Resurrection 6 comments

By Laura Bramon Good

Working on human trafficking issues, I peruse several news articles each day pondering the age-old questions of prostitution: who, if anyone, suffers from a commercial sexual transaction? Is legalization of prostitution inherently pro-woman, or an intricate cage into which paternalism ushers the female body? Is prostitution an act protected by the right to free expression, or is it society-sanctioned rape?

You can understand why, if I’m keeping up with the clips, I feel a bit dour by lunchtime.

You can also understand why I’m a sucker for a good, cleansing novel.

Getting ready for a road trip last weekend, I stood in front of my bookshelf trying to decide which novel would provide the best detoxifying experience. A battered paperback caught my eye: Tolstoy’s Resurrection. I bought it years ago at a long-gone Bethesda bookseller, the kind of cave-like, book-crammed institution in which the bearded guy at the desk, reading and mumbling behind his tower of obscure tomes, is somewhat annoyed when you decide to ring up your purchase. I remembered carting the book around in my purse for months, one among a host of books I meant to get to. But I never read it.

I pulled Resurrection out by its scraped yellow spine and threw it in my bag. That night, the car crawling north out of the DC suburbs, I opened the book, settled in for the long ride, and found myself set squarely back in the prostitution debate.

For those of you who, like me, need to brush up on your Russian novels, Tolstoy’s Resurrection recounts the spiritual reawakening of a wealthy and disillusioned young man. When called to serve on a jury trial, Nekhlyudov finds himself face-to-face with a young woman he seduced and abandoned in his youth. Now Katusha is a prostitute, and she has been charged with murder. As Nekhlyudov devotes himself to rescuing and marrying her, he rediscovers God, the world of man, and his own spirit.

Tolstoy chronicles the young man’s spiritual rise from numbness to ecstatic devotion, then to duty, and finally, to respect for Katusha. His contempt for Russian Orthodox bureaucracy and all spiritual fads comes across as strongly as does his awe at the ways God meets humankind in the intimacy of conscience and prayer. He takes pains to compare his hero’s ascent with his heroine’s equally momentous spiritual transformation. Rising above the stock, bleak lines of a prostitute’s lot, she becomes neither an entrepreneur of abuse, a romanticized victim, nor her savior’s pawn. When, at the close of the book, she leaves Nekhlyudov for a man who loves her, she is Neklyudov’s spiritual and moral equal.

I read Resurrection’s last few pages in a dark cabin, the sleeping breath of friends and the slight tide of a lake rising around me. For Nekhlyudov, too, the book ends deep in the night, a book open in his hands. The victimizer turned champion turned spurned, would-be spouse opens a forgotten New Testament whose words cause him to ponder humankind’s absurd compulsion to sin and flee from God, and then turn to judge and destroy other sinners. His final resolution is to seek God and His kingdom, despite the failures he will certainly face.

A few days later, I was back at work and back to the inbox, back to reading clip after clip about prostitutes, pimps, and the apparently fine line between abuse and freedom. But I found there was a certain spaciousness in my brain, gained not only through a few days of rest, but also through the chance to meditate on these issues not as “issues,” but as lives and histories, as chains of minute choices unraveled within a few single souls.

Good fiction should, and does, achieve this: moving readers past rhetoric, to the literal heart of the matter: the spirits and minds of human beings faced with the questions that will always plague mankind.