Prince Dmitri Nekhlyudov is doing his duty as a juror when he recognizes the prisoner in the dock: Katyusha Maslova, the young servant girl he seduced and abandoned a decade earlier, now a prostitute wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to hard labor in Siberia. Stricken by the knowledge that her ruin began with his own act, the idle, privileged Nekhlyudov resolves to undo what he has done — to free her, and when that fails, to follow her into exile and marry her — though Maslova, hardened and suspicious, neither forgives him easily nor wants his sacrifice.

What follows is a journey through the whole machinery of Russian justice. Nekhlyudov moves between the world of his own class and the world of the condemned — petitioning officials, sitting in prisons, giving away his land to the peasants who work it, and trailing the convict convoy across Russia into Siberia — as both his life and Maslova’s are slowly, painfully remade. The title names what is at stake for both: not the resurrection promised by the church, but the moral rebirth of two ruined lives.

Published in 1899, Resurrection was the last of Tolstoy’s three great novels and the most openly polemical — written to fund the emigration of the persecuted Doukhobor sect, and so fierce in its attack on the courts, the prisons, private property, and above all the church that it helped bring about Tolstoy’s excommunication from Russian Orthodoxy in 1901. Plain, direct, and unsparing, it lets the facts do the indicting and drives toward the Gospel teaching named in its opening epigraphs: that no one is fit to judge another.

This edition pairs the complete public-domain English translation by Louise Maude — one of the versions Tolstoy himself authorized — with an editor’s foreword on the novel’s composition and meaning, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.