Gyorgy Lukacs says of Dostoevsky and Lenin said of Tolstoy – who the Bolshevik loathed – that they ask the right questions, regarding the state of society, they make the right diagnoses – in Tolstoy’s case that the evils plaguing Russia, barely a generation after the abolition of serfdom, were engrained in a system of exaggerated inequality, exploitation and injustice and that radical measures to remedy the situation were needed to avoid catastrophe – which is what befell Russian in 1917 and for the next 70 years – but come up with the wrong solutions.
Anyone familiar with the 19th century Russian novel, which along with Homer, Greek tragedy and Shakespeare, represent the highest forms of literature, will know of the febrile social and political climate that form their backdrop. While Dostoevsky’s solution to Russia’s turmoil was nationalism, tradition, Orthodoxy, Tolstoy understood that social and particularly economic reform was necessary.
Thus, in We Live Again/Resurrection, Prince Dmitri, the landowning nobleman, embraces land redistribution – as did the blue-blooded Tolstoy, partly inspired by Georgism and partly by Christian ethics – and sinks his teeth into the corruption and inhumanity of the church, the judiciary and class system. It was Tolstoy’s reformist approach that irked Lenin, whose vision for Russia was much more drastic and, stripped of any Christian outlook, deranged.
Indeed, it would be wrong to see Resurrection as a political novel and the resurrection of the title doesn’t just refer to national renewal, but personal revival. Both Prince Dmitri and the woman he has wronged, the peasant girl Katusha, have entered a spiritual Hades, out of which Tolstoy wants to lead them. Resurrection, an escape from hell, from death, is the fundamental tenet of Orthodox Christianity, which is why Easter plays such a prominent part in the novel and film.
All these social and political themes in Tolstoy’s novel are, remarkably you might think, prevalent in Mamoulian’s film. The film is clear in its denunciation and mockery of the Russian caste system and openly sympathises with those characters that offer a socialist critique and alternative to it. We Live Again may be one of the very few Hollywood film that positively refers to and discusses socialism.
Again, however, We Live Again is not an explicitly political film; it is a classic Hollywood melodrama, conceived by Samuel Goldwyn as a star vehicle for Anna Sten, who he promoted as a new Garbo, while the censors at the Hays Office overlooked all its controversial political and sexual themes precisely because they regarded the drama of sin and redemption as a morally instructive and uplifting message for American audiences.