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Rh the mask of effrontery. The pure, faint light which little by little waxes within the vicious mind of Maslova, and at last illumines her with a sacrificial flame, has the touching beauty of one of those rays of sunshine which transfigure some humble scene painted by the brush of Rembrandt. There is no severity here, even for the warders and executioners. “Lord, forgive them, for they know not what they do!”… The worst of it is that often they do know what they do; they feel all the pangs of remorse, yet they cannot do otherwise. There broods over the book the sense of the crushing and inevitable fatality which weighs upon those who suffer and those who cause that suffering: the director of the prison, full of natural kindness, as sick of his jailer’s life as of the pianoforte exercises of the pale, sickly daughter with the dark circles beneath her eyes, who indefatigably murders a rhapsody of Liszt; the Governor-General of the Siberian town, intelligent and kindly, who, in the hope of escaping the inevitable conflict between the good he wishes to do and the evil he is forced to do, has been steadily drinking since the age of thirty-five; who is always sufficiently master of himself to keep up appearances, even when he is drunk. And among these people we find the ordinary affection for wife and children, although their calling renders them pitiless in respect of the rest of humanity.

The only character in this book who has no objective reality is Nekhludov himself; and this is so because Tolstoy has invested him with his own