Tolstoy

It was agreed that The Kreutzer Sonata would be published first in an ephemeral weekly newspaper which did not have such strict censorship, and then handed over to Sonya,¹¹⁹ but rumours that it would be banned even from this publication started spreading at the beginning of December 1889. They were confirmed later that month.¹²⁰ In the detailed review of the story Pobedonostsev sent his colleague Evgeny Feoktistov in February 1890, he conceded it was a ‘powerful’ work, and that he could not in good conscience ban a story which promoted chastity in the name of morality, but the overwhelmingly bleak message this sent out about the future of the human race made it unacceptable for publication. Alexander III enjoyed the story as much as The Power of Darkness when it was read to him at the Winter Palace, but his wife was shocked – as Theodore Roosevelt would be when translations reached the United States later that year. As US Attorney General, he forbade the distribution of the newspapers which printed it. By February 1890 illegal copies of The Kreutzer Sonata were being read all over Moscow, as we know from statements by Anton Chekhov, who had largely left his medical career behind and was by now a celebrated writer. He had been publishing under his own name in Russia’s most prestigious literary journals for twelve years at this point, and was just beginning to appear on Tolstoy’s radar. In the letter that Chekhov wrote to his friend Alexey Pleshcheyev about The Kreutzer Sonata, his typically incisive, clear-sighted observations bring a breath of fresh air into a debate that was highly charged:

Did you really not like The Kreutzer Sonata? I don’t say that it is a work of immortal genius – I’m not able to judge that – but I do consider that, compared to most of what is being written today both here and abroad, it would be hard to find anything to compare with the importance of its theme and the beauty of its execution. Aside from its artistic merits, which are in places stupendous, we must above all be grateful to the story for its power to excite our minds to their limits. Reading it, you can scarcely forbear to exclaim: ‘That’s so true!’ or alternatively ‘That’s stupid!’ There is no doubt that it has some irritating defects. As well as those you have listed, there is one for which it is hard to forgive the author, and that is his arrogance in discussing matters about which he understands nothing and is prevented by obstinacy from even wanting to understand anything. Thus his opinions on syphilis, foundling hospitals, women’s distaste for sexual intercourse and so on, are not only contentious but show what an ignorant man in some respects he is, a man who has never in his long life taken the trouble to read one or two books written by specialists on the subject. But at the same time the story’s virtues render these faults so insignificant that they waft away practically unnoticed, like feathers on the wind, and if we do notice them they serve merely to remind us of the fate of all human endeavour without exception, which is to be incomplete and never entirely free of blemishes.¹²¹

Chekhov undertook his momentous journey to study the notorious penal colony on the island of Sakhalin in the summer of 1890, and when he came back that autumn he was able to read the afterword that Tolstoy had now written – also in samizdat. In response to the furore caused by his story, Tolstoy clarified that chastity was merely an ideal, and that he was not advocating the end of the human race. The time Chekhov spent in Siberia changed him, and also his view of Tolstoy’s story, as in the letter he wrote in December 1890 to his great friend Alexey Suvorin (editor of New Times), his outlook was quite different:

Before my trip, The Kreutzer Sonata was a great event for me, but now I find it ridiculous and it seems quite absurd … To hell with the philosophy of the great men of this world! All great wise men are as despotic as generals and as rude and insensitive as generals, because they are confident of their impunity. Diogenes spat in people’s beards knowing nothing would come of it; Tolstoy lambasts doctors as scoundrels and exposes his ignorance of the important issues because he is another Diogenes whom no one will arrest or criticise in the newspapers …¹²²