Leo Tolstoy

Suddenly it grew clear to him that what had been oppressing him, and would not leave him, was all dropping away at once, from two sides, from ten sides, from all sides. He was sorry for them, he must act so as not to hurt them: release them and free himself from these sufferings. ‘How good and how simple’, he thought.

‘And the pain?’ he asked himself. ‘What has become of it? Well then, where are you, pain?’ He turned his attention to it. ‘Yes here it is. Well, what of it? Let it be.’

And death . . . Where is it?

He looked for his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. ‘Where is it? What death?’ There was no fear, because there was no death.

In place of death, there was light. (TSF, p. 128)

In 1886, when Tolstoy was finishing The Death of Ivan Ilyich, he hurt his leg trying to help an old peasant woman, which led to a nearly lethal case of septicaemia. A long and painful recovery inspired the treatise On Life, in which Tolstoy supplemented his social and moral teachings with a general philosophy of life and death that brought together his belief in Nature and Reason, his interpretation of the Gospels and interest in Eastern religions and philosophy. The initial title of the essay was On Life and Death, but then Tolstoy cut the second noun, saying ‘There is no death’ (SAT-Ds, I, p. 123).

According to this treatise, any individual existence is just a tiny particle of general life, and individual death is a necessary and liberating reunion with the whole. The only manifestation of general life available to humans is love, which can never be limited to one’s kin and has nothing to do with the egotism and possessive instinct inherent in erotic infatuation, but unites the individual with humankind and thus with God. While universal love brings light and makes death blissful, sexual desire is akin to murder. In Anna Karenina Tolstoy compared Vronsky kissing Anna’s body after their first lovemaking with a murderer striking an already dead victim with a knife.

The year after the publication of The Death of Ivan Ilyich Tolstoy started writing The Kreutzer Sonata, on which he worked until 1889. In that year he also wrote a draft of a story now known as The Devil. Both stories involved murders carried out or planned by men who were disappointed in their marriages. The basic facts behind each story came from real criminal cases, but Tolstoy processed them through his personal experience and imbued them with his own moral goals. Pozdnyshev, the main character of The Kreutzer Sonata, kills his wife out of jealousy; Irteniev in The Devil murders his former lover because, striving to keep his marriage chaste, he is unable to overcome his sexual obsession. In the first version of The Kreutzer Sonata Pozdnyshev was considering suicide as a possible outcome. As The Devil remained unpublished in Tolstoy’s lifetime, the author did not have to choose between the two variants of the ending he drafted: in one alternative, instead of murdering his lover, Irteniev kills himself.

Tolstoy believed that the tragedies were caused by the sexual licence of young men before marriage, which had taught them to expect the same gratification of carnal desires from their family life. Irteniev’s disaffection with his marriage finds its realization in the spell his former partner still holds over him; Pozdnyshev’s manifests itself in hatred towards his wife and maniacal jealousy. Both male characters remain faithful to their wives, but the cost is insanity that drives them to murder or suicide. As he was writing The Kreutzer Sonata, Tolstoy told his daughter and his niece: ‘There are no bad maidens, and there are no happy marriages.’

He was thinking, of course, of his own family history. The romance between Irteniev and a peasant woman, Stepanida, in The Devil strikingly resembles the relationship between Tolstoy and Aksinya Bazykina. In The Kreutzer Sonata the autobiographical context is less evident, but also present. Pozdnyshev’s wife, after the delivery of her fifth child, submits herself to medical sterilization and starts looking to gratify her need for love. This finally draws her to adultery. Tolstoy’s wife was considering the same type of contraceptive measures having given birth to her fifth child. In a way, Tolstoy was retrospectively imagining what could have happened had he not forbidden her to take such preventive actions.