Resurrection by Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy (portable ebook reader txt) 📕

This devoted love of Katusha touched Mary Pavlovna in her turn,

and she learned to love Katusha.

These women were also united by the repulsion they both felt to

sexual love. The one loathed that kind of love, having

experienced all its horrors, the other, never having experienced

it, looked on it as something incomprehensible and at the same

time as something repugnant and offensive to human dignity.

CHAPTER IV.

SIMONSON.

Mary Pavlovna’s influence was one that Maslova submitted to

because she loved Mary Pavlovna. Simonson influenced her because

he loved her.

Everybody lives and acts partly according to his own, partly

according to other people’s, ideas. This is what constitutes one

of the great differences among men. To some, thinking is a kind

of mental game; they treat their reason as if it were a fly-wheel

without a connecting strap, and are guided in their actions by

other people’s ideas, by custom or laws; while others look upon

their own ideas as the chief motive power of all their actions,

and always listen to the dictates of their own reason and submit

to it, accepting other people’s opinions only on rare occasions

and after weighing them critically. Simonson was a man of the

latter sort; he settled and verified everything according to his

own reason and acted on the decisions he arrived at. When a

schoolboy he made up his mind that his father’s income, made as a

paymaster in government office was dishonestly gained, and he

told his father that it ought to be given to the people. When his

father, instead of listening to him, gave him a scolding, he left

his father’s house and would not make use of his father’s means.

Having come to the conclusion that all the existing misery was a

result of the people’s ignorance, he joined the socialists, who

carried on propaganda among the people, as soon as he left the

university and got a place as a village schoolmaster. He taught

and explained to his pupils and to the peasants what he

considered to be just, and openly blamed what he thought unjust.

He was arrested and tried. During his trial he determined to tell

his judges that his was a just cause, for which he ought not to

be tried or punished. When the judges paid no heed to his words,

but went on with the trial, he decided not to answer them and

kept resolutely silent when they questioned him. He was exiled to

the Government of Archangel. There he formulated a religious

teaching which was founded on the theory that everything in the

world was alive, that nothing is lifeless, and that all the

objects we consider to be without life or inorganic are only

parts of an enormous organic body which we cannot compass. A

man’s task is to sustain the life of that huge organism and all

its animate parts. Therefore he was against war, capital

punishment and every kind of killing, not only of human beings,

but also of animals. Concerning marriage, too, he had a peculiar

idea of his own; he thought that increase was a lower function of

man, the highest function being to serve the already existing

lives. He found a confirmation of his theory in the fact that

there were phacocytes in the blood. Celibates, according to his

opinion, were the same as phacocytes, their function being to

help the weak and the sickly particles of the organism. From the

moment he came to this conclusion he began to consider himself as

well as Mary Pavlovna as phacocytes, and to live accordingly,

though as a youth he had been addicted to vice. His love for

Katusha did not infringe this conception, because he loved her

platonically, and such love he considered could not hinder his

activity as a phacocytes, but acted, on the contrary, as an

inspiration.

Not only moral, but also most practical questions he decided in

his own way. He applied a theory of his own to all practical

business, had rules relating to the number of hours for rest and

for work, to the kind of food to eat, the way to dress, to heat

and light up the rooms. With all this Simonson was very shy and

modest; and yet when he had once made up his mind nothing could

make him waver. And this man had a decided influence on Maslova

through his love for her. With a woman’s instinct Maslova very

soon found out that he loved her. And the fact that she could

awaken love in a man of that kind raised her in her own

estimation. It was Nekhludoff’s magnanimity and what had been in

the past that made him offer to marry her, but Simonson loved her

such as she was now, loved her simply because of the love he bore

her. And she felt that Simonson considered her to be an

exceptional woman, having peculiarly high moral qualities. She

did not quite know what the qualities he attributed to her were,

but in order to be on the safe side and that he should not be

disappointed in her, she tried with all her might to awaken in

herself all the highest qualities she could conceive, and she

tried to be as good as possible. This had begun while they were

still in prison, when on a common visiting day she had noticed

his kindly dark blue eyes gazing fixedly at her from under his

projecting brow. Even then she had noticed that this was a

peculiar man, and that he was looking at her in a peculiar

manner, and had also noticed the striking combination of

sternness—the unruly hair and the frowning forehead gave him

this appearance—with the childlike kindness and innocence of

his look. She saw him again in Tomsk, where she joined the

political prisoners. Though they had not uttered a word, their

looks told plainly that they had understood one another. Even

after that they had had no serious conversation with each other,

but Maslova felt that when he spoke in her presence his words

were addressed to her, and that he spoke for her sake, trying to

express himself as plainly as he could; but it was when he

started walking with the criminal prisoners that they grew

specially near to one another.

CHAPTER V.

THE POLITICAL PRISONERS.

Until they left Perm Nekhludoff only twice managed to see

Katusha, once in Nijni, before the prisoners were embarked on a

barge surrounded with a wire netting, and again in Perm in the

prison office. At both these interviews he found her reserved and

unkind. She answered his questions as to whether she was in want

of anything, and whether she was comfortable, evasively and

bashfully, and, as he thought, with the same feeling of hostile

reproach which she had shown several times before. Her depressed

state of mind, which was only the result of the molestations from

the men that she was undergoing at the time, tormented

Nekhludoff. He feared lest, influenced by the hard and degrading

circumstances in which she was placed on the journey, she should

again get into that state of despair and discord with her own

self which formerly made her irritable with him, and which had

caused her to drink and smoke excessively to gain oblivion. But

he was unable to help her in any way during this part of the

journey, as it was impossible for him to be with her. It was only

when she joined the political prisoners that he saw how unfounded

his fears were, and at each interview he noticed that inner

change he so strongly desired to see in her becoming more and

more marked. The first time they met in Tomsk she was again just

as she had been when leaving Moscow. She did not frown or become

confused when she saw him, but met him joyfully and simply,

thanking him for what he had done for her, especially for

bringing her among the people with whom she now was.

After two months’ marching with the gang, the change that had

taken place within her became noticeable in her appearance. She

grew sunburned and thinner, and seemed older; wrinkles appeared

on her temples and round her mouth. She had no ringlets on her

forehead now, and her hair was covered with the kerchief; in the

way it was arranged, as well as in her dress and her manners,

there was no trace of coquetry left. And this change, which had

taken place and was still progressing in her, made Nekhludoff

very happy.

He felt for her something he had never experienced before. This

feeling had nothing in common with his first poetic love for her,

and even less with the sensual love that had followed, nor even

with the satisfaction of a duty fulfilled, not unmixed with

self-admiration, with which he decided to marry her after the

trial. The present feeling was simply one of pity and tenderness.

He had felt it when he met her in prison for the first time, and

then again when, after conquering his repugnance, he forgave her

the imagined intrigue with the medical assistant in the hospital

(the injustice done her had since been discovered); it was the

same feeling he now had, only with this difference, that formerly

it was momentary, and that now it had become permanent. Whatever

he was doing, whatever he was thinking now, a feeling of pity and

tenderness dwelt with him, and not only pity and tenderness for

her, but for everybody. This feeling seemed to have opened the

floodgates of love, which had found no outlet in Nekhludoff’s

soul, and the love now flowed out to every one he met.

During this journey Nekhludoff’s feelings were so stimulated that

he could not help being attentive and considerate to everybody,

from the coachman and the convoy soldiers to the prison

inspectors and governors whom he had to deal with. Now that

Maslova was among the political prisoners, Nekhludoff could not

help becoming acquainted with many of them, first in

Ekaterinburg, where they had a good deal of freedom and were kept

altogether in a large cell, and then on the road when Maslova was

marching with three of the men and four of the women. Coming in

contact with political exiles in this way made Nekhludoff

completely change his mind concerning them.

From the very beginning of the revolutionary movement in Russia,

but especially since that first of March, when Alexander II was

murdered, Nekhludoff regarded the revolutionists with dislike and

contempt. He was repulsed by the cruelty and secrecy of the

methods they employed in their struggles against the government,

especially the cruel murders they committed, and their arrogance

also disgusted him. But having learned more intimately to know

them and all they had suffered at the hands of the government, he

saw that they could not be other than they were.

Terrible and endless as were the torments which were inflicted on

the criminals, there was at least some semblance of justice shown

them before and after they were sentenced, but in the case of the

political prisoners there was not even that semblance, as

Nekhludoff saw in the case of Sholostova and that of many and

many of his new acquaintances. These people were dealt with like

fish caught with a net; everything that gets into the nets is

pulled ashore, and then the big fish which are required are

sorted out and the little ones are left to perish unheeded on the

shore. Having captured hundreds that were evidently guiltless,

and that could not be dangerous to the government, they left them

imprisoned for years, where they became consumptive, went out of

their minds or committed suicide, and kept them only because they

had no inducement to set them free, while they might