Pozdnyshev’s theory is that it is impossible to maintain a long-term relationship and that love and attraction does not last:īut when, as is most often the case, the husband and wife accept the external obligation to live together all their lives and have, by the second month, come to loathe the sight of each other, want to get divorced and yet go on living together, it usually ends in that terrible hell that drives them to drink, makes them shoot themselves, kill and poison each other. Suffice to say that it isn’t a very cheerful read, as the main character can see no justification for marriage, or indeed any sexual relationship between men and women, as the result of his experiences with women. I won’t go into too much detail about the plot, for those who haven’t read the book. The narrator of the sad tale is a train passenger called Pozdnyshev, who begins to relate the story of his life and marriage to a fellow passenger, after a disagreement between the travellers about love, marriage and divorce. In The Kreutzer Sonata, Tolstoy sets out his case against marriage and carnal love, with the story of a marriage that went disastrously wrong.

Sadly, of the thirteen children that she bore, only eight survived to adulthood.

The writer fails to point out that the brunt of that would have been borne (pun intended) by poor Sofya. The introduction states that ‘together they had thirteen children’. One of my finds was a novella by Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonatapublished as one of Penguin’s Great Loves series of twenty examples of ‘the most seductive, inspiring and surprising writing on love in all its infinite variety.’ The book, originally written in 1889 apparently drew on Tolstoy’s own marriage (1862) to Sofya Andreyevna, which by all accounts was a rather stormy relationship.

The kreutzer sonata tolstoy