1860s

The 1860s in Russia—the decade of the Great Reforms, most notably the emancipation of the serfs in 1861—constitute the decisive historical horizon against which the moral drama of Resurrection unfolds. Tolstoy does not merely set his story in this era; he makes the intellectual and political legacy of the 1860s a living force within the narrative, a standard of idealism against which the subsequent corruption of both individuals and institutions is measured.

The Formative Decade of Nekhludoff's Idealism

The 1860s are the decade of Dmitri Ivanovitch Nekhludoff's youth and moral awakening. During the summer he spent with his aunts while a university student, he was an enthusiastic admirer of Herbert Spencer and Henry George, and was especially impressed by Spencer's views on landholding as expressed in Social Statics. He fully realised the cruelty and injustice of private property in land, and being one of those to whom a sacrifice to the demands of conscience gives the highest spiritual enjoyment, he decided not to retain property rights but to give up to the peasant labourers the land he had inherited from his father. It was on this land question that he wrote his essay. This period of his life, marked by a blissful state of existence when a young man for the first time realises all the beauty and significance of life and the importance of the task allotted to it, is explicitly contrasted with his later depraved and selfish life in the army and high society. The ideals of the 1860s are thus the touchstone of his original, uncorrupted self.

The Liberal Tradition of the Older Generation

The 1860s also serve as the political reference point for the older generation of liberals. Bay, the patriarchal-looking senator who is a Liberal of the very first water, holds sacred the Liberal traditions of the sixth decade of this century. If he ever oversteps the limits of strict neutrality, it is always in the direction of Liberalism. This characterisation places the 1860s as the golden age of a principled, if now somewhat ossified, liberal idealism that stands in contrast to the cynical careerism of later officials like Wolf or the reactionary conservatism of figures like Toporoff.

The Material and Social Context of the Era

The material conditions of the 1860s are also evoked. The trial of Maslova takes place in a court whose furnishings—the high-backed chairs, the green cloth, the portrait of the Emperor—reflect the institutional architecture of the reform era. The legal system itself, with its jury trials introduced by the Judicial Reform of 1864, is a direct product of the 1860s, and the novel's entire critique of that system—its absurdities, its class bias, its failure to deliver justice—is a reckoning with the legacy of that reformist decade. The very possibility of Nekhludoff serving on a jury and confronting his past is a consequence of the legal institutions created in the 1860s.

The 1860s as a Lost Horizon

By the time of the novel's main action in the 1880s, the ideals of the 1860s have been largely abandoned or betrayed. Nekhludoff himself, after his military service, has sunk into a life of selfishness and luxury, forgetting his youthful convictions. The liberal senator Bay is a relic, his principles a matter of personal nostalgia rather than effective political force. The revolutionary movement, represented by figures like Kryltzoff and Novodvoroff, has moved beyond the reformist liberalism of the 1860s toward more radical, often violent, methods. The 1860s thus function as a lost horizon of possibility, a moment when a different, more just social order seemed attainable, against which the subsequent failures of the legal system, the church, and the aristocracy are measured. Nekhludoff's final spiritual awakening, his turn to the Sermon on the Mount, can be read as a radicalisation of the very idealism he first discovered in the 1860s, a search for a foundation more durable than the compromised reforms of that decade.