The Trial (Part One)

Though hundreds of thousands of people, crowded into one small place, had done their best to disfigure the earth they lived on — paving it with stones so that nothing could grow, rooting out every blade of grass, cutting down the trees, driving away the birds and beasts, filling the air with the smoke of coal and oil — spring was spring, even in the town. The sun shone; the grass, wherever it had not been scraped away, came up green between the paving stones of the boulevards; the birches and the poplars and the bird-cherries unfolded their sticky, fragrant leaves; the lime trees swelled their buds; the jackdaws, sparrows and pigeons were joyfully building their nests in the spring, and the flies buzzed against the sunny walls. Plants, birds, insects and children were glad. Only men — grown men — did not stop deceiving and tormenting themselves and one another. They considered sacred and important not this spring morning, not this beauty of God's world, given for the happiness of all creatures, but what they themselves had invented to rule over one another.

So, in the office of the provincial prison, it was thought sacred and important that on the previous day an order had come, stamped and numbered, that three prisoners — two women and a man — should be brought to the court that morning at nine o'clock. One of the women was the chief criminal and had to be delivered separately.

The warder unlocked the door of the women's cell, and a hot, stinking air came out of it, and he called: "Maslova! To the court!" A young woman of medium height came out, in a grey prison coat over a white jacket and petticoat. Her face had the peculiar whiteness of people who live long shut in, like potato shoots in a cellar. Her small hands were white too, and her full neck. Her black, shining eyes, one of them with a slight squint, looked out from under her kerchief. Two curls of black hair had escaped from it, purposely, it seemed. She walked to the court between two soldiers through the streets, and the people stared at her, and a peasant crossed himself and gave her a copeck; and she was pleased to feel the spring air on her face after the prison.

Her story was an ordinary one. Her mother had been an unmarried farm labourer in a village where two elderly maiden ladies, sisters, owned the estate. Her mother had a child every year, and the children were baptised and then neglected, and died. The sixth was a girl. One of the old ladies, coming into the cowshed, saw the healthy little thing, and took pity on her, and stood godmother to her. When the mother died, the old ladies took the girl, then three years old, into the house, half as a ward and half as a servant. They called her Katyusha. She was a lively girl with black, sparkling eyes. She sewed, she tidied the rooms, she read aloud to the ladies; and when she was sixteen, their nephew came to stay.

He was Prince Dmitri Ivanovich Nekhlyudov, a rich young student, nineteen years old, pure and enthusiastic, who had come to the country for the summer to write an essay on the ownership of land, and who believed then that the land should belong to no one. He and Katyusha loved each other, without knowing it, as innocently as children. They played catch with the other young people in the meadow, and once, running, they found themselves alone behind a lilac bush by the ditch, and he kissed her; and that was all. He did not think of anything more. It would have seemed to him a crime.

Three years later he came again, an officer on his way to the war, and stayed with his aunts over Easter. He was a different man. In those three years he had learned to live as everyone in his world lived: for himself, for his pleasures, believing what others believed, spending money, drinking, gambling; and his own true self, the spiritual man in him, had been stifled, and the animal man had taken its place. At the midnight Easter service in the village church he saw Katyusha in her white dress with a blue sash and a red bow in her black hair, her face shining with happiness; and when they exchanged the Easter kiss, "Christ is risen!" — "He is risen indeed!" — he felt that there was something in her eyes that was for him alone.

Two days later, on the night before he left, in the fog, with the ice cracking and breaking on the river, he went to her room, and she did not resist him. In the morning, as he was leaving, he caught her in the passage and pushed into her hand an envelope with a hundred-rouble note in it. He felt it was the right thing to do; everybody did it. Then he went to the war.

One dark autumn night, some months later, Katyusha learned that Nekhlyudov's train would pass through the station three miles from the village, where it stopped for only two minutes. He had written to his aunts that he could not visit them. She ran through the rain and the mud in the dark, with another girl, to see him. She reached the station as the second bell was ringing, and ran along the train, and saw him through the lighted window of a first-class carriage, sitting on a velvet seat with his coat off, playing cards with other officers, laughing. She tapped on the window with her frozen hand. The third bell rang; the train moved. He did not see her. She ran beside the carriage, and then it went faster, and the last carriage passed her, and she was left in the rain and the wind on the edge of the platform. "He is in a lighted carriage, in a velvet seat, drinking and joking, and I am here in the mud, in the dark, in the wind and the rain," she thought. And from that night she stopped believing in God and in goodness. She was sure that everyone lived only for themselves, and that all the talk of God and goodness was a trick to fool people.

She found that she was with child. The old ladies, when they knew, dismissed her. She was sent from place to place, worked for a forest warden who pursued her, lived with an aunt, gave birth to a child that was taken to the foundling hospital and died. And then — the story of all such girls — she went from one man to another, from service to service, until at last she was living in a licensed house in the town, under a yellow ticket, as a prostitute. She had been there seven years. And the only thing that made that life bearable was drink, and tobacco, and the conviction that all men wanted only one thing from women.

That spring morning Nekhlyudov woke late in his fine house in Moscow, on a bed with a high spring mattress, and washed with scented soap, and put on a clean shirt, and drank his coffee. He was thirty-five now, had left the army, and lived on his estates, which were large, and painted a little, and did nothing. He had a liaison with the wife of a marshal of the nobility, which he wished to end, and a half-engagement with a rich and well-born girl, Princess Missy Korchagina, whom everyone expected him to marry. He was due that morning to serve on a jury at the district court.

In the jury room he found the other jurors already waiting: a stout merchant who smelled of wine and was cheerful about everything; a retired colonel who knew the law and wanted to be foreman; a clerk; a little old man; a schoolmaster with long hair who talked of progress. They chose the colonel as foreman. Nekhlyudov felt pleasantly important. He was performing a public duty.

The court was a large room with a portrait of the Emperor in a gilt frame and an icon in the corner. The jurors were merchants, a retired colonel, a clerk, a Jew, a schoolteacher; the judges were the president, who was in a hurry to see a red-haired Swiss lady at six; a member who was in a bad temper because he had quarrelled with his wife; and a member who believed in good omens and counted his steps. The case was the poisoning of a Siberian merchant, Smelkov, in a hotel room. He had died after drinking brandy given him by a prostitute; and he had had money, which had disappeared.

The three accused were brought in: two hotel servants, a man and a woman, Kartinkin and Botchkova; and the prostitute, Lyubov Maslova. Nekhlyudov looked at her, and could not take his eyes away. He knew those black eyes with the slight squint. "It can't be," he thought. And then: "It is she." Katyusha. And he understood that he had done this. He had been the beginning of it all.

"Your name?" asked the president. "Lyubov," she answered. Nekhlyudov felt the blood rush to his face. She had been Katyusha. "Your profession?" She hesitated. "I was living in a house." "What sort of house?" "You know yourself what sort," she said, and smiled, and then looked around the court with a quick glance, and her eyes passed over Nekhlyudov without stopping.

There followed the long, dull procedure of the court: the reading of the indictment, the questions, the witnesses, the evidence of the doctors who had opened the merchant's body and examined its organs, described at tedious length and placed in jars on the table. Nekhlyudov heard none of it. He sat looking at her and remembering.

The case was heard. Maslova told her story: the merchant had sent her from the brothel to his hotel to fetch money from his trunk; the hotel servants had given her a powder, telling her it would make him sleep so that he would leave her alone; she had put it in his brandy, believing it a sleeping powder; she had taken nothing but the forty roubles he had given her and a ring he had given her himself. The servants had stolen the money. Everything she said was plainly true. The prosecutor, a young man who had prepared a speech full of scientific phrases about heredity and the criminal type, delivered it. The defence lawyers were weak. The president, anxious to get away, hurried the summing-up.

In the jury room, the jurors argued for hours. Nekhlyudov, shaking with shame and fear that someone would know, pleaded that she had not meant to kill him. They agreed: she was guilty of giving the powder, but without intent to rob. But in writing the verdict they forgot to add the words "without intent to cause death"; and so the verdict, as it stood, meant that she had poisoned the man without any reason, and was a murderess. The judges saw the mistake; but it was late, and the president was in a hurry, and the law did not oblige them to correct it. Maslova was sentenced to four years' penal servitude in Siberia.

When the sentence was read, she cried out to the whole court: "I am not guilty! I am not guilty! It's a sin! I'm not guilty! I never wished it, I never thought it. It's the truth I'm telling!" And she sank down on the bench, sobbing aloud, while they led the others out.

Nekhlyudov stayed in the court after the verdict and went to the president and asked whether the mistake could be put right. The president, already in his overcoat, told him he must find a lawyer and appeal to the Senate. Then Nekhlyudov went to see the prosecutor, and asked permission to visit Maslova in prison. The prosecutor looked at him with surprise. Nekhlyudov said, his face burning, that he had seduced her, and that he was the cause of her ruin. The prosecutor smiled politely and wrote out the permission.

Nekhlyudov went that evening to dine at the Korchagins', in a house of great wealth, where everything was refined and clean and arranged for the comfort of the few, and where everyone was charming and false; and he saw, as though for the first time, the old prince with his red face and his greedy chewing, and Missy with her little affectations, and her mother lying on her couch in a darkened room arranging her lighting so as to look young. He saw that all of it was shameful, and that he was shameful too.

That night, at home, he walked up and down his rooms, and remembered everything: the lilac bush, the Easter morning, the hundred-rouble note, the fog and the ice on the river. And he felt what he had felt only a few times in his life before: the need to clean his soul — to sweep out all the rubbish that had gathered there and stopped up his true life. "I am a scoundrel," he thought, "and that is the whole truth." He prayed, asking God to help him, to come and dwell in him and cleanse him; and he felt that what he asked had already been done. The God who lived in him had awakened in his consciousness. He resolved to go to her, to beg her forgiveness, to do everything to lighten her lot. And if it was necessary, he would marry her.

On his way to the prison, Nekhlyudov felt both fear and exaltation, as before a battle. He had begun at once to set his life in order. He wrote to the marshal's wife to break off with her. He decided to tell Missy the truth. He decided to give up his land. He no longer saw the world as he had seen it yesterday; everything seemed to have shifted a little, and he saw the wrongs in it everywhere.

He went to the prison. The visiting room was divided by two gratings, with a corridor between, so that the prisoners on one side and the visitors on the other had to shout to be heard over the noise of all the others shouting; and in that din he asked to see Maslova. She came to the grating, and did not recognise him. She thought he was a client from her old life, or a philanthropist, and smiled at him with the professional smile of her trade. When he told her who he was, she was startled, and then indifferent. She had put him out of her mind long ago. She asked him for ten roubles.

Maslova lived in a cell with fourteen women and children. There was Korableva, a tall, strong old woman, sentenced for killing her husband with an axe, who mothered the others and secretly sold vodka; Fedosya, a pretty young peasant woman, little more than a child, who had tried to poison her husband soon after her wedding and was now loved by him and by everyone; a red-haired woman with a baby, imprisoned for stealing; a deacon's wife; a railway watchman's wife who had been sent to prison because a train had been in an accident while her husband was away and she had not shown the flag. They quarrelled and fought and told each other their stories; and when Maslova came back from the court sentenced, Korableva gave her vodka, and they all cried with her.

He came again, in the prison office, where they could talk alone. He told her he had come to ask her forgiveness, that he was guilty before her, that he wanted to atone, that he would marry her. She looked at him with hatred.

"Go away! I'm a convict, and you're a prince, and you've no business here. You used me in this world, and now you want to save yourself through me in the next! You disgust me — your spectacles and your fat, ugly face! Go away!" Then she wept, and then asked for money again, and drank the brandy the warders sold her. She had built a whole view of the world in which men used women, and she was not ashamed of her life; and the thought of him shook that view and brought back memories of a life she had buried. That she could not bear.

On Sunday, in the prison church, the priest held the service for the prisoners. He was dressed in a strange, uncomfortable brocade vestment, and he read and sang in a language that nobody understood; and then he cut bread into little pieces and put them in a cup of wine, and declared that they were the body and blood of God. And he gave this to the prisoners, while the governor and the warders stood in front, crossing themselves. And it never occurred to anyone present — not the priest, not the governor, not Maslova — that the very Jesus whose name the priest repeated so often had forbidden exactly what was being done there: had forbidden not only this meaningless much-speaking and this blasphemous sorcery of priests over bread and wine, but in the most definite way had forbidden men to call other men their teachers, had forbidden prayers in temples, and had ordered each man to pray in solitude; had forbidden to judge, to imprison, to torment, to disgrace or punish men; and had said that he came to set the captives free.

This chapter was the one most heavily cut by the Russian censors, and its publication was one of the reasons for Tolstoy's excommunication by the Orthodox Church in 1901.

The lawyer was Fanarin, the most celebrated advocate in Moscow, a clever, fleshy, self-satisfied man, who took Nekhlyudov's money and told him frankly that the case was poor, that the verdict was a matter of form rather than justice, and that it would all depend on which senators sat on the appeal. Nekhlyudov listened, and saw that to Fanarin, as to the judges, the woman in the prison was not a person but a case.

Nekhlyudov engaged a famous lawyer to appeal against the sentence. He went every day to the prison, and in the prison he saw, as if for the first time, the hundreds of men and women and children shut up there: people arrested by mistake, people imprisoned for having no passport, peasants punished for a quarrel, political prisoners, old women sent away for setting fire to a house they had not set fire to. He took up their cases one after another, and wrote petitions, and found that the more he did, the more there was to do.

Among the prisoners whose cases he took up were an old peasant woman, Menshova, and her son, who had been imprisoned on a false charge of arson; the man who had really set the fire, the tavern-keeper, had wanted the son's young wife and had arranged it. Nekhlyudov saw that their whole crime was that they were poor and had no one to speak for them. He saw also a hundred and thirty men kept in prison for a month because their passports had expired; and political prisoners, students and young women, held for months without trial for owning forbidden books. He saw that the prison, the court, the whole machine was not made to punish crime but to protect the rich and the powerful against the poor, and that the people who ran it were neither better nor worse than he was.

Maslova, at his request, was moved to the prison hospital to work as a nurse. And there, slowly, she changed. She gave up drink. She stopped smoking. She began to remember the girl she had been. One day she told him, not looking at him, that she would not marry him — but she no longer said it with hatred.