assures himself that "everybody" does these things, and that he is not to blame for Máslova's fate; but, notwithstanding his struggles, the conviction is borne in upon him that he is morally responsible both for the woman's hideous degradation and for her presence in the dock. With the most consummate art Tolstoy introduces us first to the foetid and wretched atmosphere of the law-court, with the story of the poisoned merchant, and the horrible description of his half-putrefying dead body, and then, by force of Nekhlúdof's recollections, shows us the magical contrast of Katusha's pure and innocent girlhood. There is no love story in literature rendered with a more poignant charm. Katusha is the one woman whom Nekhlúdof had really and truly and poetically {83} loved; he loved her when he was himself innocent, and his love had the aroma of Paradise, never, in all his later life, to be recalled again. Katusha was a poor girl, the daughter of a gipsy tramp, whom his aunts had educated, half as a servant and half as a companion. She is very beautiful, refined in her manners, exquisitely tender; he loves her with a love full of reserves and mysteries, incredibly sweet, transfiguring the whole world. Nekhlúdof goes away; he returns, but, in the meantime, he has tasted of vice, and he is no longer the same. When he sees Katusha again the old innocent poetic charm revives once more, but it has now to contend with what Tolstoy called "the dreadful, animal man." For a moment the better nature conquers. No scene in all Tolstoy's pages is more lovely than that of the Easter Mass, when Nekhlúdof rides to the church early in the morning across the snow, sees it brilliantly lighted, the priests in their gorgeous vestments, hears the glorious Easter hymns, and feels as if all the joy, the tenderness, and the beauty were for Katusha and for her alone. "For her the gold glittered round the icons; for her all these candles in candelabra and candlesticks were alight; for her were sung these joyful hymns.... All ... all that was good in the world was for her."