I know that from an artistic point of view this work is beneath all criticism… None the less, I have left it as it is, not out of laziness, but because I am unable to put it right. But I don’t mind this, because I am secure in the knowledge that what I have written is by no means without use; on the contrary, it may be of great use to other people, and be to some extent new to them.’

That the tale’s ‘use’ and ‘novelty’ were indeed among its most immediately appealing features was given vivid confirmation by the way in which, not yet completed, it was wrested from its creator’s hands and transformed into a piece of public property. Before Tolstoy had even had time to prepare his ninth and final draft, the text of the eighth draft began to circulate in handwritten, lithographed and hectographed copies. On 28 October 1889, a copy in the handwriting of Tolstoy’s son Mikhail was brought from Yasnaya Polyana to St Petersburg by M. A. Kuzminskaya, whereupon it was immediately read aloud at a gathering held at the Kuzminskys’ flat, where further copies were made. On the following day the tale was read aloud in the office of Posrednik (The Intermediary), the religious–philosophical journal edited by Chertkov. Since Kuzminskaya had to return to Yasnaya Polyana immediately, as soon as the reading was over the manuscript was divided up into sections, and by the following morning a complete new copy was ready. ‘In this manner,’ wrote Yu. O. Yakubov-sky, ‘within three days, against the wishes of the author, the manuscript of The Kreutzer Sonata, in its first version, received distribution in St Petersburg. But this proved to be merely a drop in the ocean; in many houses copies were made on domestic hectographs, and these received instant distribution in the new and second-hand bookshops, where they sold at a price of 10–15 rubles apiece.’

Tolstoy’s daughter Aleksandra records in her memoirs:

It is hard to convey now what took place when, for example, The Kreutzer Sonata and The Power of Darkness first appeared. Before they had even been passed for the press hundreds, even thousands of copies of them were made, which went from hand to hand, were translated into every language and were read everywhere with incredible passion; it sometimes seemed that the public had forgotten all its personal concerns and was living exclusively for the sake of the works of Count Tolstoy… The most important political events were seldom the object of such overwhelming and universal attention.

Strakhov informed Tolstoy that people no longer said ‘How do you do?’ when they met, but ‘Have you read The Kreutzer Sonata?’ Copies of the tale’s eighth draft soon reached Moscow, and from there found their way far and wide throughout the provinces of Russia. Tolstoy’s archive in Moscow contains a very large number of letters from all over Russia and from abroad containing readers’ reactions to the tale in its unfinished version. This ‘edition’ also provoked a number of responses from other writers, both Russian and foreign, and was even responsible for inspiring several literary works, of which the most significant is the short story Apropos of the Kreutzer Sonata by N. S. Leskov. The story bears an epigraph which is a paraphrase of a quotation from the eighth draft of Tolstoy’s tale: ‘Every young girl is morally superior to any man, because she is incomparably more pure than he is. A girl who marries is always superior to her husband. She is superior to him both when she is still a girl and when she becomes a woman in our conditions of society.’ It is significant that this passage was excised by Tolstoy when he came to write the ninth draft, indicating his disapproval of Leskov’s ‘tolerant’ view of marital infidelity as expressed in the story.

It was partly in reply to this and other ‘misunderstandings’ of the tale, and partly as a result of pressure from his prospective publisher, Chertkov, that Tolstoy wrote the Postface to The Kreutzer Sonata. There was also the problem of the controversy and outrage that had accompanied the distribution of the eighth draft – in some quarters Tolstoy had been accused of preaching immorality and of attempting to deprave the young (the Archbishop of Kherson pronounced anathema on him as ‘a sheep in wolf’s clothing’); in others, he was thought to have gone mad. Some response on the part of the author was clearly called for. It was work that cost him much effort and labour. After a number of drafts, he finally arrived at the version published as Appendix 1 to the present volume, in which the ultimate ideal of humanity is envisaged as perfect chastity, and the concept of ‘Christian marriage’ exposed as an absurd contradiction in terms.

There seemed at first little likelihood that the censor would ever permit the tale to be published in printed form. When it was submitted for consideration in its final version, a copy was passed to Tsar Aleksander III, who made the tale the subject of an imperial banning order. This was, however, not the first time that one of Tolstoy’s writings had fallen into the ‘forbidden’ category, and Sofya Andreyevna, who was preparing a new volume of her husband’s collected works, saw a possibility that permission might be forthcoming for her to include The Kreutzer Sonata in it. Thus it was that the warnings of Pobedonostsev and other advisers to the Tsar went unheeded. Although it was not until 1891 that Sofya Andreyevna was able to procure an interview with Aleksander, when she asked him to remove the banning order he replied: ‘Yes, we might allow you to print it in the complete works, because not everyone could afford to buy the full set, and it would not be too widely disseminated.’

Sofya Andreyevna agreed to edit the text of the tale, toning down its language and removing some of its sexual explicitness. In all, she made some two hundred alterations, and it was in this bowdlerized form that The Kreutzer Sonata was eventually published, along with some other related material, as Volume XIII of the Collected Works. Not until the appearance in 1933 of Volume 27 of the Jubilee Edition was The Kreutzer Sonata published in Tolstoy’s original ninth redaction: this is the text that has been used for the present translation.

In giving permission for the publication of The Kreutzer Sonata, the Tsar had stipulated that it should only be obtainable as Volume XIII of the entire series; he had not realized that it could be published separately.

I have decided to write your majesty about unpleasant matters [began a letter from Pobedonostsev, the head of the Holy Synod].