If I had known in advance that the wife of Leo Tolstoy had requested an audience of your majesty, I would have begged you not to receive her. What has happened is what one might have feared. Countess Tolstoy returned from you with the thought that her husband has in you a defence and justification for all those things in him over which the healthy-minded and religious people of Russia are indignant. You permitted her to print The Kreutzer Sonata in the complete collection of the works of Tolstoy. It might have been possible to foresee how they would make use of this permission. This complete collection consists of thirteen volumes, which can be placed on sale separately. The thirteenth volume is a small book, in which have been published, together with The Kreutzer Sonata, certain slight articles in the same spirit. They have placed this book on sale separately, and already three separate editions of it have appeared. Now this book is in the hands of Gymnasium students and young girls. On the road from Sevastopol, I saw it on sale in the station and being read in the trains. The book market is full of the thirteenth volume of Tolstoy… (Quoted in E. J. Simmons, Leo Tolstoy, John Lehmann, 1949, pp. 498–9).

Although Sofya Andreyevna had acted in good faith, the Tsar was greatly displeased with this ‘misdemeanour’, as he saw it, and Pobedonostsev’s letter, which also contained a vitriolic attack on the whole of Tolstoy’s thinking and teaching, became the signal for a campaign of reprisals taken against him by the Church. It set the seal on a deep antagonism between Tolstoy and the Church–State complex of Imperial Russia that was to last until the writer’s death in 1910, and even beyond it (it is significant that even though the Soviet cultural authorities were quick to exploit Tolstoy’s anti-Church writings to the full, a text such as What I Believe, filled as it is with attacks on State power, has even today not received any wide publication in the Soviet Union.

What, nearly a hundred years on, has The Kreutzer Sonata to say to us? As a work of prose fiction it undoubtedly suffers from numerous defects – improbability, long-windedness, structural weakness and much else besides. Its ‘sexual’ theme, once the focus of a profound social and political scandal, can hardly shock us today. On the other hand, its treatment of female sexuality and the problems attendant upon it may have a certain relevance to our own times. Should we approach the tale as an autobiographical confession, a text in the same lineage as the Confession of 1879 or the tract What I Believe of 1883? There is much to be said for such a view of the work. Certainly, the device of Pozdnyshev, the half-mad, ‘Dostoyevskian’ central character, is only partly successful. We constantly have the feeling that Tolstoy is hiding behind it. Every so often the disguise seems to break down, revealing the writer’s anguished features. Sofya Andreyevna had no illusions whatsoever on this matter. For her, the tale was a nightmarish act of callous indiscretion aimed at her and her children by a man she was beginning to fear and hate, a monstrous outpouring in public of the most intimate secrets of her marriage to him. Until the end of 1888, Tolstoy had continued to cling to the idea that marriage as an institution was a good in itself. Then, suddenly, as we have seen, he reached the conclusion that absolute chastity was the ultimate ideal towards which mankind must strive. The year 1889, with its intensive bouts of work on The Kreutzer Sonata and its Postface, saw him decide that marriage was not one of the forms of service to God. Without further ado, he consigned his own marriage to a private scrap-heap – from now on he would devote his energies to the realization of the Kingdom of God upon earth. Living almost as a guest in his own home, he now regarded family life as an empty frivolity and sexual relations with his wife as an evil to be fought and resisted. As she copied her husband’s diary, Sofya Andreyevna could not help but see a marked similarity between these latest jottings concerning his struggle to preserve his chastity (‘The Devil fell upon me,’ he wrote. ‘It was so shameful, as after a crime,’ or ‘What if a child should be born? How shameful, especially where the children are concerned.