herself. ‘But, Your Honour, nothing happened! I have the misfortune to be married to a jealous maniac who has made my life a misery. He himself introduced this man who is supposed to be my lover into our house and encouraged his visits to play music – we are both keen amateur musicians. The evening my husband returned unexpectedly and found me having supper with this supposed lover I had thought that for once I could invite him around without being made to feel a criminal. Sir, nothing could have been more innocent. How could I possibly have done anything wrong? The servants were up, serving supper, and the children were awake and watching everything, the way children do. Nothing happened. Nothing could have happened.’ She never did get the chance to defend herself because her husband killed her dead, in a jealous fury.
The novel could be read as a brilliant account of unjustified male jealousy. There could not be a better description of a man working himself up into jealous madness. It could be analysed, and almost certainly has been, by psychiatrists presenting it as a case history of latent homosexuality, textbook stuff, really.
It is useful to contrast the fevered voice of Tolstoy in The Kreutzer Sonata with Anna Karenina, a panoramic account of sexual and marital relations. In it, a newly married couple, Kitty and Levin, are just settling into their life together in the country. Levin is modelled on the young Tolstoy. He is described as eccentric in his social views, awkward in company and immoderately in love with his wife. It is summer, the house is full of visitors, and one of them is a young man from the fashionable life that Levin (and Tolstoy) despises. He is a comic character, stout, wearing a ridiculous Scottish bonnet and streamers, is greedy, and he has a crush on Kitty. Flirting with her is normal behaviour for the Moscow and St Petersburg salons, but Levin suffers and throws him out of the house. His worldly male relatives mock him and call him ‘a turk’. Wonderfully observed are the absurd quarrels of the young couple, instigated always by the husband, who is ashamed of himself and cannot stop watching his imagined rival and putting the worst possible interpretation on everything he sees. Levin is seen as an oddball by family and neighbours – all those ridiculous ideas about the peasants and agriculture – and as foolishly jealous, but held in the sweep and power of that novel, when Levin throws the society peacock out of the house Tolstoy’s affectionate portrait tells us that he thinks Levin is no more than rather touchingly absurd. But the same author wrote The Kreutzer Sonata. The same author wrote War and Peace, whose great quality is balance, the command of a panoramic sweep of events and people. That dispassionate eagle eye is nowhere here. What we have in The Kreutzer Sonata is the power and the energy, but not the sanity of judgement. His position could not be more extreme, and in case anyone might imagine that he regretted The Kreutzer Sonata he wrote an apologia, Sequel to The Kreutzer Sonata, some time later, where he reiterated it all, like hammering nails into a coffin, burying any possibility of joy, enjoyment, even the mildest fun in sex, love, lovemaking. Yet the author of the two great novels describes all kinds of passion, enjoyment, the emotions that we sinful lesser mortals might associate with sex.
In the grip of his fanaticism, Tolstoy advocated chastity for the entire human race, and when it was objected that this would end the human race, his reply was the equivalent of ‘And so what!’ Or, rather tant pis, as this member of a francophile caste would have put it.
But he could not have believed in the possibility of chastity, for his own life taught him otherwise. His struggles with his sexuality are documented, and by himself, sometimes confusingly, not because he tried to conceal them, but because his behaviour and his principles did not match.
Before marriage he was corrupt and debased – so he said. He slept around with peasant women and there was at least one illegitimate child. There were always the gypsies, too, rather, THE GYPSIES! always charming young men from the paths of virtue, and Tolstoy went off to the gypsies, like so many of the characters from the novels of that time. After marriage no gypsies, and he tried hard to be a faithful husband. He was strongly sexed, going at it well into his seventies.
Late in his life Tolstoy became what we would call a born-again Christian. He had a religious experience which changed him. A type of religious conversion is described in Anna Karenina. Levin is in despair because he has no faith. Hard for us now to understand this, unless it is transposed into political terms, but people in the nineteenth century went through torments over losing faith, lacking faith, longing for faith. I myself met, when a girl, survivors of that struggle, much battered by the experience. Now, looking back, we may hear, louder than any other voice, Matthew Arnold’s ‘melancholy, long withdrawing roar’ – the loss of faith in God.
Levin was suicidal. In a beautifully moving chapter Tolstoy describes him at last achieving faith: now we would say that the psychological conflict and tension was so great it would have to be resolved one way or the other.
Christianity’s great contribution to human happiness has been a hatred of the body, and of the flesh; distrust of women, dislike of sex. In this it is unlike the two other Middle Eastern religions. Judaism, far from denouncing sex, prescribes lovemaking for the faithful on their Sabbath, thus sanctifying and celebrating sex. Islam is not a puritan religion. Not in Judaism and Islam do we find celibate priests who use nuns or their housekeepers as their mistresses, or are driven to sex with little boys. But Christianity might have been tailored to fit Tolstoy’s needs and nature.
He became what he always had the potential for – a fanatic. There are descriptions of him, after his conversion, his fevered fervid face, his bullying manner, telling people of their duty to become like him, because being a fanatic, there was only one truth, his. There is such a thing as the logic of the fanatic, who begins with a proposition or a set of them, and from there develop inexorably all the rest.
It was wrong, it was wicked, to have sex with a pregnant woman or a lactating one. His wife Sonya protested at his inconsistencies, but Tolstoy was never afraid of contradicting himself. Thus he is driven – by logic – at least for the period of the argument, to support polygamy, for the sensible Tolstoy knows that celibacy is impossible. He is rather like those politicians, their fiery years forgotten, who tell teenagers that it is easy to ‘just to say No’. Say No – that’s all there is to it! Anyone with an ounce of common sense, or even with a working memory of their young selves, must know it is absurd: but we are in the grip of fanatic logic.
My favourite is the Inquisition which, having burned a heretic alive, used to send their police around to collect from the relatives money to pay for the wood used for the bonfire. Who else? The relatives might not have wanted their loved one incinerated, but obviously it was they who were responsible for the monster and therefore they must pay. It makes an entertaining, if painful, pastime, watching the logic-chopping of extremists, unfortunately so numerous in our sad times, and Tolstoy’s recommendation for celibacy for the entire human race is an excellent example.
What women might think about these prohibitions (and his wife had many loudly-voiced ideas of her own) did not interest Tolstoy. He insists that women are ‘pure’. Even ‘as pure as doves’. The sane Tolstoy knows this is rubbish, but he has to insist that women all hate sex, which is vile, shameful and even unnatural – these are only some of his epithets. A pure maiden will always hate sex.
Chekhov, who stood by him in the fuss over the book, told him that he talked nonsense about female sexuality. At some point one does have to ask if perhaps the trouble was really a simple one: Tolstoy was no good in bed. There must be some explanation for his insistence that women dislike sex. His Sonya did not like it but saw sex as a way of keeping him at heel. When he did ask to sleep alone, she refused. She welcomed sex with him because he became friendly, simple, affectionate: if his disciples knew, she mocked, the reason for his saintliness, that his good moods were the result of sex with his wife, then they too would mock this apostle for total celibacy.
If Tolstoy was bad at sex, there is a parallel, D. H. Lawrence, who clearly knew little about sex: at least, the author of his earlier books did not. Yet he also wrote wonderfully about love, sexual power struggles,
