Penguin Books seem to be packaging and repackaging their back catalogue in as many permutations and combinations as they can. The Kreutzer Sonata is one from Penguin’s Great Loves series, but it’s more a story of hatred and despair than love. The narrator meets a man on a train, a man who becomes increasingly agitated as the conversation turns to love and marriage. As the train runs on through the night and the other passengers fall asleep, the man reveals the source of his agitation: he killed his wife when he found out she was unfaithful.
However, this is not just a tale of simple jealousy. Long before the wife was unfaithful, the marriage was going badly, and the murderous husband blames all of this on sex. Sex, he believes, is ‘swinish’, a degrading animality that civilised people should avoid. Marriage should not be be based on carnal desire, true love would not involve sex at all, and so long as men view women as objects of desire, they cannot help but to degrade and oppress women. All this can only lead to one end: jealousy, murder, violence and suffering.
Are you still with me? All this is not as depressing and outrageous to read as it sounds. The Kreutzer Sonata of the title refers to a Beethoven violin sonata: watching his wife play this piece with her lover, the husband realises by the way the music is affecting her, that his suspicions about her infidelity are true. The first movement of this sonata is an angry and unrelenting piece of music, emotionally exhausting, much as the narrator must have felt after listening to the story. Much like a piece of Beethoven’s music, idea after idea is brought forward in an unrelenting stream, with the full picture gradually emerging in a violent and exhilarating crescendo.
It can’t be easy to write the rantings of a madman is a way that is coherent and focused, but every crazy argument is completely consistent with the character, and seems, scarily, to make perfect sense. Tolstoy is a brilliant writer, and he builds the story up to a crescendo without a bum note, keeping the narrative taut to the very end.
Tolstoy became deeply religious in later life, and advocated chastity and abstinence, among other things, as being essential to leading a committed Christian life. He wrote “”The Christian’s ideal is love of God and his neighbour, self-renunciation in order to serve God and his neighbour; carnal love, marriage, means serving oneself, and therefore is, in any case, a hindrance in the service of God and men”. The book was banned in Russia almost as soon as it was published, and later in the US as well.
Despite Tolstoy’s ideas on women, sex and love being almost entirely opposite to my own, I really enjoyed this book. It’s so intense that sometimes I had to stop reading, but I was compelled to dive straight in again to find out what happened next. If you’ve never read any Tolstoy and are put off by the length of War and Peace or Anna Karenina, The Kreutzer Sonata is a great introduction and a great read.
The Kreutzer Sonata
Leo Tolstoy
Penguin
