And why should we not strive towards it? In my view, marriage should be like this: the couple become intimate as a result of the overmastering pressure of being in love, a child is conceived, and the husband and wife, avoiding everything that may interfere with the growth and nursing of the child, avoiding all fleshly temptation – not, as at present, arousing it – live together as brother and sister. Otherwise the husband, who before his marriage has led a life of debauchery, will transfer his debauched habits to his wife, will infect her with the same sensuality and will place upon her the intolerable burden of being at one and the same time a mistress, an exhausted mother and a sick, irritable and hysterical human being. And her husband will love her as a mistress, ignore her as a mother and hate her for her irritability and hysteria, which he himself has produced and continues to produce. This, in my view, is the key to all the sufferings that are concealed in the vast majority of families.

The way I envisage it is that the husband and wife will live together as brother and sister; the wife will carry her child, bear it, and nurse it in peace and quiet and without interruption, growing morally in stature all the while, and only when she is ready to conceive again will they once more abandon themselves to their amorousness for one another, which will last for a week and then be followed by another period of calm. In my view, this amorousness is like the pressure of steam that would cause a boiler to burst if the safety valve were not released. The valve is only opened when the pressure has reached a very high level; at other times it is kept assiduously closed, and our goal must be to close it as tightly as possible and to place a weight on it in order to keep it from opening. This is how I interpret the words: ‘He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.’ – i.e. let each man try to abstain from marrying for as long as possible, and when he does marry let him live with his wife as a brother lives with his sister. And the steam will gather and open the valves – but it is not for us to open them, as we do at present, regarding sexual intercourse as a legitimate source of pleasure. It is only legitimate when we are unable to abstain from it and when it breaks through against our will…

In the world of men it is considered a very good thing to take enjoyment in sexual love, just as it might be thought a good thing to open the safety valves and let the steam out of them; in God’s world, however, the only good is to live the true life, to work for God with one’s talent: i.e. to love other people, their souls, and of them first and foremost one’s own wife, and help her in the comprehension of the truth, not interfere with her ability to perceive it by making her the instrument of one’s pleasure – in other words, to work in the way that the steam does, and to take all measures to see that it does not go into the safety valves.

‘But then the human race will die out.’ For one thing, no matter how hard people may try to refrain from sexual intercourse, the fact remains that the safety valves exist because they are necessary, and that children will be born. And anyway, why should we tell ourselves lies? In defending our indulgence in sexual intercourse, are we really concerned with the extinction of the species? What we are really concerned with is our own pleasure. This is something that needs to be said. The human race die out? What will die out is man the animal. What a terrible misfortune that would be! Just as the animals of prehistoric times died out, so, probably, will the human animal (considered in terms of its appearance in space and time). Let it die out. I am no more sorry for this two-legged animal than I am for the ichthyosaurs etc. What I care about is that the true life should not die out, the love of creatures that are able to love. And not only will this not die out if the human race comes to an end because people renounce the pleasures of lust for the sake of love, but it will grow an immeasurable number of times greater, and this love will grow correspondingly greater, and the creatures that experience it will become such that the continuation of the human species will not be necessary for them. Carnal love is only necessary in order that such creatures may be made from human beings.

This, broadly, is the ideological framework within which The Kreutzer Sonata developed into its final versions, and it also represents the raw material for the Postface which Tolstoy wrote for the tale. It is a familiar framework, representing a logical development of arguments from earlier phases of his thinking on these matters. The concept of ‘man the animal’, in particular, is one he had treated before, nowhere so straight-forwardly, perhaps, as in the tale Strider: The Story of a Horse (1886), where human beings, considered as animals, are seen as being inferior to the rest of animal creation. Man is a misfit in the animal kingdom: his task is to transcend his animal nature, which is in contradiction with his spirit and reason and is merely an encumbrance and a hindrance to his further growth, but it is a task he either shirks or ignores.

Three events which took place during 1888 and 1889 were instrumental in shaping the structure and content of the final versions of The Kreutzer Sonata. The first of these related to the plot of the tale; the other two were a support and reinforcement of the ‘ideal’, the conclusion ‘so distant from everything I was occupied with at the time’, at which Tolstoy had initially been ‘stricken with horror’ – the notion that the ultimate aim and aspiration of mankind must be the attainment of total chastity – and which found its expression in Pozdnyshev’s elaborate, extended monologue.

In the spring of 1888, a performance of Beethoven’s ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ took place in the Tolstoy family’s Moscow home. The musicians were the young violinist Yuli Lyasota and Tolstoy’s son Sergey. Also present were Andreyev-Burlak and the distinguished painter Repin. Tolstoy was well acquainted with the sonata, but this performance of it made an especially strong impression on him. Once more he returned to the idea of writing a dramatic monologue on the theme of a husband who murders his wife; this time, however, the plot would be fused with the inspiration provided by the music. Tolstoy proposed to Repin that he should paint a canvas on the same theme, likewise entitled The Kreutzer Sonata. The picture would be exhibited at an evening gathering, and Andreyev-Burlak would recite the tale written by Tolstoy.