revolver

The revolver appears in Resurrection not as a single, prominent prop but as a recurring material presence that marks the novel's most charged ethical and political fault lines. It is the weapon that Mary Pavlovna Schetinina falsely claims to have fired, the instrument of state violence that the convicts carry, and the absent tool of suicide that Katusha Maslova contemplates on the railway platform. Each appearance forces the reader to confront the question of when, if ever, lethal force is justified, and who has the right to wield it.

Identity and Material Presence

The revolver is never described in the novel with the technical specificity that Tolstoy gives to, say, a plough or a samovar. It remains a generic object—a "revolver" or "pistol"—whose materiality is less important than the social and moral weight it carries. It belongs to the world of the gendarmes, the convoy soldiers, and the revolutionaries, all of whom use or threaten to use it. The only time a revolver is actually fired in the novel's narrated events is during the police raid on the secret printing press, when a revolutionary shoots and mortally wounds a gendarme. Mary Pavlovna, though she had never held a revolver in her hands and would not hurt a fly, immediately claims responsibility for the shooting, a lie that sends her to penal servitude in Siberia. The revolver here becomes the object around which a sacrificial act of solidarity is organized: Mary Pavlovna takes on the guilt of another to protect the revolutionary cause.

The Revolver as State Violence

The revolver is also the emblem of the state's monopoly on legitimate violence. The convoy soldiers who escort the prisoners carry rifles, but the officers and gendarmes who command them are often armed with revolvers. When the convoy officer threatens to have the prisoners "shot like dogs" during the incident with the child and the exile Bousovkin, the revolver at his hip is the implicit guarantee of his authority. The novel repeatedly shows that this authority is exercised arbitrarily: the same officer who beats a prisoner for carrying his own child would, if he chose, use his revolver to kill without legal consequence. The revolver thus embodies the law's ultimate foundation in physical coercion, a foundation that Nekhludoff comes to see as morally illegitimate.

The Absent Revolver: Suicide and Despair

The most haunting appearance of the revolver is its absence. On the rainy autumn night when Katusha runs to the railway station to catch a glimpse of Nekhludoff, and he sits laughing in a brightly lit first-class carriage while she stands weeping in the mud, she thinks: "When a train passes—then under a carriage, and there will be an end." She does not reach for a revolver; she thinks of throwing herself under the wheels. But the logic is the same: the revolver, like the train, is a tool of self-annihilation that she contemplates in her despair. Later, in prison, when she learns of her sentence to hard labor, her first thought is of tobacco and vodka, not of a weapon. The revolver is never hers to use. It belongs to the world of men, of officers, of those who have power over life and death. Her suicide would have to be accomplished with the materials available to a woman in her position: her own body, a passing train.

The Revolver and Revolutionary Ethics

The most extended discussion of the revolver's moral significance occurs in the context of the political prisoners. Kryltzoff, dying of consumption, speaks bitterly of the need to "destroy them"—the officials who torture and kill—and imagines using bombs and balloons to "sprinkle bombs down on them as if they were bugs." The revolver is the smaller, more intimate version of this logic: the weapon of the individual terrorist, the Narodnaya Volya member who assassinates a governor or a gendarme. Nekhludoff, who has come to believe that no man has the right to punish another, recoils from this reasoning. Yet the novel does not allow him a simple condemnation. The revolutionaries he meets—Kryltzoff, Mary Pavlovna, Simonson—are not monsters; they are people of extraordinary moral seriousness who have been driven to violence by a system that leaves them no legal recourse. The revolver, in their hands, is both a desperate instrument of resistance and a tragic admission that the state's monopoly on violence has corrupted every alternative.

The Revolver and the Question of Justice

By the end of the novel, the revolver has become a symbol of the entire legal and penal system that Nekhludoff has come to abhor. The judges, prosecutors, and officials who condemn men to prison and exile are, in his eyes, no different from the revolutionaries they persecute: both use violence to achieve their ends. The difference is that the state's violence is legalized, routinized, and hidden behind the forms of law. The revolver, whether carried by a gendarme or a revolutionary, is the same piece of metal. The question the novel poses is whether any human institution can legitimately claim the right to take life. Nekhludoff's final answer, drawn from the Sermon on the Mount, is that it cannot: the only law is forgiveness, and the only weapon is love.