Tolstoy’s views on adultery were known to the reading public from his essays and not least from Anna Karenina. What made The Kreutzer Sonata so shockingly new was the treatment of male romantic love depicted here as a socially acceptable manifestation of lust, a device for concealing the truth, most importantly from oneself. According to Tolstoy, society poeticizes romantic love and provides sentimental education for young people in order to make lust approvable and enjoyable for both sexes, teaching young females that their main duty is to be sexually attractive to males. In marriage, the nature of this social order becomes explicit; the oscillation of the Pozdnyshevs’ relations between love and hatred reflects the rhythm of erotic passion.
Russian society was facing an irreversible process of female emancipation and ripe for the open discussion of sexuality. Tolstoy’s views were militantly patriarchal, but he spoke about ‘the cursed question’ in his usual straightforward and unequivocal way. This opened the floodgates. The manuscript of the eighth draft of The Kreutzer Sonata had been given to the Kuzminskys. The text was lithographed and hectographed in hundreds of copies. When the censors banned publication of The Kreutzer Sonata, this only fuelled interest in the story, which was also published abroad and smuggled into Russia. Most readers were stunned by Tolstoy’s analysis of the psychology of love, jealousy and murder, but were reluctant to subscribe to his moral conclusions. Some could not believe that the author could really have put his cherished thoughts in the mouth of a repentant murderer, and tried to reinterpret the text.
Many proponents of the ‘soft’ reading of The Kreutzer Sonata argue that in the final version, unlike the previous ones, Tolstoy deliberately leaves the reader in the dark as to whether adultery had actually taken place or whether it was the delusion of a jealous husband. For Tolstoy, however, feelings, motives and desires meant more than physical actions. He gave his story an epigraph from the Sermon on the Mount: ‘But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.’ Pozdnyshev’s wife ‘committed adultery in her heart’, and this was the only thing that really mattered for Tolstoy. To dispel all possible ambiguities, Tolstoy added an afterword in which he not only reiterated Pozdnyshev’s views, but actually developed them further.
This approach was too extreme even for Chertkov, who by that time was happily married. The disciple pleaded with his teacher to provide ‘half a page or just a few lines’ showing that marital sex is permissible in ‘a moral marriage’. He believed that Tolstoy’s militancy would drive ‘hundreds of millions of modern people’ (CW, LXXXVII, p. 25) away from his teachings. Usually quick to accommodate his second alter ego, Tolstoy this time remained adamant. He responded to Chertkov’s desperate plea with a clear statement that a moral marriage ‘does not exist’ (CW, LXXXVII, p. 24). He was aware that the way to moral perfection was full of obstacles and that he himself was not yet able to practise sexual abstinence within his family. From his perspective, it was possible to forgive human weakness, but not the obstinate refusal to see the truth, as he wrote around the same time to one of his followers: ‘It is impossible to admit the slightest compromise over an idea’ (Ls, II, p. 456).
In this particular case Sofia would probably have agreed with her arch-rival. In 1888 she gave birth to their last child, Ivan, who, as she sarcastically remarked, was the real ‘afterword’ to The Kreutzer Sonata. She wrote that the story humiliated her ‘in the eyes of the entire world and destroyed the last love’ in the family (SAT-ML, p. 167). At the same time, however, she went to St Petersburg for an audience with the emperor to ask him for permission to publish The Kreutzer Sonata in the edition of Tolstoy’s collected works. Alexander III liked the story and Pobedonostsev found it useless to continue the ban against a work that was already widely circulating around Russia. The emperor granted the countess permission, but prohibited separate editions of the book, trying to keep it away from the attention of a mass audience: volume XIII with The Kreutzer Sonata appeared in three subsequent editions, the second of which was published in 20,000 copies.
There are numerous biographical, psychological and psychoanalytical interpretations of the roots of Tolstoy’s attitude to sex. However, one cannot fully understand it outside of the general framework of his anarchistic worldview. Tolstoy saw sexual instinct as a coercive force. Unlike the state or the Church, this force was located inside the body, but that only made it more onerous, as it worked not through external repression, but through the manipulation of desires.
The ideal of chastity was not new to Russian culture and not limited to traditional monastic communities. In a much more radical way, a sect of self-castrators that had a widespread following among Russian peasants believed that men should get rid of the organs that lead them into temptation. Tolstoy firmly rejected this idea. The self-castrators were to him akin to revolutionaries ready to resist evil by violence. According to Tolstoy, an individual needed to free himself from the shackles of animal nature, not through a one-time act of enforced purification, but through incessant moral effort that was itself more valuable that any possible outcome. As he wrote to Yevgeny Popov, his collaborator at ‘Intermediary’:
If men were not lustful, there would be no chastity and no conception of it for him. The mistake is to set oneself the task of chastity (the outward state of chastity) and not the striving towards chastity, the inner recognition, at all times and in all circumstances of life, of the advantages of chastity over dissoluteness, the advantages of greater purity over lesser. This mistake is very important. For a man who has set himself the outward state of chastity as his task, a retreat from that outward state, a fall, destroys everything and halts a possibility of work and living. For a man who has set himself the task of striving towards chastity, there is no fall, no halting of his work; and temptations and a fall cannot halt his striving towards chastity, but often actually intensify it. (Ls, II, p. 469)
Lust was the most powerful, but not the only, enemy with which Tolstoy had to struggle. In order to let universal Christian love reign supreme in his soul, he needed to overcome pride, vanity, anger, bad feelings towards others, exclusive preference for his kin, desire for physical comfort, fear of death and other inborn passions. This was a lifetime task, an ideal he did not hope to attain but merely to strive towards. In 1881 and 1884 he had resumed his diary sporadically, but from 1888 onwards he kept it without major interruptions until the end of his life in order to record all the movements of his mind and to measure them against the gauge of perfection he had created for himself.
The exhaustive struggle with his own bestiality and the egotism that Tolstoy had envisaged for himself was seriously complicated by the popularity of his teachings. When Tolstoy first became engaged in theological research, Sofia had expressed her disappointment that her husband was leaving the field that had brought him universal fame for studies that could hardly have a dozen readers. It is difficult to imagine a less accurate prediction. By the end of the 1880s Tolstoy’s fame has grown to outsize proportions.
The Holy Synod of the Russian Church banned Tolstoy’s treatises, but that did not prevent his ideas from reaching the widest possible audience. In 1890 Pobedonostsev wrote to the emperor that it was impossible