by A. N. Wilson
Tolstoy did not share the apocalyptic hope of the Shakers, but he read their views on sex and pronounced them ‘Excellent. Complete sexual restraint.’5 Not that he was able to practise it since, as he admitted to Chertkov, ‘I am a dirty, libidinous old man.’6 Nevertheless, celibacy had by now become his ideal.
Hostile readers will consider this ‘ideal’ about as impressive as the tears of some incurable lecher before an icon of the immaculate Mother of God, but it has to be said that Tolstoy and the Shakers have the New Testament on their side. The pattern of his understanding in this matter is exactly parallel to his discovery of what Christ taught in relation to violence and resistance to evil. Most modern churchmen (with the exception of the Pope), beguiled by what Tolstoy would call ‘lying science’ and what they would call common sense, have a shrill desire to dissociate themselves from anything which smacks of ‘fear of the physical’ or an irrational dread of sex. For Tolstoy, the question was rather different. He wanted to recover the teachings of Jesus, and he believed them to be true. In the case of Christian pacifism there are anomalies which Tolstoy had to argue his way around.
In sexual matters, the New Testament presents a much more united and consistent ethic. True, Christ consorted with publicans and sinners, but it was to them and to the harlots that He addressed His teachings of chastity. He forgave the woman taken in adultery but told her to sin no more. And His call to chastity is more searching than any before or since. ‘Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: 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.27–28). Later in St. Matthew’s Gospel we are told that some are made eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven’s sake. There is not a single passage or text in the New Testament, from any of its different writers, which departs from this ideal. The whole of the early Christian tradition, both in the New Testament and in the writings of the Greek and Latin fathers, held out celibacy as an ideal, marriage as a distinct second best in the Christian life, and sex as in general a dangerous and a bad thing.
Tolstoy’s exposition of his beliefs about sex in the Afterword to The Kreutzer Sonata is preached in deliberately intemperate terms. But, as with his doctrines of peace, there is nothing in his ethical view (one discounts his rejection of the doctrine of grace etc.) which would not have found an echo in St. Paul, in Clement of Alexandria, in Tertullian, in St. Augustine. It is, in fact, ‘mere Christianity’. The Afterword, which is one of his clearest expositions of the teaching, is much less thunderous than is often supposed by readers who have only had it described to them. His point is a rather crucial one to any Tolstoyan understanding of Christianity; and that is that Christ taught an ideal. Tolstoy fully recognises that when the ideal is chastity, not many people will be able to attain it. ‘The follower of Christ’s teachings is like a man carrying a lantern in front of him on a stick which might be long or short; the light is always in front of him, and is always inciting him to follow; and then it opens up to him a new space ahead, filled with light and drawing the man to itself.’7 There is a great gentleness in this image, which the commentators do not always repeat for us.
Opponents of Tolstoy and opponents of the Bible (which in this case come to the same thing) often point out that if this ideal were put into practice, the human race would suffer the fate of the Shakers and become extinct. And they would see it as part of the sinister strand in Biblical tradition, the strand which hates mankind. God, in the Old Testament, who told the human race to be fruitful and to multiply, decided within a very short space of time that He repented that He had made man on the earth, and therefore decided to destroy the human race, preserving only a small remnant in the Ark. This strand of Bible thinking can be found from the beginning of the Christian Scriptures to the end, from Noah’s Ark to the choirs of the elect singing around the throne of the lamb while the majority of humankind is plunged into a fiery lake towards the close of the Apocalypse of John.
Christ’s teaching about celibacy needs to be seen in this context. He held before His disciples not only an ideal of celibacy, but also a vision, inherited by Paul and the other writers of the New Testament, of a world which was shortly to be brought to an end by the ‘Abomination of Desolation’. Questions of world population in the next generation but two or three are scarcely of interest to men and women who believe that any cloud passing over the sky might contain a trumpeting angel and the promised Messiah.
Tolstoy did not believe in the Parousia, nor the Last Judgement, nor any of the ‘mythological’ elements in the New Testament. But within his own nature there was a correspondingly ‘dark’ theme to which he confesses in his diary as the year 1889 develops. ‘Death is ahead of me, i.e. life, so why should I not be glad?’ he noted in an entry which suggests a continuing hope of immortality. ‘It’s just because I feel I have lost interest in – I don’t say my own person or my own joys (they are dead and buried thank God) – but in other people’s good; in the good of ordinary people, that they should be educated, not drink, not live in poverty; I feel my interest is cooling even towards the general good, the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth. . . .’8 There is typical honesty here, and perhaps if natural disasters, famines, and the worsening political situation had not shaken him out of this view in the quite near future, Tolstoy’s religious position might from now on have developed along purely ‘mystical’ lines.
But there was in Tolstoy, as well as a natural cooling of interest in the Kingdom of God on earth, a positive glee in arguments which were absurd, provocative and irritating. Earlier in the year 1889, a happy diary entry recorded reading Voltaire with a niece. ‘We roared with laughter.’9 So, when dumbfounded critics confronted Tolstoy with the view (considering it unanswerable) that if we were all celibate, the human race would die out, it was quite inevitable that he would enjoy being forced into the ultimate rejection of humanity itself. ‘You will object that this would mean the end of the human race. . . . What a great misfortune! The antediluvian animals are gone from the earth, human animals will disappear too. . . . I have no more pity for these two-footed beasts than for the ichthyosaurus.’10 For a moment the humble Christian who loves all mankind has been taken over by the saeva indignatio and biting comedy of Jonathan Swift.
And, doubtless, we should bear in mind all these things as we start to read The Kreutzer Sonata. As so often, the story came to him by someone telling him an anecdote. He started it, laid it aside, and allowed the idea to gestate. Then followed a period of intense writing and rewriting. In this case, the anecdote came from an actor called Vasily Nikolayevich Andreyev-Burlak. He had been to see the Tolstoys on June 20, 1887,11 and in the after-dinner circle he described meeting a stranger in a train, who had poured out to him the story of his wife’s unfaithfulness. Tolstoy had immediately doodled with this tale and at that point thought of it as his story of ‘sexual love’. The next year, in their Moscow house, he was again in Andreyev-Burlak’s company. Tolstoy’s children put on a little concert for a gathering of friends. Andreyev-Burlak came, and Repin the painter. The children’s teacher, Yuly Lyasota, played the violin part of Beethoven’s ‘Kreutzer’ sonata, with Tolstoy’s son Sergey at the piano. It was very much part of the family repertoire and, as always, Tolstoy was moved by it. But now, for no more rational reason than that Andreyev-Burlak was present, Tolstoy came to associate it with the wronged husband in the railway carriage. He would write a monologue for Andreyev-Burlak to recite. Repin could paint the scene. It could be made to incorporate one of his unfinished short stories, The Man Who Murdered His Wife. Andreyev-Burlak could be enjoined to ‘perform’ this story as a dramatic monologue, rather like the public readings of Dickens.
And so the idea of The Kreutzer Sonata was born. And even though the actor Andreyev-Burlak died on May 10, 1888,12 the monologue form, turning into prose fiction with a first-person narrative, remained part of Tolstoy’s conception. For most of that year, 1
888, he did little to the story, but in 1889, he took it up in earnest, and worked and reworked it. Throughout the summer, this was the principal thing on his mind, and the diary reflects this. The figure of the musician – the despised figure in the story whom the narrator of the story believes to have seduced the wife – thinks to himself, ‘I won’t go to a brothel, I may get infected there. . . .’ Then, a month later, ‘I must make the dying woman delirious, as she begs for forgiveness and can’t believe it was he who had killed her. . . .’ Two days later, on August 19, 1889, he adds, ‘ “Fornicator” is not a term of abuse, but rather denotes a condition (the same is true of a woman fornicator, I think) – a condition of restlessness, curiosity and the need for novelty which comes from intercourse for the sake of pleasure, not with one person but many. Likewise “drunkard”. One can try to abstain, but a drunkard remains a drunkard and a fornicator a fornicator – at the first lapse of concentration he falls. I am a fornicator.’13
A version was finished by the end of August, and a week later, having copied it, Sofya Andreyevna gave a reading aloud to the older children and the family.
The story in its finished state begins as a third-person narrative by a colourless figure making his way across Russia by train. Conversation in the carriage turns to the universally interesting subjects of sex, love and marriage. Wishing to moderate some of the intemperate views expressed by the other passengers, a certain lawyer claims that there are many people who live long married lives. But this is violently contradicted by a passenger called Pozdnyshev. ‘Marriages in our day are mere deception!’ he announces. And he then goes on to suppose in typically paranoid fashion that the lawyer was alluding to him, Pozdnyshev, when he spoke of some marriages passing through ‘critical episodes’. Pozdnyshev then announces that he himself killed his wife.
Few announcements can be more calculated to compel an audience. The reader is as gripped as the narrator in the train by Pozdnyshev’s extraordinary story. It very soon becomes clear that Pozdnyshev is a man with an insane sexual obsession. All his memories of sexual awakening in his youth are tormented with guilt, every sexual encounter is regarded as a terrible ‘fall’ from some ideal of purity, and the activity of sexual intercourse is described as a perverted thing which should by rights appeal only to monkeys and Parisians.
But it is for marriage that Pozdnyshev reserves his strictest censure. He is a man with a mission. He longs to disabuse his hearers and to persuade everyone that all marriages, everywhere and in every circumstance, are an obscene sham. Years before, when he was a gullible young man visiting Paris, that city of monkey-business, he saw a sign advertising a bearded woman and a water-dog. He eagerly paid his money and entered, only to discover that the ‘bearded woman’ was a man dressed in women’s clothes, and the water-dog was a dog dressed in a walrus skin and swimming in a bathtub. Bitterly disappointed, he made his way out of the show. The showman called out to the public, ‘Ask this gentleman whether or not the show is worth seeing!’ And he was too ashamed to tell them that it was all a sham. This is what marriage is like, says Pozdnyshev.
Charging ahead with his narrative, Pozdnyshev allows himself many generalisations with which no sane listener could agree – such as that the emancipation of women, or University education for women, has come about solely through motives of lust by both sexes, or that most cases of adultery have been occasioned by music, that well-known aphrodisiac. This idea, which explains the title and the theme of the story, that music is the food of love, is Pozdnyshev’s overriding obsession. He married a pretty woman. They had children (‘a regular hell’); they came to hate one another, while lusting after one another. You know, Pozdnyshev seems to imply, the usual thing. And then there came to their house a musician called Trukachevsky who offered to accompany Pozdnyshev’s wife on the violin.
From the moment this suggestion was made, Pozdnyshev became convinced that the pair were conducting a sexual intrigue. In connection with his work, Pozdnyshev had to go into the country to attend the meeting of the local council, or zemstvo. He remembered the look on the faces of his wife and the musician while they were playing the ‘Kreutzer’ sonata. He resolved to return to Moscow early from his meeting, surprise the guilty lovers and give them the only punishment which such behaviour deserves: death.
The dénouement of the tale comes with Pozdnyshev’s return home. He found his wife and the musician – not in bed, but merely sitting in the drawing room having played some music. The musician escaped, but Pozdnyshev killed his wife with a curved Damascus dagger which hung on the wall.
It is strange to think of Sofya Andreyevna reading this outstandingly nasty tale to the assembled family, in the same way that she might read some harmless story by Leskov, Trollope or Turgenev. When it was over, Tanya, ever anxious to ingratiate herself with her father, said that one could not sympathise with the wife, and that she would not repent because she had not really committed any sins. Tolstoy’s spirits were high, and evidently he felt happy that week with his family. Above all, it was good to be writing fiction again! ‘One joyful thing I do remember is that the awareness of life through the recovery of my talent has been restored to me,’14 one of the most touching, and revealing sentences in the whole of Tolstoy’s diary. There is not the slightest suggestion in any of the diary entries that Sofya Andreyevna objected to the story, nor that anyone in the family thought that the madman in the train, who had murdered his wife because she was having an affair with a fiddler, bore the slightest resemblance to Tolstoy, any more than the wife resembled Sofya Andreyevna. If she had objected to it, how could Countess Tolstoy have borne to read it aloud to the family?
However, there were, as always, tensions in the air. Sofya Andreyevna was more taken up with little Ivan (Vanichka) than with any of her previous children. She probably knew that he was the last child she was ever going to have and at forty-four, and no less than thirteen completed pregnancies behind her, it is possible that she even hoped he was the last. There was certainly an enormous joy and consolation to be derived from this child’s company – more than from any other. Since Sofya Andreyevna was much preoccupied and, with Tolstoy, so frequently out of sympathy, it is not surprising that he should have turned to his daughters for help, advice and secretarial assistance.
Marya (Masha) was the person responsible for most of the nine drafts which Tolstoy made of this novella. As Tolstoy wrote to Masha’s old teacher Alexeyev on August 22, 1889, ‘Of my children, only Masha is close to me in spirit. The others, poor things, are only oppressed by the fact that I am always around, reminding them of what their conscience demands of them.’15 It is typical of Tolstoy that he has observed that most of his family find him tiresome, but that he confidently attributes this to moral weakness on their part.
The favours he showed to Masha caused eruptions in other parts of the household. Some time after the ninth version had been copied, Masha casually came into the hall and put on Tatyana’s galoshes. It left Tatyana marooned in the house – the wet weather had started, and when Masha returned, there was a silly squabble.16 But it was not really a quarrel about galoshes. Tatyana resented the fact that her younger sister was so doted upon by Papa, and the fact that her efforts to guide her life according to Tolstoyan principles appeared to go unnoticed. Had she not vowed in her diary, ‘since the inception of The Kreutzer Sonata, not to get married’?17 Whether she was the more influenced in reaching this decision (ten years later she broke it) by reading her father’s work or by witnessing the way her parents were getting on together, we are not informed.
No one was more jealous of Masha than their mother. ‘I used to copy everything he wrote, and loved doing so,’ she scribbled in her diary. ‘Now he carefully conceals everything from me and gives it to his daughters instead. He is systematically destroying me by driving me out of his life in this way, and it is unbearably painful.’18
By now, however, a worse threat had appeared in Sofya Andreyevna’s life. The Kreutzer Sonata had been submitted to the
official censor, and it was all taking a very long time. Its first failure to get past the censor was early in 1890, when Tolstoy allowed N. I. Storozhenko permission to publish it in a collection dedicated to the memory of S. A. Yuryev. But by then, copies of the story had got out, and were circulating. Lithograph copies, produced illegally by underground presses, were reproducing thousands of copies of The Kreutzer Sonata in St. Petersburg, making of the whole story a cause célèbre. Pobedonostsev, who had hitherto thought it a ‘powerful work’, and not immoral, had found his opinion echoed by the Tsar who thought it ‘magnificent’. But the fact that it was being circulated by a seditious press (without Tolstoy’s permission) made it all the more dangerous to handle. Who had got it to the underground presses, to the lithographers, and hectographers? Can we doubt it was Chertkov, via Masha? Sofya Andreyevna was understandably furious. If a major new work of fiction could be stolen in this way, what was to become of her magnificent Collected Edition of Tolstoy? It was essential for her that The Kreutzer Sonata should appear in Volume XIII of the Collected Works: essential for her financially, and even more importantly, essential from the point of view of showing the world who was the victor, herself or Chertkov, when it came to handling her husband’s affairs.
Unfortunately, the story was not being read on its literary merits, but rather for its gossip value. By now it was notorious in the drawing rooms of St. Petersburg and Moscow that the Tolstoys were what is called ‘unhappy’, and it is hardly surprising that very scandalous interpretations were placed upon the story. Biryukov, Chertkov, and the many young men who hovered about Tolstoy and lapped up his opinions were not slow to promulgate the views of the Master, and to spread abroad his ex cathedra pronouncements. It was common knowledge that Tolstoy had begun to favour complete celibacy: even in marriage. . . .
