Political prisoner exile

Political prisoner exile is the central institutional mechanism through which the tsarist state in Resurrection attempts to neutralize dissent, and the novel’s most sustained critique of the legal and penal system is directed at this practice. Unlike the criminal convicts, whose guilt is at least nominally adjudicated, political prisoners are exiled on the basis of administrative whim, secret denunciations, or the mere possession of prohibited literature, and their treatment reveals the law as a tool of class warfare rather than justice. The narrative follows several such exiles—Vera Doukhova, Mary Pavlovna Schetinina, Valdemar Simonson, Anatole Kryltzoff, and others—as they march alongside the criminal gang from Moscow to Siberia, and their collective experience forms the moral and intellectual core of the novel’s second half.

Causes and Background

The exile of political prisoners in the novel is rooted in the state’s fear of any movement toward popular enlightenment or constitutional reform. Vera Doukhova, a former schoolteacher, is exiled for her involvement with the Narodnaya Volya, a revolutionary group that advocated for peasant rights and representative government. She tells Nekhludoff that she was arrested after a comrade’s papers were seized, and that she now faces exile “but feels perfectly happy” . Mary Pavlovna Schetinina, the daughter of a wealthy general, left home at nineteen to work in a factory and later sheltered a secret printing press; when police raided the house and a revolutionary fired a shot, she falsely confessed to the shooting and was sentenced to hard labor . Anatole Kryltzoff, a brilliant mathematics student, was arrested for giving money to a student fund that turned out to be revolutionary, and after witnessing the hanging of two teenage boys—Lozinsky and Rozovsky—he became a dedicated terrorist, was betrayed, and condemned to lifelong hard labor . These biographies illustrate that political exile is not a response to violent crime but to the state’s perception of ideological threat, and that the exiles are often the most idealistic, educated, and morally sensitive members of society.

The Journey and Conditions

The political prisoners travel with the criminal gang but are housed separately and treated somewhat less brutally, though they share the same overcrowded, fetid halting stations and the same risk of death from disease or sunstroke. At one station, Nekhludoff finds the political prisoners in two small rooms partitioned off from the main corridor, where they have cleaned the space and made it as comfortable as possible . The contrast between their orderly, purposeful community and the chaos of the criminal wards is stark. The political prisoners include not only the idealists but also career revolutionaries like Novodvoroff, who is ambitious and dogmatic, and working-class converts like Markel Kondratieff, a former factory hand who has educated himself through Marxism and now carries the first volume of Karl Marx as his most treasured possession . The journey itself is a trial: Kryltzoff, already consumptive, grows weaker each day and dies in the prison infirmary, his body laid out in the mortuary alongside three other corpses . The English traveler who visits the prison with Nekhludoff is shown the cells and gives away Testaments, but the political prisoners are not among those who receive them—they are already beyond the reach of such consolations.

The Moral and Intellectual World of the Exiles

Within the political prisoner group, a complex social and intellectual life flourishes. The exiles debate the fundamental questions of revolutionary strategy: whether to educate the people first or to seize power first, whether to use peaceful propaganda or terrorism. Kryltzoff, dying, argues passionately that the state’s violence has made counter-violence inevitable, and he recalls the hanging of Lozinsky and Rozovsky as the moment that turned him into a revolutionary . Simonson, by contrast, is a vegetarian, a pacifist, and a mystic who believes that all matter is alive and that the highest human function is to serve the existing lives as a “phagocyte” . He falls in love with Maslova and proposes to her, offering her a way out of her past and a new identity. Mary Pavlovna, who has devoted herself entirely to serving others, becomes Maslova’s closest friend and model. The group also includes Nabatoff, a cheerful peasant-born communist who believes the revolution should preserve the old village structures, and Rintzeva, a devoted wife who follows her husband into exile. These characters form a counter-society whose values—self-sacrifice, truthfulness, mutual aid—stand in direct opposition to the selfishness and hypocrisy of the aristocratic world Nekhludoff has left behind.

Consequences and Aftermath

The exile of political prisoners has devastating personal consequences. Kryltzoff dies, his body abandoned in a prison mortuary. Vera Doukhova, though she claims to be happy, is thin, yellow, and frightened, her neck “terribly thin” and her clothes shabby . Mary Pavlovna, who has given up her place on the cart to a pregnant criminal, marches on foot and is beaten by the convoy officer when she tries to protect a child . Yet the exile also creates new bonds: Simonson’s love for Maslova gives her a reason to live and to change, and she decides to follow him wherever he is sent, refusing Nekhludoff’s offer of marriage because she believes it would ruin his life. The political prisoners’ exile thus becomes the crucible in which the novel’s most hopeful transformations occur—not through the state’s punishment, but despite it. Nekhludoff, who has followed the gang to Siberia, comes to see the exiles not as criminals but as the only truly free people he has met, and he realizes that “the only place befitting an honest man in Russia at the present time is a prison” .

Narrative Role and Significance

Political prisoner exile functions in Resurrection as the ultimate indictment of the tsarist legal and penal system. The novel shows that the state does not punish crime so much as manufacture criminals, and that the most dangerous people to the regime are precisely those who are most moral. The exiles are not a threat to society; they are society’s conscience, and their suffering exposes the lie at the heart of the entire apparatus of justice. By placing Maslova among the political prisoners in the final third of the book, Tolstoy allows her to be transformed by their example, and he allows Nekhludoff to see, through his contact with them, the possibility of a life lived according to the Sermon on the Mount rather than the penal code. The exile of political prisoners is thus not merely a plot device but the novel’s central symbol of the conflict between the kingdom of Caesar and the kingdom of God.