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. He 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. Reception and criticism The book was eagerly awaited. "How all of us rejoiced," one critic wrote on learning that Tolstoy had decided to make his first fiction in 25 years, not a short novella but a full-length novel. "May God grant that there will be more and more!" It outsold Anna Karenina and War and Peace. Speaking of the Russian nation, William James has said: "I was especially struck by two books. Resurrection by Tolstoy and Karamasoff by Dostoevsky. To me the characters exhibited in them seem to come from another planet, where everything is different, and better. They have landed on earth by accident and are irritated by this, almost insulted. There is something childish, ingenuous in them, and one is reminded of the obstinacy of an honest alchemist who believes that he is capable of discovering the 'Cause of all causes'." Despite its early success, today Resurrection is not as famous as the works that preceded it. It is usually regarded as inferior to War and Peace and Anna Karenna, although it is still marked as a very important literary achievement and a work that helps to understand the Russian Revolution. Some writers have said that Resurrection has characters that are one-dimensional and that as a whole the book lacks Tolstoy's earlier attention to detail. By this point, Tolstoy was writing in a style that favored meaning over aesthetic quality. Brian Aldiss calls it the greatest of Tolstoy's novels. It is said of legendary Japanese filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi that he was of the opinion that "All melodrama is based on Tolstoy's Resurrection". Adaptations Operatic adaptations of the novel include Risurrezione (1904) by Italian composer Franco Alfano, Vzkriesenie (1960) by