Tolstoy intended the novel as a panoramic view of Russia at the end of the 19th century from the highest to the lowest levels of society and as an exposition of the injustice of man-made laws and the hypocrisy of the institutionalized church.

[3] In August 1898, after much deliberation and consulting with colleagues, Tolstoy decided to quickly finish, copyright and sell the novel to aid the emigration of persecuted pacifist Spiritual Christian Dukhobortsy from Russia to Canada.

[2] The book was to be published serially simultaneously in Russia, Germany, France, England and America, to quickly raise funds and give him time to finish the story, but delayed due to contract "difficulties" requiring parts to be censored and shortened.

Ten years later, Nekhlyudov sits on a jury which sentences the girl, Maslova, to prison in Siberia for murder (poisoning a client who beat her, a crime of which she is innocent).

Story after story he hears and even sees people chained without cause, beaten without cause, immured in dungeons for life without cause, and a twelve-year-old boy sleeping in a lake of human dung from an overflowing latrine because there is no other place on the prison floor, but clinging in a vain search for love to the leg of the man next to him, until the book achieves the bizarre intensity of a horrific fever dream.

Nekhlyudov decides to give up his property and pass ownership on to his peasants, leaving them to argue over the different ways in which they can organise the estate, and he follows Katyusha into exile, planning on marrying her.

On their long journey into Siberia, she falls in love with another man, and Nekhludov gives his blessing and still chooses to live as part of the penal community, seeking redemption.

It is usually regarded as inferior to War and Peace and Anna Karenina, although it is still marked as a very important literary achievement and a work that helps to understand the Russian Revolution.

Resurrection naturally forces comparison with those supreme works, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and it must be admitted that it falls below the lofty artistic achievements of these earlier novels.

However, its best things, artistically speaking, belong to the narrative method of Tolstoy's earlier fiction rather than to the compressed, direct, and stylistically unadorned manner of the later period after What Is Art?

In 'Resurrection' there is that same wealth of precise realistic detail which conveys the appearance of indubitable actuality to imagined situations, as well as roundness, completeness, and the vitality of life to his characters.

Tolstoy never did anything more delightfully infectious in fiction than the scene of the Easter service in the village church, where the young hero and heroine, after the traditional Russian greeting "Christ is risen," exchange kisses with the carefree rapture of mingled religious exaltation and dawning affinity for each other.

There is much of the old master also in Tolstoy's handling of the trial scene, in the portrayal of high society in both Moscow and Petersburg, and in the remarkably realistic treatment of the brutal march of the convicts to Siberia.

In late 1940–early 1941, Dmitri Shostakovich worked on an operatic realization entitled Katyusha Maslova, adapted by Anatoly Mariengof, but never developed it beyond sketches.

An Indian-Bengali film adaptation titled "জীবন জিজ্ঞাসা" (Jibon Jiggasha) was released in 1971, directed by Piyush Bose and starring Uttam Kumar and Supriya Chowdhury.

BBC Radio 4 broadcast a two-part adaptation by Robert Forrest of the novel on 31 December 2006 and 7 January 2007,[18] with the cast including Katherine Igoe as Katerina, Richard Dillane as Prince Dmitri, Vivienne Dixon as Lydia and Joanna Tope as Vera.