gallows

The gallows in Resurrection is not merely a piece of prison equipment but a charged symbol of the state's power to kill, and a focal point for the novel's critique of legal punishment. It appears most memorably in the harrowing story told by the revolutionary Anatole Kryltzoff, who witnessed the execution of two young prisoners, and later surfaces in Nekhludoff's moral reckoning with the entire system of criminal justice. The object thus serves as a concrete embodiment of the abstract evil that the novel sets out to expose.

Kryltzoff's Account of the Execution

The most detailed and emotionally devastating appearance of the gallows comes in Kryltzoff's first-person narrative to Nekhludoff. Kryltzoff describes how, after the trial of Lozinsky and Rozovsky, a watchman told him that carpenters had arrived and were setting up the gallows. The prisoners in the cells fell silent, and Kryltzoff spent a terrible night listening for every sound. At dawn, the inspector and his assistant came to fetch the condemned men. Lozinsky, a handsome young Pole with fair curly hair and blue eyes, asked Kryltzoff for a cigarette, then said, "It is cruel and unjust. I have committed no crime." Rozovsky, a boy of about seventeen with black eyes and a childish face, trembled and kept pulling up his trousers. He asked about cough medicine, unable to grasp what was happening. When they were led away, Rozovsky began to shriek and sob, struggling so violently that the executioners had to force his head into the noose. A watchman later told Kryltzoff that after the hanging, the bodies only "shrugged their shoulders twice" before the hangman tightened the rope. Kryltzoff repeats the watchman's phrase "not at all frightful" with bitter irony, then breaks down sobbing. This experience, he says, transformed him into a revolutionary.

The Gallows as a Symbol of State Violence

Beyond this specific scene, the gallows functions in the novel as a synecdoche for the entire apparatus of legal punishment that Nekhludoff comes to see as both cruel and absurd. During his journey to Siberia, Nekhludoff reflects on the fact that the state executes people while claiming to uphold justice. The gallows represents the ultimate endpoint of a system that, in his view, does not correct criminals but instead depraves them further. The novel contrasts the gallows with the Christian commandment of forgiveness, which Nekhludoff discovers in the Gospel at the end of the book. The five commandments he reads—especially the fourth, to turn the other cheek, and the fifth, to love one's enemies—stand in direct opposition to the logic of the gallows. The object thus becomes a measure of how far the state has strayed from the moral law that Nekhludoff believes should govern human life.

The Gallows and Nekhludoff's Moral Awakening

Nekhludoff's encounter with the idea of the gallows is part of his broader awakening to the injustice of the legal system. In his conversation with the advocate Fanarin, he learns that the law can be used to condemn a man to the mines simply for reading the Gospels with friends. The advocate tells him that the judges could, if they wished, send anyone to Siberia. This arbitrary power, which can end in the gallows, horrifies Nekhludoff. Later, in Petersburg, he hears about the duel in which Kaminski was killed, and reflects on the contrast between the officer who killed him—who will be set free after a brief confinement—and the convicts he has seen in prison, who are sent to the gallows or to hard labor for far lesser offenses. The gallows thus becomes a symbol of the class bias that pervades the entire legal system.

The Gallows and the Old Man's Defiance

In the final chapters of the novel, Nekhludoff encounters an old man in the prison who refuses to stand when the inspector enters. The old man calls the inspector a servant of Antichrist and declares that the state's laws are a fraud. When the Englishman asks how thieves and murderers should be treated, the old man replies that the authorities should first "take the seal of Antichrist off" themselves. The gallows, though not physically present in this scene, is the implicit endpoint of the system the old man rejects. His defiance echoes Kryltzoff's earlier horror and Nekhludoff's growing conviction that punishment is not only useless but evil. The gallows thus ties together the novel's political and spiritual critiques: it is the ultimate expression of a society that has forgotten the law of forgiveness.