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By the end of July, I finished Tolstoy’s Resurrection. (Strongly recommended!)
Here I share with you some of my favourite parts, which positively stuns, inspires and changes(and therefore, “resurrects”) me in terms of my points on man-woman relationship, my views about government and people as well as my personal values of the whole world. I hope you can get inspired too.

Part I Chap XLIII
Maslova never expected to see him again, and certainly not here and not now; therefore, when she first recognised him, she could not keep back the memories which she never wished to revive. In the first moment she remembered dimly that new, wonderful world of feeling and of thought which had been opened to her by the charming young man who loved her and whom she loved, and then his incomprehensible cruelty and the whole string of humiliations and suffering which flowed from and followed that magic joy. This gave her pain, and, unable to understand it, she did what she was always in the habit of doing, she got rid of these memories by enveloping them in the mist of a depraved life. In the first moment, she associated the man now sitting beside her with the lad she had loved; but feeling that this gave her pain, she dissociated them again. Now, this well-dressed, carefully-got-up gentleman with perfumed beard was no longer the Nekhludov whom she had loved but only one of the people who made use of creatures like herself when they needed them, and whom creatures like herself had to make use of in their turn as profitably as they could; and that is why she looked at him with a luring smile and considered silently how she could best make use of him.

Part I Chapter XLIV
Before this interview, Nekhludov thought that when she saw how repentant he was and knew of his intention to serve her, Katusha would be pleased and touched, and would be Katusha again; but, to his horror, he found that Katusha existed no more, and in her place was Maslova. This astonished and horrified him.
What astonished him most was that Katusha was not ashamed of her position--not the position of a prisoner (she was ashamed of that), but her position as a prostitute--she seemed satisfied, even proud of it. And, yet, it could not be otherwise. Everybody, in order to be able to act, has to consider his occupation important and good. Therefore, in whatever position a person is, he is certain to form such a view of the life of men in general as will make his occupation seem important and good.
It is usually imagined that a thief, a murderer, a spy, a prostitute, acknowledging his or her profession to be evil, is ashamed of it. But the contrary is true. People whom fate and their sin-mistakes have placed in a certain position, however false that position may be, form a view of life in general which makes their position seem good and admissible. In order to keep up their view of life, these people instinctively keep to the circle of those people who share their views of life and their own place in it. This surprises us, where the persons concerned are thieves, bragging about their dexterity, prostitutes vaunting their depravity, or murderers boasting of their cruelty. But it surprises us only because the circle, the atmosphere in which these people live, is limited, and chiefly because we are outside it. But can we not observe the same phenomenon when the rich boast of their wealth, i.e., robbery; the commanders in the army pride themselves on victories, i.e., murder; and those in high places vaunt their power, i.e., violence? That we do not see the perversion in the views of life held by these people, only because the circle formed by them is larger and we ourselves belonged to it.
It was in this manner that Maslova had formed her views of life and of her own position. She was a prostitute condemned to hard labour, and yet she had a conception of life which made it possible for her to be satisfied with herself, and even to pride herself on her position.
According to this conception, the highest good for all men --old, young, schoolboys, generals, educated and uneducated--was sexual intercourse with attractive women; therefore, all men, even when they pretended to be occupied with other things, in reality desired nothing else. She was an attractive woman, and it lay in her power to satisfy, or not to satisfy, this desire, and she was therefore an important and necessary person. The whole of her former and present life bore out the correctness of this conception.
During the last ten years of her life, wherever she found herself, she saw that all men--from Nekhlyudoff and the old-police-officer down to the jailers in the prison--needed her;for she did not observe and she took no notice of those men who had no need of her. Therefore all the world seemed to her a collection of people agitated by lust, who were trying to get possession of her by all possible means--deception, violence, purchase, or cunning.
This, then, was how Maslova understood life; and from this point of view she was by no means the lowest but a very important person. And Maslova prized this view of life more than anything else; she could not but prize it, for if she lost this view of life, she would lose the importance it accorded her. And, in order not to lose the meaning of her life, she instinctively clung to the set that looked at life in the same way as she did. Feeling that Nekhludov wanted to lead her out into another world, she resisted him, foreseeing that she would have to lose her place in life, with the self-possession and self-respect it gave her. For this reason she drove from her the recollections of her early youth and her first relations with Nekhludov. These recollections did not correspond with her present conception of the world, and were therefore quite struck out of her memory, or, rather, lay somewhere buried and untouched, closed up and plastered over so that they could not escape, as bees, in order to protect the result of their labour, sometimes plaster up a nest of wax-worms. Therefore, the present Nekhludov was not the man she had once loved with a pure love, but only a rich gentleman whom she could, and must, make use of, and with whom she could only have the same relations as with men in general.

Part I Chap XLVIII
"All right. I`ll find out about them," Nekhludov said, more and more astonished by her free-and-easy manner. "But I was going to speak to you about myself. Do you remember what I told you last time?"
"You said a lot last time. What was it you told me?" she said, continuing to smile and to turn her head from side to side.
"I said I had come to ask you to forgive me," he began.
"What`s the use of that? Forgive, forgive, where`s the good of--"
"To atone for my sin, not by mere words, but in deed. I have made up my mind to marry you."
An expression of fear suddenly came over her face. Her squinting eyes remained fixed on him, and yet seemed not to be looking at him.
"What`s that for?" she said, with an angry frown.
"I feel that it is my duty before God to do it."
"What God have you found now? You are not saying what you ought to. God, indeed! What God? You ought to have remembered God then," she said, and stopped with her mouth open. It was only now that Nekhludov noticed that her breath smelled of spirits, and that he understood the cause of her excitement.
"Try and be calm," he said.
"Why should I be calm?" she began, quickly, flushing scarlet. "I am a convict, and you are a gentleman and a prince. There`s no need for you to soil yourself by touching me. You go to your princesses; my price is a ten-rouble note."
"However cruelly you may speak, you cannot express what I myself am feeling," he said, trembling all over; "you cannot imagine to what extent I feel myself guilty towards you.
"Feel yourself guilty?" she said, angrily mimicking him. "You did not feel so then, but threw me 100 roubles. That`s your price."
"I know, I know; but what is to be done now?" said Nekhludov. "I have decided not to leave you, and what I have said I shall do."
"And I say you sha`n`t," she said, and laughed aloud.
"Katusha" he said, touching her hand.
"You go away. I am a convict and you a prince, and you`ve no business here," she cried, pulling away her hand, her whole appearance transformed by her wrath. "You`ve got pleasure out of me in this life, and want to save yourself through me in the life to come. You are disgusting to me--your spectacles and the whole of your dirty fat mug. Go, go!" she screamed, starting to her feet.
The jailer came up to them. "What are you kicking up this row for?` That won`t--"
"Let her alone, please," said Nekhludov.
"She must not forget herself," said the jailer. "Please wait a little," said Nekhludov, and the jailer returned to the window.
Maslova sat down again, dropping her eyes and firmly clasping her small hands.
Nekhludov stooped over her, not knowing what to do.
"You do not believe me?" he said.
"That you mean to marry me? It will never be. I`ll rather hang myself. So there!"
"Well, still I shall go on serving you."
"That`s your affair, only I don`t want anything from you. I am telling you the plain truth," she said. "Oh, why did I not die then?" she added, and began to cry piteously.
Nekhludov could not speak; her tears infected him.
She lifted her eyes, looked at him in surprise, and began to wipe her tears with her kerchief.
The jailer came up again and reminded them that it was time to part.
Maslova rose.
"You are excited. If it is possible, I shall come again tomorrow; you think it over," said Nekhludov.
She gave him no answer and, without looking up, followed the jailer out of the room.

Part I Chap LIX
One of the most widespread superstitions is that every man has some distinguishing quality; one is kind, another cruel, the third wise, or stupid, or energetic, or apathetic. Men are not really like that. We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more often wise than stupid, more often energetic than apathetic, or the reverse; but it would not be true to say of one man that he is kind and wise, of another that he is bad and foolish. And yet we always classify mankind in this way. And this is false. Men are like rivers: the water is the same in one and all; but every river is narrow here, more rapid there, here slower, there broader, now clear, now dull, now cold, now warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears in himself the germs of every human quality;but sometimes one quality manifests itself, sometimes another, and the man often becomes unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.

Part II Chap XL
The heat in the large third-class carriage, which had been standing in the burning sun all day, was so great that Nekhludov did not go in, but stopped on the little platform behind the carriage which formed a passage to the next one. But there was not a breath of fresh air here either, and Nekhludov breathed freely only when the train had passed the buildings and the draught blew across the platform.
"Yes, killed," he repeated to himself, the words he had used to his sister. And in his imagination in the midst of all other impressions there arose with wonderful clearness the beautiful face of the second dead convict, with the smile of the lips, the severe expression of the brows, and the small, firm ear below the shaved bluish skull.
And what seemed terrible was that he had been murdered, and no one knew who had murdered him. Yet he had been murdered. He was led out like all the rest of the prisoners by Maslennikoff`s orders. Maslennikoff had probably given the order in the usual manner, had signed with his stupid flourish the paper with the printed heading, and most certainly would not consider himself guilty. Still less would the careful doctor who examined the convicts consider himself guilty. He had performed his duty accurately, and had separated the weak. How could he have foreseen this terrible heat, or the fact that they would start so late in the day and in such crowds? The prison inspector? But the inspector had only carried into execution the order that on a given day a certain number of exiles and convicts--men and women--had to be sent off. The convoy officer could not be guilty either, for his business was to receive a certain number of persons in a certain place, and to deliver up the same number. He conducted them in the usual manner, and could not foresee that two such strong men as those Nekhludov saw would not be able to stand it and would die. No one is guilty, and yet the men have been murdered by these people who are not guilty of their murder.
"All this comes," Nekhludov thought, "from the fact that all these people, governors, inspectors, police officers, and men, consider that there are circumstances in which human relations are not necessary between human beings. All these men, Maslennikoff, and the inspector, and the convoy officer, if they were not governor, inspector, officer, would have considered twenty times before sending people in such heat in such a mass--would have stopped twenty times on the way, and, seeing that a man was growing weak, gasping for breath, would have led him into the shade, would have given him water and let him rest, and if an accident had still occurred they would have expressed pity. But they not only did not do it, but hindered others from doing it, because they considered not men and their duty towards them but only the office they themselves filled, and held what that office demanded of them to be above human relations. "That`s what it is," Nekhludov went on in his thoughts. "If one acknowledges but for a single hour that anything can be more important than love for one`s fellowmen, even in some one exceptional case, any crime can be committed without a feeling of guilt."
Nekhludov was so engrossed by his thoughts that he did not notice how the weather changed. The sun was covered over by a low-hanging, ragged cloud. A compact, light grey cloud was rapidly coming from the west, and was already falling in heavy, driving rain on the fields and woods far in the distance. Moisture, coming from the cloud, mixed with the air. Now and then the cloud was rent by flashes of lightning, and peals of thunder mingled more and more often with the rattling of the train. The cloud came nearer and nearer, the rain-drops driven by the wind began to spot the platform and Nekhludov`s coat; and he stepped to the other side of the little platform, and, inhaling the fresh, moist air--filled with the smell of corn and wet earth that had long been waiting for rain--he stood looking at the gardens, the woods, the yellow rye fields, the green oatfields, the dark-green strips of potatoes in bloom, that glided past. Everything looked as if covered over with varnish--the green turned greener, the yellow yellower, the black blacker.
"More! more!" said Nekhludov, gladdened by the sight of gardens and fields revived by the beneficent shower. The shower did not last long. Part of the cloud had come down in rain, part passed over, and the last fine drops fell straight on to the earth. The sun reappeared, everything began to glisten, and in the east--not very high above the horizon--appeared a bright rainbow, with the violet tint very distinct and broken only at one end.
"Why, what was I thinking about?" Nekhludov asked himself when all these changes in nature were over, and the train ran into a cutting between two high banks.
"Oh! I was thinking that all those people (inspector, convoy men--all those in the service) are for the greater part kind people--cruel only because they are serving." He recalled Maslennikoff`s indifference when he told him about what was being done in the prison, the inspector`s severity, the cruelty of the convoy officer when he refused places on the carts to those who asked for them, and paid no attention to the fact that there was a woman in travail in the train. All these people were evidently invulnerable and impregnable to the simplest feelings of compassion only because they held offices. "As officials they were impermeable to the feelings of humanity, as this paved ground is impermeable to the rain." Thus thought Nekhludov as he looked at the railway embankment paved with stones of different colours, down which the water was running in streams instead of soaking into the earth. "Perhaps it is necessary to pave the banks with stones, but it is sad to look at the ground, which might be yielding corn, grass, bushes, or trees in the same way as the ground visible up there is doing--deprived of vegetation, and so it is with men," thought Nekhludov. "Perhaps these governors, inspectors, policemen, are needed, but it is terrible to see men deprived of the chief human attribute, that of love and sympathy for one another. The thing is," he continued, "that these people consider lawful what is not lawful, and do not consider the eternal, immutable law, written in the hearts of men by God, as law. That is why I feel so depressed when I am with these people. I am simply afraid of them, and really they are terrible, more terrible than robbers. A robber might, after all, feel pity, but they can feel no pity, they are inured against pity as these stones are against vegetation. That is what makes them terrible. It is said that the Pougatcheffs, the Razins [leaders of rebellions in Russia: Stonka Razin in the 17th and Pougatcheff in the 18th century] are terrible. These are a thousand times more terrible," he continued, in his thoughts. "If a psychological problem were set to find means of making men of our time--Christian, humane, simple, kind people--perform the most horrible crimes without feeling guilty, only one solution could be devised: to go on doing what is being done. It is only necessary that these people should he governors, inspectors, policemen; that they should be fully convinced that there is a kind of business, called government service, which allows men to treat other men as things, without human brotherly relations with them, and also that these people should be so linked together by this government service that the responsibility for the results of their actions should not fall on any one of them separately. Without these conditions, the terrible acts I witnessed to-day would be impossible in our times. It all lies in the fact that men think there are circumstances in which one may deal with human beings without love; and there are no such circumstances. One may deal with things without love—we may cut down trees, make bricks, hammer iron without love; but we cannot deal with men without it, just as one cannot deal with bees without being careful. If you deal carelessly with bees you will injure them, and will be injured yourself. And so with men. It cannot be otherwise, because mutural love is the fundamental law of human life. It is true that a man cannot force another to love him, as he can force him to work for him; but it does not follow that a man may deal with men without love, especially if one demands or expects anything from them. If you feel no love, sit still," Nekhludov thought; "occupy yourself with things, with yourself, with anything you like, only not with men. Just as you can only eat without injuring yourself when you are hungry, so you can only usefully and without injury deal with men when you love. Only let yourself deal with a man without love, as I did yesterday with my brother-in-law, and there are no limits to the cruelty and brutality you will show to others, as I witnessed today, and no limits to the suffering you will bring on yourself, as all my life proves. Yes, yes, it is so," thought Nekhludov; "it is true; yes, it is true," he repeated, enjoying the freshness after the torturing heat, and conscious of having attained to the fullest clearness on a question that had long occupied him.

Part III Chap XXVIII
In hopes of finding a confirmation of this thought in the Gospel, Nekhludov began reading it from the beginning. When he had read the Sermon on the Mount, which had always touched him, he saw in it for the first time to-day not beautiful abstract thoughts, setting forth for the most part exaggerated and impossible demands, but simple, clear, practical laws. If these laws were carried out in practice (and this was quite possible) they would establish perfectly new and surprising conditions of social life, in which the violence that filled Nekhludov with such indignation would cease of itself. Not only this, but the greatest blessing that is obtainable to men, the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth would he established. There were five of these laws.
The first (Matt. v. 21-26), that man should not kill, and should not even be angry with his brother, should not consider one "Raca," worthless; and if he has quarrelled with anyone he should make it up with him before bringing his gift to God--i.e., before praying.
The second (Matt. v. 27-32), that man should not commit adultery, and should not even seek for enjoyment in a woman`s beauty, and if he has once come together with a woman he should never be faithless to her.
The third (Matt. 33-37), that man should never bind himself by oath.
The fourth (Matt. 38-42), that man should not demand an eye for an eye, but when struck on one cheek should offer the other, should forgive an injury and bear it humbly, and never refuse a service desired of him.
The fifth (Matt. 43-48), that man should not hate his enemies, nor fight them, but love them, help them, serve them.

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