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.
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