God Sees the Truth, but Waits

Closely related to the theme of forgiveness is the theme of justice—specifically, the juxtaposition of infallible divine justice and corrupt human judgment. Aksenov, the protagonist, is unjustly convicted of a murder he did not commit and subsequently spends 26 years in a Siberian prison. Tolstoy’s earlier version of the story, recounted by one of the characters in War and Peace, illustrates the idea that human judgment is inevitably unjust. The corollary, which Tolstoy explores at length in the standalone story, is that true justice, like forgiveness, can come only from God.

For Tolstoy, human judgment is not true justice. The judicial system is inherently flawed and corrupt, as it relies on partial information, physical force, and bodily punishment: Unlike God, human authorities do not “see the truth.” The human judicial system completely fails Aksenov: He is arrested and convicted on misleading evidence and punished for a crime he did not commit while the true criminal goes unpunished by those same human authorities. That even the tsar—the supreme judicial authority of Tolstoy’s Russia—denies Aksenov’s petition and unjustly pronounces an innocent man guilty highlights this failure of human judgment.

Moreover, the punishments that the flawed human judicial system metes out are essentially superficial, relying on force and violence. The police officers that arrest Aksenov and the authorities in the Siberian prison represent the threat of bodily harm. When Aksenov learns of Makar’s attempt to escape the prison, Makar asks him not to betray him for fear that the authorities will “flog the life out of [him]” (121). This system functions by instilling fear, which is one reason why it deals with appearances rather than the truth. When the police discover a bloody knife among Aksenov’s things, “his voice was broken, his face pale, and he trembled with fear as though he were guilty” (118). In other words, the human judicial system judges people guilty because they appear guilty—not necessarily because they are guilty.

Divine justice, as Aksenov comes to realize, is the only true justice. This is because (as the story’s title suggests) God—and God alone—sees the truth. At the same time, God also waits: His judgment is not immediate. This underlines another important aspect of true, divine justice, which is eternal rather than temporal. While the judicial system is all too quick to judge based on present evidence, biases, or pressures, God exists outside of time and can dispense justice without flawed judgment. Consequently, true justice—God’s justice—must be sought not in the human, temporal world but in the divine, eternal realm.

The juxtaposition of human judgment and divine justice underpins Aksenov’s transformation over the course of the story. When he is wrongly convicted, Aksenov begins to realize that only God knows the truth, but he does not fully acknowledge the corollary—namely, that God alone can judge. Indeed, Aksenov himself becomes a kind of judge in the prison, acting as arbiter when quarrels arise among the prisoners. He also judges Makar—the person he views as the cause of his unjust sufferings—until the very end of the story. Yet Aksenov glimpses the limitations of human judgment when he reflects that his suspicions about Makar may be incorrect, and when Aksenov declines to report Makar’s attempt to escape to the prison authorities, he explicitly rejects human judgment in favor of divine justice, saying that “[i]t’s not God’s will that [he] should tell” (122). By the end of the story, Aksenov finally realizes that God is the only true source of justice when he tells Makar that God—not he—will forgive him.

Aksenov’s realization that God alone can forgive implicitly accompanied his realization that God is the only true source of justice. Makar, on the other hand, clings to the illusory realm of human judgment when he seeks absolution for his sins by confessing to the earthly authorities. Yet Aksenov’s death represents the final triumph of divine justice: Having completed his spiritual journey, Aksenov departs the corrupt human world to receive true justice in an eternal afterlife.