Book description
Serving on a jury at the trial of a prostitute arrested for murder,
Prince Nekhlyudov is horrified to discover that the accused is a woman
he had once loved, seduced and then abandoned when she was a young
servant girl. Racked with guilt at realizing he was the cause of her
ruin, he determines to appeal for her release or give up his own way of
life and follow her. Conceived on an epic scale, Resurrection portrays a
vast panorama of Russian life, taking us from the underworld of prison
cells and warders to the palaces of countesses. It is also an angry
denunciation of government, the upper classes, the judicial system and
the Church, and a highly personal statement of Tolstoy's belief in human
redemption.
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), the Russian prose writer, is chiefly
remembered for his novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina.
Rosemary Edmonds was bron in London and studied English, Russian,
French, Italian and Old Church Slavonic at various universities. She
was translator for General de Gaulle in the Second World War. She has
edited many Penguin Classics, including War and Peace and Turgenev's
Fathers and Sons.
