The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories

THE KREUTZER SONATA

AND OTHER STORIES

COUNT LEO NIKOLAYEVICH TOLSTOY was born in 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana in the Tula province, and educated privately. He studied Oriental languages and law at the University of Kazan, then led a life of pleasure until 1851 when he joined an artillery regiment in the Caucasus. He took part in the Crimean War and after the defence of Sebastopol he wrote The Sebastopol Sketches, which established his reputation. After a period in St Petersburg and abroad, where he studied educational methods for use in his school for peasant children in Yasnaya, he married Sofya Andreyevna Behrs in 1862. The next fifteen years was a period of great happiness; they had thirteen children, and Tolstoy managed his vast estates in the Volga Steppes, continued his educational projects, cared for his peasants and wrote War and Peace (1865–8) and Anna Karenin (1874–6). A Confession (1879–82) marked an outward change in his life and works; he became an extreme rationalist and moralist, and in a series of pamphlets after 1880 he expressed theories such as rejection of the state and church, indictment of the demands of the flesh, and denunciation of private property. His teaching earned him numerous followers in Russia and abroad, but also much opposition, and in 1901 he was excommunicated by the Russian holy synod. He died in 1910 in the course of a dramatic flight from home, at the small railway station of Astapovo.

DAVID McDUFF was born in 1945 and was educated at the University of Edinburgh. His publications comprise a large number of translations of foreign verse and prose, including poems by Joseph Brodsky and Tomas Venclova, as well as contemporary Scandinavian work; Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam; Complete Poems of Edith Södergran; and No I’m Not Afraid by Irina Ratushinskaya. His first book of verse, Words in Nature, appeared in 1972. He has translated a number of nineteenth-century Russian prose works for Penguin Classics. These include Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The House of the Dead, Poor Folk and Other Stories and Uncle’s Dream and Other Stories, Tolstoy’s The Sebastopol Sketches, and Nikolai Leskov’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. He has also translated Babel’s Collected Stories and Bely’s Petersburg for Penguin.

LEO TOLSTOY

The Kreutzer Sonata
and Other Stories

Translated with an Introduction by
DAVID McDUFF

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This translation first published 1983
Reprinted with a new Chronology and Further Reading 2004
17

Copyright © David McDuff, 1985, 2004

All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

EISBN: 9781101490020

CONTENTS

Translator’s Introduction

The Kreutzer Sonata

The Devil

The Forged Coupon

After the Ball

Appendix 1: Postface to The Kreutzer Sonata

Appendix 2: Alternative Conclusion to The Devil

Notes

Chronology

Further Reading

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

Tolstoy’s work on The Kreutzer Sonata was prolonged and characterized by a high degree of complexity: with certain interruptions, it lasted not less than two years, during which he also wrote the comedy The Fruits of Enlightenment, the tale The Devil, some works on art and a number of other articles and essays.

The embryo of the tale is to be found in an unfinished fragment dating from the end of the 1860s and bearing the title The Wife-murderer. This fragment does little more than illustrate that the central problem it deals with – the moral situation of a husband who murders his wife – was one that preyed on Tolstoy’s mind at least from the time of his marriage to Sofya Andreyevna Behrs in 1862. The development of the ideological and thematic framework of The Kreutzer Sonata was long and tortuous, and was intimately connected with the moral, religious and existential crisis that led to Tolstoy’s temporary abandonment of ‘artistic’ literary forms, and to his writing of Confession and What I Believe, and his retranslation and reordering of the New Testament.

In a letter to his children’s tutor, V. I. Alekseyev, dated 10 February 1890, Tolstoy explained his own attitude to the tale which had become such a centre of public controversy and discussion: ‘The substance of what I was writing was just as new to me then as it is now to those who are reading it. In this regard there was opened to me an ideal so distant from everything I was occupied with at the time that at first I was stricken with horror and did not want to accept it; subsequently, however, I grew convinced of its truth, saw the error of my ways and rejoiced at the joyful transformation that awaited me and others.’

It is impossible to determine exactly when Tolstoy began work on the tale. A letter to G. A. Rusanov of 14 March 1889 does, however, give us an approximate dating: ‘The rumour concerning the tale is grounded in fact. Two years ago I wrote the rough draft of a tale on the theme of sexual love, but so carelessly and unsatisfactorily that I haven’t even bothered to revise it – if I were to take up this idea again, I should rewrite the whole thing.’ Thus it would appear that the first draft dates from 1887. It was apparently written as a dramatic monologue for the actor V. N. Andreyev-Burlak,* who came to visit Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana on 20 June 1887. According to Sofya Andreyevna, the monologue was based on a story told by Andreyev-Burlak to Tolstoy: ‘[He] recalled how he had once met a man in a train who had told him of the unhappiness he had experienced as a result of his wife’s infidelity, and it was this plot Levochka made use of.’

The earliest draft of the tale bears only a moderate resemblance to its later, finished version. It is considerably shorter, as befitting a piece intended for stage delivery or recital at a soirée, and it contains none of the extended general discussions that are such an important feature of The Kreutzer Sonata. The action is compressed. Pozdnyshev’s wife’s lover is not a musician, but a painter; indeed, there is no mention of music anywhere in this draft. The first and last meetings of Pozdnyshev’s wife and her lover, and also the murder itself, take place at a country dacha, not in the Pozdnyshev household.