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Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission
Title: The Awakening
Series:
(The Russians)
Author: Leo Tolstoy
Translater:
Unknown
Rating:
3 of 5 Stars
Genre: Classic
Pages:
641
Words: 174K
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Synopsis: |
From Wikipedia
The story is about a nobleman named Dmitri Ivanovich Nekhlyudov, who seeks redemption for a sin committed years earlier. When he was a younger man, at his Aunts' estate, he fell in love with their ward, Katyusha (Katerina Mikhailovna Maslova), who is goddaughter to one Aunt and treated badly by the other. However, after going to the city and becoming corrupted by drink and gambling, he returns two years later to his Aunts' estate and rapes Katyusha, leaving her pregnant. She is then thrown out by his Aunt, and proceeds to face a series of unfortunate and unpleasant events, before she ends up working as a prostitute, going by her surname, Maslova.
Ten years later, Nekhlyudov sits on a jury which sentences the girl, Maslova, to prison in Siberia for murder (poisoning a client who beat her, a crime of which she is innocent). The book narrates his attempts to help her practically, but focuses on his personal mental and moral struggle. He goes to visit her in prison, meets other prisoners, hears their stories, and slowly comes to realize that below his gilded aristocratic world, yet invisible to it, is a much larger world of cruelty, injustice and suffering. Story after story he hears and even sees people chained without cause, beaten without cause, immured in dungeons for life without cause, and a twelve-year-old boy sleeping in a lake of human dung from an overflowing latrine because there is no other place on the prison floor, but clinging in a vain search for love to the leg of the man next to him, until the book achieves the bizarre intensity of a horrific fever dream. He decides to give up his property and pass ownership on to his peasants, leaving them to argue over the different ways in which they can organise the estate, and he follows Katyusha into exile, planning on marrying her. On their long journey into Siberia, she falls in love with another man, and Nekhludov gives his blessing and still chooses to live as part of the penal community, seeking redemption.
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My Thoughts: |
While I have not committed the same particular sin as the main character, his reaction to it, albeit a decade later, felt like looking in a mirror of my younger days. It was scary because while I wouldn't react like that now, I remember reacting/thinking EXACTLY like that in my 20's. It was eye opening and made me much more charitable towards Nekhlyudov and as such, towards young idiots of today ;-)
This was pretty heavy-handed in terms of philosophy. Tolstoy uses Nekhlyudov to talk about property ownership and pre-supposes the audience is familiar with some long forgotten european who seemed to be against property ownership. The little bit I was able to figure out was pretty ridiculous at best, and woke guilt at worst. Who knew, you woke folks are just old news recycled ;-)
I've got so many reviews coming up this month that I'm keeping everything super short. The dangers of being out of work for 10 days. Lots of books get read :-/
★★★☆☆
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