In her recent statements, it felt as if Clinton were crossing a line, policy specifics or no, in the way she was choosing to frame economic questions. PHOTOGRAPH BY AL DRAGO / CQ ROLL CALL VIA GETTY

The twenty-first-century boom in new translations of the great nineteenth-century Russian novels has not encompassed one significant work: the last of Leo Tolstoy’s three full-length novels, “Resurrection,” originally published in 1899. The English translation of “Resurrection” that is easiest to find is the first, from 1900, by the Tolstoy acolyte Louise Maude, and there hasn’t been a new one in decades.

It’s easy to see why this is so. Both “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina” have Tolstoy-like characters—Pierre Bezukhov and Konstantin Levin—who chafe at the self-satisfaction, relentless social striving, and oppressive economic underpinnings of the Russian aristocracy into which they were born. Both are drawn to reformist spiritual and political ideas. But in “Resurrection” the main character, Dmitri Nekhlyudov, another landowning aristocrat, goes a step further, into what appears to be full-bore rejection of his world and its values. He institutes land reform on his estates, and leaves the Russia of cities and country homes to undertake a long eastward journey to Siberia, where a household servant he seduced and abandoned years earlier has been unjustly imprisoned. Where “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina” presented the life of a corrupt society with astonishing richness and subtlety, “Resurrection” is relentlessly preachy, prudish, and joyless.

There is a strain of American liberalism that offers government as a sensible, useful way to make society function better than it does now—as a problem-solving instrument that conservatives are too stubbornly prejudiced to employ. That is Bill Clinton’s liberalism. And then there’s the Tolstoyan strain, in which it’s evident that society works well only for a fortunate minority, whose elaborately enjoyed well-being may even have come at the expense of the majority. Tolstoyan liberalism is, like its namesake, élite liberalism—more Franklin Roosevelt (who grew up on an American inherited dacha farmed by peasants) than Eugene Debs, or for that matter Elizabeth Warren. Tolstoy offers a harsh critique, but from an insider’s perspective; it treats the system as deeply flawed, but not as utterly alien. In her 2016 Presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton has been publicly flirting with Tolstoyan liberalism.

Long before she announced her candidacy, Clinton surrounded herself with advisers from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, and banished the centrists who controlled her last campaign. Her April announcement video and first campaign speech last month hinted at a left-populist direction that continued, with more bite, in her first big economic-policy address this week. This wasn’t where her husband had ever gone, or where she had been in 2008.

Has she decided never again to be in the thankless position of running as a moderate in a Democratic primary campaign, no matter how prohibitive her lead? Is Bernie Sanders’s surge in the first two primary states pushing her leftward? Is she seeing research that indicates, or just concluding instinctively, that the financial crisis changed the way Americans think about the economy? Does she finally feel free to express what have always been her opinions?

This week’s speech left the answers to such questions where they usually are with Clinton—tantalizingly uncertain. She left all but a few specifics of her economic policies to be unveiled in speeches to come, and she made sure to praise small business, entrepreneurship, and investment. But she criticized Wall Street by name and by specific practices (her Web site has a section called “Rein in Wall Street”), and criticized Uber and AirbnB, sacred causes in Silicon Valley, without naming them, by saying that their advent is “raising hard questions about workplace protections and what a good job will look like in the future.” This demonstrates a willingness to risk alienating the subcultures where some of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors dwell. (On Friday, President Obama will appear at a fund-raiser at the San Francisco home of Shervin Pishevar, one of Uber’s founding investors.) And there was no commensurate implicit challenge to organized labor, which both Clintons and Obama have tangled with in the past.

It felt as if Clinton were crossing a line, policy specifics or no, in the way she was choosing to frame economic questions. First, she made it clear that the traditionally safe zone for American political discourse about the economy—calling for equality of opportunity, not equality of result—was no longer sufficient for her. Her target is “strong and steady income growth” for ordinary working people, which can presumably be measured only by how much money people wind up with, not how fair a chance they had to make it. And second, she at least toyed with the theme of resentment of the rich—another area Democratic politicians of the past generation, including Clinton herself, have generally avoided—as when she responded to Jeb Bush’s exhortation to Americans to work longer hours by saying, “Let him tell that to the nurse who stands on her feet all day or the trucker who drives all night. Let him tell that to the fast-food workers marching in the streets for better pay. They don’t need a lecture—they need a raise.”

Tolstoy, even though he was deep into his final holy-moralist phrase, didn’t quite know what to do with Nekhlyudov at the end of “Resurrection.” Having set out on his Siberian journey resolved to give everything away and to marry his wronged former mistress, the hero is perhaps relieved to learn that she refuses to marry him. He’s free, and it seems possible that he might return to some version of the former life he had been determined to reject. He still seems more comfortable at a dinner party than in the company of the political prisoners he encounters in the proto-gulag.

Hillary Clinton wasn’t born an aristocrat, but she functions as one now, and, assuming she becomes a major-party nominee, she can only take her new and rather profound critique of how well American society functions so far. She won’t, and can’t, run, or live, as a radical. So it’s a question of finding the right equipoise. The practice of American politics almost always requires rhetorical optimism; the practice of liberal American politics now seems also to require just the right measure of opprobrium directed at the way our country is run. What’s interesting about Clinton’s struggle to find the balance is that she is struggling to find it, as she hasn’t in the past. And it will be even more interesting to see what she does with it, if she gets the chance to govern.