Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy’s views on adultery were known to the reading public from his essays and not least from Anna Karenina. What made The Kreutzer Sonata so shockingly new was the treatment of male romantic love depicted here as a socially acceptable manifestation of lust, a device for concealing the truth, most importantly from oneself. According to Tolstoy, society poeticizes romantic love and provides sentimental education for young people in order to make lust approvable and enjoyable for both sexes, teaching young females that their main duty is to be sexually attractive to males. In marriage, the nature of this social order becomes explicit; the oscillation of the Pozdnyshevs’ relations between love and hatred reflects the rhythm of erotic passion.

Russian society was facing an irreversible process of female emancipation and ripe for the open discussion of sexuality. Tolstoy’s views were militantly patriarchal, but he spoke about ‘the cursed question’ in his usual straightforward and unequivocal way. This opened the floodgates. The manuscript of the eighth draft of The Kreutzer Sonata had been given to the Kuzminskys. The text was lithographed and hectographed in hundreds of copies. When the censors banned publication of The Kreutzer Sonata, this only fuelled interest in the story, which was also published abroad and smuggled into Russia. Most readers were stunned by Tolstoy’s analysis of the psychology of love, jealousy and murder, but were reluctant to subscribe to his moral conclusions. Some could not believe that the author could really have put his cherished thoughts in the mouth of a repentant murderer, and tried to reinterpret the text.

Many proponents of the ‘soft’ reading of The Kreutzer Sonata argue that in the final version, unlike the previous ones, Tolstoy deliberately leaves the reader in the dark as to whether adultery had actually taken place or whether it was the delusion of a jealous husband. For Tolstoy, however, feelings, motives and desires meant more than physical actions. He gave his story an epigraph from the Sermon on the Mount: ‘But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.’ Pozdnyshev’s wife ‘committed adultery in her heart’, and this was the only thing that really mattered for Tolstoy. To dispel all possible ambiguities, Tolstoy added an afterword in which he not only reiterated Pozdnyshev’s views, but actually developed them further.

This approach was too extreme even for Chertkov, who by that time was happily married. The disciple pleaded with his teacher to provide ‘half a page or just a few lines’ showing that marital sex is permissible in ‘a moral marriage’. He believed that Tolstoy’s militancy would drive ‘hundreds of millions of modern people’ (CW, LXXXVII, p. 25) away from his teachings. Usually quick to accommodate his second alter ego, Tolstoy this time remained adamant. He responded to Chertkov’s desperate plea with a clear statement that a moral marriage ‘does not exist’ (CW, LXXXVII, p. 24). He was aware that the way to moral perfection was full of obstacles and that he himself was not yet able to practise sexual abstinence within his family. From his perspective, it was possible to forgive human weakness, but not the obstinate refusal to see the truth, as he wrote around the same time to one of his followers: ‘It is impossible to admit the slightest compromise over an idea’ (Ls, II, p. 456).

In this particular case Sofia would probably have agreed with her arch-rival. In 1888 she gave birth to their last child, Ivan, who, as she sarcastically remarked, was the real ‘afterword’ to The Kreutzer Sonata. She wrote that the story humiliated her ‘in the eyes of the entire world and destroyed the last love’ in the family (SAT-ML, p. 167). At the same time, however, she went to St Petersburg for an audience with the emperor to ask him for permission to publish The Kreutzer Sonata in the edition of Tolstoy’s collected works. Alexander III liked the story and Pobedonostsev found it useless to continue the ban against a work that was already widely circulating around Russia. The emperor granted the countess permission, but prohibited separate editions of the book, trying to keep it away from the attention of a mass audience: volume XIII with The Kreutzer Sonata appeared in three subsequent editions, the second of which was published in 20,000 copies.