The Kreutzer Sonata

by Leo Tolstoy

Today is Leo Tolstoy’s birthday. To celebrate I’m recommending his extraordinary novella The Kreutzer Sonata, first published in 1889. It’s named after the opening movement of the eponymous Beethoven sonata. You might like to listen to the music while reading this post.

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

Count Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy led a varied life. After a dissipated youth he joined an artillery regiment and fought in the Crimean War. In 1856 he resigned his commission and returned to his vast family estate at Yasnaya Polyana, more than a hundred miles south of Moscow, where he spent the rest of his life. He married Sofya Behrs in 1862 and they had thirteen children over fifteen years. He studied theories of education, establishing a progressive school for the peasant children on his estate, and he became internationally famous for his stories, novels and political writings, publishing War and Peace between 1863 and 1869 and Anna Karenina (our January 2025 read-along) between 1873 and 1879. At the age of 82, oppressed by his own reputation and alienated from his wife, he fled his home in the middle of the night and died within a week, in the small railway station of Astapovo.

Oxford World’s Classics | 93 of 477 pages | translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude, updated by J. W. Duff | introduction by Richard F. Gustafson

The Kreutzer Sonata is one of Tolstoy’s later works. On a night-long train journey, an agitated grey-haired man, Pozdnyshev, explains to the unnamed narrator how he came to murder his own wife. Pozdnyshev became convinced that his wife was having an affair with a violinist, Trukhachevsky, while listening to the pair of them perform the presto from the Kreutzer Sonata:

Ah! It’s a fearful thing, that sonata. Especially that movement. [. . .] Can one really allow it to be played in a drawing-room full of women in low-cut dresses? To be played, and then followed by a little light applause, and the eating of ice-cream?

Pozdnyshev becomes increasingly jealous and paranoid, especially when he leaves Moscow on a trip, only to receive word that Trukhachevsky is visiting his wife while he’s away . . .

But the novella is not only a gripping whydunit, it is Tolstoy’s passionate and unconventional argument in favour of sexual abstinence, as he clarifies unequivocally in a postscript.

Owing to its explicit discussion of sex and sexuality, it was initially banned in both Russia and the USA, and President Theodore Roosevelt called Tolstoy a ‘sexual moral pervert’.

The Kreutzer Sonata (1901) by René-Xavier Prinet

The novella has inspired many subsequent artists, including this French painting of the kiss that may or may not occur in the novel.

In turn, this painting was used for many years by the perfumery House of Dana to advertise their ‘forbidden’ fragrance Tabu.

‘Tabu by Dana’ advert (1957)

There have been at least twelve film adaptations of the novel, including a 1956 short film by Éric Rohmer. Most recently, in 2008, Bernard Rose directed a British feature film adaptation starring Danny Huston, Elisabeth Röhm, Matthew Yang King and Anjelica Huston.

The Kreutzer Sonata (2008), dir. Bernard Rose

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Before I sign off – on a completely different note – spare a thought this Wednesday for Pierre de Ronsard, who marks his 500th birthday that day. Ronsard was the leader of the Pléiade, a group of seven 16th-century French poets who wrote vernacular poetry according to classical principles. Ronsard named his group after the Alexandrian Pleiad, a group of 3rd-century Greek poets, who were themselves named after the Pleiades, the cluster of seven bright stars in the constellation Taurus.

Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585)

Today, the French publisher Éditions Gallimard publishes a prestigious French-language classics series named La Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

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