The Forged Coupon (1911)

The Forged Coupon is a two-part novella that skilfully explores the intertwined lives of more than a dozen characters that are connected by one seemingly harmless, but evil deed.

Tolstoy's moral/thesis is that salvation is within us all and that it can be gained through a personal reading/relationship with the Bible. For him, church and state complicate life and impede salvation. Tolstoy knew this personally, for he was excommunicated by the Orthodox Church a year before he started this late novel. The bureaucracy is corrupt, it has no true sense of justice, and it sits around only to imprison and execute. The clergy is full of phonies who don't believe and who don't care about the suffering masses. Together, church and state work together to the turn people away from God and to create a society of selfish, solipsistic individuals that go around cheating, killing, and pissing each other off. However, all is not lost for Tolstoy.

Redemption is still possible, for Tolstoy, through religion, the renunciation of violence, and the dedication of one's life to works of good corporal mercy.

The Forged Coupon is a good, comforting novel that champions good hearts and good people. It's a nice read, but there's a certain unrealism in the latter half, an unrealism that is comforting, yet, it doesn’t fully satisfy humanist scepticism. Secular humanists, of course, would not be satisfied with the story since it’s resolved through Tolstoyan spiritual virtue. Religion, regardless of its name, would be a crutch that coddles individuals instead of liberating them.

Then again, this is just a story, and any reader of Tolstoy should expect that his unique spirituality is there in the printed page, whether we agree with it or not.

Minor nitpick: Page 96, in the W. W. Norton English translation (1985), features a spelling mistake in an otherwise fine translation. (Remember) in the second last paragraph is missing a "b."