They will work out when it took place, and they will read what I am writing [The Kreutzer Sonata]’) and the diary entries from the 1850s she had been given to read at her betrothal on the subject of his struggle with the ‘devil’ of sex. She saw her twenty-seven years of married life – with their constant childbearing, her devotion to her husband and all the hard and persevering work she had put into supporting his literary career – fall into ruins before her very eyes. The whole episode of her petition to Aleksander must be seen as a desperate attempt on her part to project the work as a piece of literature, to deny its confessional nature and to protect her own reputation and that of her family.

Despite all this, however, there is a sense in which The Kreutzer Sonata transcends the level of autobiographic self-laceration, and in which it moves beyond the social and historical ramifications of its subject-matter. The profound personal and spiritual crisis that brought Tolstoy to the verge of suicide at the age of fifty, the influence of which may clearly be observed in the final part of Anna Karenina and the effects of which are described in Confession, was to a large extent connected with a sense of being imprisoned in the world, of being excessively enmeshed in the details of personal life and of a literary career. The vision of cosmic terror and salvation that concludes Confession is an act of freeing, a breaking of the bonds of place and time that had hitherto held the author’s spirit captive. The tale The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) conveys Tolstoy’s personally experienced sense of life’s meaninglessness in the face of physical death. Yet Ivan Ilyich’s death itself is an intensely meaningful process, an act of liberation: ‘“It is finished!” someone said above him. He heard these words and repeated them within his own soul. “Death is finished,” he said to himself. “It doesn’t exist any more.”’

Similarly, in Pozdnyshev’s murder of his wife, we may see an act of rebellion against life’s meaninglessness in the face of domination by the reproductive urge, institutionalized in marriage. Much has been made of Tolstoy’s supposed ‘misogyny’, of his typification of woman as a ‘devil’ – yet it is not woman herself Tolstoy condemns, rather the social institutions that compel her to play a role he considers degrading, and the instinct of sex itself, which he sees as having no relevance to the essential human condition, being an attempt by the Devil to divert the attention of human beings from their struggle to realize the Kingdom of God upon earth. While it is impossible to eradicate the sexual instinct from human relations altogether, Tolstoy considers that it should be tolerated only as a necessary evil: the human race will continue, even though its days, like those of the dinosaurs once, may be numbered. The aim, the purpose of humanity is, however, not to reproduce itself, but to be more loving, more Christ-like, more nearly a part of the Kingdom of God, and this aim can only be achieved by the practice of chastity. Pozdnyshev’s wife dies as the victim of a cruel and inhuman world which sees the reproduction and reinforcement of its physicality as more important than the realization of spiritual goals. Starting from the despairing cry of ‘Life is evil!’, Tolstoy moved towards the premiss that ‘God is life’, and finally to the conclusion that ‘Life without faith is impossible.’ In The Kreutzer Sonata and its Postface he gives us a record of that journey, mapped out in terms of his own intimate, personal tragedy.

During the latter part of 1889 and early 1890 Tolstoy began to work on a second tale devoted to this theme. It developed rather differently, however. The Devil is the result of a fusion of two stories taken from real life: that of ‘Fridrikhs’, a judicial investigator from Tula whose involvement with and murder of a peasant girl named Stepanida bear many resemblances to Tolstoy’s final narrative; and the story of Tolstoy’s own involvement with Aksinya Bazytskaya, a peasant girl on his estate at Yasnaya Polyana, which lasted from 1858 until 1860. This affair evidently made a deep and lasting impression on Tolstoy: even as late as 1908 we find references to it in his diary, passages which were a source of great distress to Sofya Andreyevna when she finally read them after her husband’s death – as was her reading of The Devil itself in 1909, when Tolstoy still had more than a year to live. The tale was not published until 1911, in the edition of Posthumous Works edited by Chertkov.

While The Devil does not possess the demonic intensity of The Kreutzer Sonata, as a tale it is considerably better constructed. It is also cast in a lighter key, and although the outcome of the action is tragic (the alternative variants of the ending present either murder or suicide as a solution to Irtenev’s plight), one has the sense that on one level, at least, this story of a much younger man’s obsession represented a kind of idyll for the ageing Tolstoy. Although the bulk of the writing dates from around the same time as The Kreutzer Sonata, the emotional detachment and lightness of touch seem more typical of the ‘twentieth-century’ Tolstoy: gone are the ideological passages, the laborious God-seeking of the works of the 1880s. The narration is swift, injected with touches of humour, and the action is clear and concise.

The way in which Tolstoy gradually recovered his artistic poise after the decade-long crisis of the 1880s may be seen, not in the ill-conceived and overblown Resurrection, but in the shorter prose works which followed the composition of the two tales on ‘sexual love’: Master and Man (1895), and the posthumously published The Forged Coupon, After the Ball, Father Sergius and Hadji-Murat. In The Forged Coupon, Tolstoy gives artistic treatment, most successfully, of his doctrine of non-resistance to evil, first outlined in What I Believe. The first part of the tale, in which the evil of the schoolboys’ forgery is gradually compounded until it climaxes in Pelageyushkin’s murder of Maria Semyonovna is skilfully offset by the second part, which describes a gradual progress away from darkness towards the light shed by the Gospels. The compression and tautness of the narrative are unparalleled in Tolstoy’s literary output, with the possible exception of Hadji-Murat. After the Ball depicts the evil that Tolstoy saw as the motive power behind ‘secular’ society, a power from which there can be no escape except through a renunciation of that society and its values.

The Kreutzer Sonata was the product of a central crisis in Tolstoy’s life as an artist, thinker and religious believer. In itself problematic from an artistic point of view, it none the less made possible the final period of Tolstoy’s creative development. Although the tension between art and ideology is not resolved in it, any more than it is in the last part of Anna Karenina, the struggle for resolution did ultimately lead to a form of reconciliation between the pedagogic and creative impulses in Tolstoy’s psyche, and made possible the writing of works in which the two at last successfully joined hands.

THE KREUTZER SONATA

But I say unto you, That whosoever
looketh on a woman to lust after her
hath committed adultery with her
already in his heart.

(Matthew v, 28)

His disciples say unto him. If the case of the man be so with his wife, it is not good to marry.

But he said unto them. All men cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given.

For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from
their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs, which
were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which
have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom
of heaven’s sake.