During an interminable Russian train journey, the narrator gets into conversation with a man called Pózdnyshev who has been mocking his travelling companions' modern ideas about love, marriage and the emancipation of women. As far as he is concerned, "love" is an illusion, sex is degrading and filthy, and marriage a legalised form of prostitution. The only way men and women can live together in a fair and equitable society is by abolishing sex altogether. If that means the end of the human race, then so be it: after all, as Christians we are supposed to be looking forward to the Last Days, aren't we?

Obviously he's not quite all there, but he has a story to tell, and it's going to be a long night, so the narrator settles in to take notes. Pózdnyshev describes how, after a typically debauched youth, he made a typical bourgeois marriage with a Pure Young Woman who had been brought up by her typical bourgeois parents with the sole aim in life of finding a good husband. Believing their conditioning they thought themselves in love, but in practice living together turned out to be sheer hell, mitigated only by occasional bouts of physical pleasure in between pregnancies.

Then, on the advice of a clearly malignant physician, the wife decides to stop having babies and takes up her interest in music again. An old friend of Pózdnyshev, a violinist, turns up. The jealous Pózdnyshev catches them playing Beethoven's Kreutzer
Sonata together. This is music so dripping with animal passion that it actually renders sex superfluous, and poor Pózdnyshev convinces himself that he has no alternative to stabbing his wife to death. With hindsight, he realises that wasn't such a good idea, but it's too late now...

Fair enough, and a deranged murderer is pretty much the ultimate unreliable narrator, so we can be suitably chilled and horrified and move on. But before we manage to put the book down, Tolstoy himself has stepped into frame in an Afterword, telling us that he is aware we will think it strange but, all the same, he has thought it over and he's 100% behind Pózdnyshev's crazy ideas about the desirability of us all adopting celibacy. St Paul was only halfway to the right answer. And while he's got our attention, he would also like to invite us to consider taking up vegetarianism and manual labour. It will make us feel so much better.

I don't remember it being so off the wall last time I read it: perhaps I was more inclined to take Russian sages seriously when I was younger? ( )

Read from Lima Public Library 1984, read again old paperback in my library (which I then pitched because of book deterioration) 9/8/19

Theme: tales of life and romance, Kreutzer: jealousy portrayed
Type: romantic fiction (of life and morals)
Value: 1-
Age: col
Interest: 1-
Objectionable: swearing, no final answers (not intent of author); Epilogue by author reveals he believed God (Chr ist) did not establish marriage, ideal is abstinence, striving toward heaven (no giving in marriage), people should adopt not have children, no sex even within marriage, there will be children because ideal will not be realized, children born (outside God's plan?!) must be brought up Christianly
Synopsis/Noteworthy: intro (Maude) viii, x

FAMILY HAPPINESS (1859) a young girl (Masha) marries an older man (Sergei) and have ideal, romantic marriage which metamorphosizes into nonromantic, practicality as either a matter of course or the girl's greed (as she tries the flattery of life); 18 love transforms; 64 feeling; 68 man always right; 73; 96 separate lives; 103;105; 108

THE KREUTZER SONATA (1889) man (Pozdnyshev) who murdered his wife relates the (moral) sequence of his disillusionment (with love: love is animal/be honest) to a first person; thoughts on married life and women and jealousy; 120 love for pretty women; 124-6 first depravity, 127 defilement; 128; 129-135; 137; 139: theory 142; 144; 153, 160 doctors, 155 abortion; 157 children; 159; 162; 164 busyness; 167; 169; 175; 180

THE DEVIL (1889) a man (Eugene Irtenev) is driven to madness and murder by practicing socialy-accepted immorality (Stepanida) before his marriage; alternate ending; loved his wife (Lisa); 250 girls' romanticism

FATHER SERGIUS (1890-8) a (worldly) good and ambitious man (Kasatsky) finaly finds the purpose of life after living his life as a monk for wrong reasons (desire for preeminence); 302; 304; 307; 327 cut off finger; 354 conclusion (or moral)
Francoise (1892) a sailor (Celestine Duclos) engaging in prostitution realizes every woman is somebody's sister

(Appendix:) THE PORCELAIN DOLL (1863) Tolstoy writes his wife's younger sister (Tanya) as though his wife (Sonya) has become a porcelain doll