Redemption and Two Other Plays

About

Tolstoy's late dramatic works collected here — including The Living Corpse (known in English as Redemption) — represent the final phase of his theatrical ambition. The Living Corpse (1900, published posthumously) follows Fyodor Protasov, who fakes his own death to free his wife for a happier marriage, only to find that the law's discovery of his deception destroys everyone. It is Tolstoy's most dramatically accomplished late play, less didactic than The Power of Darkness and more personally felt. The story drew on an actual legal case and Tolstoy's own spiritual preoccupations with guilt, sacrifice, and the law's inability to address moral complexity.