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Practice writing and read good books.>
Sam reviews Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata
February 22, 2010
I was invited while in Hawaii to go to the annual Punaho School fundraiser on its amazing campus in Honolulu earlier this month.
One tent was comprised of donated items, and while rummaging through the endless boxes of books I found Leo Tolstoy’s most controversial work, The Kreutzer Sonata. Having read only a single Tolstoy novel, I decided I should grab it and take a look. Little did I know what I was getting myself into.
Tolstoy wrote The Kreutzer Sonata (119 pages) in 1889 when he was 60. The copy I read was a “newly revised translation” published in 1957.
Tolstoy was forced a year after its publication to write an epilogue to explain what he was trying to say in the story. I think we should first review the book and then see if it is consistent with his epilogue.
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The book opens with two passages from the Bible’s Book of Matthew that quote Jesus (King James version).
“But I say unto you, that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in her heart.”
“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.”
The first quoted verse concerns men’s view of women who are not their wives. Jesus was essentially saying to respect other women and view them in the same way as they would their sister or mother.
The second concerns a passage where Jesus states that marriage is inviolate and requires responsibilities that hinder one’s ability to serve God.
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The Kreutzer Sonata begins with a group of travelers riding on a train who are talking about love and marriage. They are joined by an old man who becomes the story’s protagonist.
A woman with “modern views” was saying to a lawyer that divorce was more common. “How can you live with a man when there is no love? The thing these men simply cannot understand is that marriage without love just is not marriage, that love alones consecrates marriage, and that the only true marriage is that which love consecrates.”
“What is that love which consecrates marriage?” asks the old man.
“True love. It is true love between a man and a woman which makes marriage possible,” replies the woman.
“What do you mean by true love?” asks the man.
“Everyone knows what true love is,” the lady replied.
“But I for one don’t. You must define what you mean by it.”
“Why, it’s very simple. Love is the exclusive preference for which a man and a woman feel for one person out of all the rest in the world.”
“A preference for how long a time? A month? Two months? Half an hour?”
“How long? Why, sometimes it lasts a whole lifetime,” said the lady.
“Yes, but that is true only in novels, never in real life. You are speaking of what does not exist. Every man feels for every pretty woman what you call love.”
“What you are talking about is physical love. Don’t you admit that there is a love based on a unity of ideals, on a spiritual affinity?” the lady asked.
“Spiritual affinity! Unity of ideals! In that case there is no reason why we should sleep together—excuse my bluntness. Is it because of this unity of ideals that people go to bed together?”
The man confesses that he killed his wife in a jealous rage, and he and the narrator sit together alone for the rest of the story. The conversation is about the old man’s behavior before marriage, how he came to meet his wife and marry her, their lives together, and how she betrayed him and how he mortally wounded her in a jealous rage. The man was acquitted for committing an act of passion.
Tolstoy asserts throughout the story what he regards as truths. I have listed several below related to his epilogue.
-- Love is a choice because infatuation is temporary.
-- Men look at every attractive woman as a potential sex partner without knowing anything about her values, intelligence or character.
-- A man or woman may practice “polygamy” before marriage without shame and then hypocritically consider themselves moral because they make a decision to be monogamous after marriage.
-- The superficiality of beauty: “It is a remarkable thing how full of illusion is the notion that beauty is an advantage. A beautiful woman says all sorts of foolishness; you listen and do not hear any foolishness—what you hear seems to you wisdom itself. She says and does common things; to you it seems lovely. Even when she does not say stupid or common things but is simply beautiful, you are convinced that she is miraculously wise and moral.”
Tolstoy decries in the Kreutzer Sonata the cyclical ups and downs of the marital relationship and concludes their cause is a lack of passion. Vile quarrels, he claims, arise for trivial reasons and cease only when passions take hold again. He may be describing what we now know are symptoms, such as those resulting from severe PMS, rather than causes.
Tolstoy’s attack on beauty comes off as cynical.
His protagonist rails against birth control because it reinforces the notion that children are a burden, encourages women to worry about themselves and the way they look, and permits sex for pleasure.
In the end Tolstoy has his protagonist declare that if he knew what marriage was like and how it would end that he would have never married.
Because people did not get the meaning of his story, Tolstoy wrote the epilogue where he made five points:
(1) Many people condone in young men a course of conduct [before marriage] with regard to the other sex which is incompatible with strict morality.
(2) Conjugal infidelity has become more common and is considered less reprehensible.
(3) The birth of children has lost its pristine significance, and modern marriages are conceived less and less from the point of view of the family.
(4) The children of human beings are brought up for all the world like the young of animals, the chief care of their parents being not to train them to such work as is worthy of men and women, but to increase their weight, or add a cubit to their stature, to make them spruce, sleek, well-fed, and comely.
(5) Owing to the exaggerated and erroneous significance attributed by our society to love and to the idealized states that accompany and succeed it, the best energies of our men and women are drawn forth and exhausted during the most promising period of life.
Tolstoy concludes in the epilogue that because Christ did not establish marriage, marriage and marital relations are a sin.
The demeaning, irrational and volatile behavior of The Kreutzer Sonata’s protagonist did not help Tolstoy’s attempt to convince his reader of his views. It is only at the very end of the story that the reader appreciates how the protagonist acquired his perspective. And then the reader has only an understanding and may not be convinced unless he is predisposed to believe as Tolstoy did.
Neither do his last three points he declares in his epilogue resonate in the novel. In part the third and fourth points did not resonate because the protagonist did not tell us much about his children, so consumed he was with his wife and their quarrelsome relationship.
My belief is that God established monogamous marriage in Genesis 2:24 when he created Eve. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.” The Old Testament’s entire Song of Songs portrays all that is good and noble in love and marriage. Hence Tolstoy’s conclusion that marriage is a sin and something to which Christians should not aspire is a sad and narrow interpretation of scripture.
The writing of Tolstoy is impeccable and brilliant. He makes it easy to imagine in our minds what he describes on the pages. The title is a triple entendre: we all have our crosses to bear; living the Christian life is not easy; and it is the sonata his wife plays on the piano with the violinist who eventually seduces her.
I suspect the reason Tolstoy’s novel failed in large part to convince anyone of his views is because we did not “live” the marriage of the man and draw our own conclusions. Rather, Tolstoy gives us an intellectual exposition on his personal beliefs, complete with conclusions, through a protagonist who attracts little empathy from the reader.
It is easy to understand why the novel was controversial. Tolstoy’s views are still controversial today, and I suspect he would be no happier about the relationship between men and women were he alive now than he was in his own time.
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