Russian film adaptations of the literary heritage have been part of Russian cultural history for over a hundred years, with works by Pushkin, Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy and Dostoevskii adapted for the screen before the Revolution and the dawn of the ‘Golden Age’ of Soviet cinema. The director Mikhail Shveitser (1920-2000) came to specialize in adapting Russian literary works for the screen, and his film of Tolstoy’s 1899 novel Resurrection (Воскресение) was his first attempt to film the classical heritage, and one of the first Soviet adaptations of Tolstoy’s work. Released in two parts in 1960 and 1962, the film is a faithful rendering of the plot of Tolstoy’s novel about a repentant nobleman, social injustice and the corruption of the Russian legal system. Moreover, it also has a contemporary relevance, and explicitly references the injustices of the penal system under Stalin and the liberalization of the post-Stalin ‘Thaw’. The film Resurrection, consequently, serves as an example of the particular Russian approach to filming classical literature by not only bringing the literary heritage to life on the screen, but also making cultural politics the focus of attention for the time in which it was made.