The Kreutzer Sonata

A small group of strangers in a Russian railway carriage falls into the night-time conversation about love, marriage, and adultery that Tolstoy uses as the frame for one of his most controversial works. The conversation is taken over by a gaunt, sleepless man named Pozdnyshev, who, with the strange license of the late hour and anonymity among strangers, tells the story of his own marriage. It is the story of a wealthy young man who married, as his class did, on the basis of a single decorous month of acquaintance; of a slow accumulation of disappointments, fights, and reconciliations; of a violinist who began to give his wife music lessons; of an evening when the two of them played Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata together; and of what happened on a return from a business trip that the husband should never have taken.

Tolstoy published the story in 1889 and the Russian censorship banned it immediately. It is the most extreme of his late polemics against sexual love itself, written in the most uncompromising voice he ever allowed a character — a man who has lost everything and now reasons, with deranged but pristine logic, from the catastrophe back to its premises. The story collapses the frame between Tolstoy and his speaker more dangerously than anywhere else in his work: many of Pozdnyshev's positions are positions the late Tolstoy publicly held, even when his own family was the first to push back. The result is a piece of fiction that argues against its own existence — against music, against marriage, against literature like itself.

The Kreutzer Sonata rewards readers who want to confront late Tolstoy without the cushioning of his more famous novels, who recognize that the most powerful nineteenth-century writing about sexual relationship was made by people whose own marriages were catastrophes, and who can sit with a narrator whose every claim must be both taken seriously and held at arm's length. More than a hundred years on, its critique of how a society organizes desire still cuts more deeply than the censors imagined.