Resurrection

Juror number one looks at the woman in the dock, accused of poisoning a merchant, and recognises her. He seduced her when she was a servant in his aunts' house and he was a student on his way back to the regiment. He gave her a hundred roubles. Everything that has happened to her since happened because of that. The rest of this enormous book is what he does about it, which is to follow her through the courts, the prisons and eventually across Siberia, discovering at every stage that the machinery grinding her is staffed entirely by decent men doing their jobs. Tolstoy sold the serial rights to pay for a persecuted sect's passage to Canada, and he wrote it as a man who had stopped believing in the institutions he was born to own. It is angrier than anything else he made, and the anger is what keeps it alive.