The only character in this book who has no objective reality is Nekhludov himself; and this is so because Tolstoy has invested him with his own ideas. This is a defect of several of the most notable types in _War and Peace_ and in _Anna Karenin_; for example, Prince Andrei, Pierre Besoukhov, Levine, and others. The fault was less grave, however, in these earlier books; for the characters, by force of their circumstances and their age, were nearer to the author's actual state of mind. But in _Resurrection_ the author places in the body of an epicurean of thirty-five the disembodied soul of an old man of seventy. I will not say that the moral crisis through which Nekhludov is supposed to pass is absolutely untrue and impossible; nor even that it could not be brought about so suddenly.[3] But there is nothing in the temperament, the character, the previous life of the man as Tolstoy depicts him, to announce or explain this crisis; and once it has commenced nothing interrupts it. Tolstoy has, it is true, with profound observation, represented the impure alloy which at the outset is mingled with the thoughts of sacrifice; the tears of self-pity and admiration; and, later, the horror and repugnance which seize upon Nekhludov when he is brought face to face with reality. But his resolution never flinches. This crisis has nothing in common with his previous crises, violent but only momentary.[4] Henceforth nothing can arrest this weak and undecided character. A wealthy prince, much respected, greatly enjoying the good things of the world, on the point of marrying a charming girl who loves him and is not distasteful to him, he suddenly decides to abandon everything--wealth, the world, and social position--and to marry a prostitute in order to atone for a remote offence; and his exaltation survives, without flinching, for months; it holds out against every trial, even the news that the woman he wishes to make his wife is continuing her life of debauchery.[5] Here we have a saintliness of which the psychology of a Dostoyevsky would have shown us the source, in the obscure depths of the conscience or even in the organism of his hero. Nekhludov, however, is by no means one of Dostoyevsky's heroes. He is the type of the average man, commonplace, sane, who is Tolstoy's usual hero. To be exact, we are conscious of the juxtaposition of a very materialistic[6] character and a moral crisis which belongs to another man, and that man the aged Tolstoy.