Leo Tolstoy stands tall among the great Russian novelists of the nineteenth century. In fact, he fellowships with a handful of great story tellers of all time, the men and women who write literary masterpieces. Tolstoy based Resurrection, the last of his novels, on a true story of a philanderer whose misuse of a beautiful young orphan girl leads to her ruin. Fate brings the two together many years later and the meeting awakens the man's moral conscience. Anger, intimacy, forgiveness, and grace result. While the situation of Tolstoy's plot is alien to most people, his nuanced treatment of mortal life is familiar to all.

Late in his life Tolstoy confessed that he earlier had seduced two young girls for his pleasure. Perhaps his own deeds and their horrible consequences motivated him to write this novel with a special passion. It is a particularly moving tale. Tolstoy's Resurrectionis marvelous in the fullest sense of the word—a story so improbable that it must be a miraculous achievement.

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) is one of the great novelists. His masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenin explore the depths and heights of the human condition with eloquence and an edge that combine to make them powerfully real throughout generations and across national identities. Resurrection is the last of Tolstoy's major novels.