Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

Tolstoy’s views obviously evolved over time: in his most sensational work on relations between the sexes, The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), the hero kills his wife, whom he suspects of having an affair with the violinist with whom she plays Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata, “a terrible thing,” and the court finds him not guilty.

In his feverish monologue, the protagonist explains his crime by the fact that women have acquired “a terrible power over people” in modern society: “Women, like empresses, hold 90 percent of the human race in slavery and hard labor. And all because they have been humiliated, deprived of equal rights with men. And so they get their revenge by acting on our sensuality, ensnaring us in their nets.”

According to Tolstoy, that shameful and immoral “slavery of sensuality” can be avoided only by total abstinence. Akhmatova commented on the late Tolstoy’s idée fixe skeptically: the old writer, settled in his famous estate, Yasnaya Polyana, stopped lusting after the village girls and therefore decided to forbid the rest of the world to have sex too.¹⁸

In this case Akhmatova was wrong, if only because Tolstoy was still in his fifties when he wrote The Kreutzer Sonata and he had no problems with his sexual drive, judging by his diaries. The philosophy of the story is, of course, more complex, expressing the quasi-Buddhist idea that “if passions are destroyed including the last, most powerful one—physical love, then the prophecy will come to pass, people will be united into one, the goal of humanity will be reached, and there will be no reason for it to live.”

The diaries also suggest that while one of the impulses for writing the story was, in fact, autobiographical, it was rather opposite to the reason Akhmatova attributed to Tolstoy.

Tolstoy had been waging a fierce psychological war with his wife, Sophia, a strong woman who tried to hold on to her position in the family vis-à-vis the dictator and tyrant her husband was.

When they married in 1862, he was thirty-four and she was eighteen, and in the subsequent thirty years of marriage, she bore him thirteen children; as one of their sons calculated, she was pregnant for almost ten years and breast-fed children for more than thirteen years, and also “managed to run the complex household of a large family and copied War and Peace and Anna Karenina and other works by hand eight, ten, and sometimes twenty times each.”¹⁹

Sophia resisted her husband’s intentions to turn her into a mere machine for producing and feeding children (with additional functions as housekeeper, secretary, clerk, and literary agent). There were endless arguments and quarrels, accompanied by Sophia’s hysterics and nervous collapses. Time and again, Tolstoy would angrily write in his diary that the break with his wife was “complete.” Things never reached divorce, even though each threatened to leave, and Sophia often mentioned suicide, a terrible sin for a Christian.

Tolstoy, the more powerful figure, always won. But there was one sphere—sex—where Sophia could get her revenge. In his youth, Tolstoy caroused and debauched, as did everyone in his milieu. Toward the end of his life, he admitted to Maxim Gorky, “I was an insatiable … ‘—’ using a salty word at the end.”²⁰

Gorky insisted (and he knew!) that even with Tolstoy’s “passionate nature,” his wife “was his only woman for almost a half century.”²¹ It should be added that Sophia, according to contemporaries, was not only energetic and light on her feet, but amazingly youthful. When Tolstoy was writing The Kreutzer Sonata, she was in her early forties, but “there wasn’t a single wrinkle on her smooth, rosy white face,”²² as one of her daughters wrote.

Sophia did not use powder or any makeup and bore her imposing, full figure with grace and quiet confidence. In conversations, she liked to stress her youthfulness—and Tolstoy’s age. She continued to arouse her husband and, well aware of it, turned sex into a weapon (both wrote about this in their diaries).

In one typical entry, Tolstoy described bitterly that he had asked his wife to join him that night but she “with cold anger and the desire to hurt me, refused.” Tolstoy was infuriated that Sophia was turning conjugal sex “into a lure and a toy.” The Kreutzer Sonata (like other works of the period on the humiliating power of lust and sex—The Devil and Father Sergius) was his revenge and exorcism.

The story became a major public event: in Russia (as in the West) questions of sex were discussed avidly and turned into a battlefield between conservatives and liberals.