The Kreutzer Sonata and Family Happiness

by Leo Tolstoy

As a novelist Tolstoy is not all of a piece, and as a man he is full of contradictions, none more evident than those revealed in THE KREUTZER SONATA. This macabre story concerns the murder of a wife by her husband. Chained to the crime by his conscience, the narrator is filled with an intense self-loathing not so much for the murder as for his inability to explain away its consequences.

In FAMILY HAPPINESS, Tolstoy reveals an understanding of the paths of marital communication, which similarly form such a superb conclusion in WAR AND PEACE.

Genres: Classics

Audio Cassette

First published January 1, 1890

About the author

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Николаевич Толстой; most appropriately used Liev Tolstoy; commonly Leo Tolstoy in Anglophone countries) was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist fiction. Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world's greatest novelists. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker and social reformer.

His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

See also:
French → Léon Tolstoï
Spanish → León Tolstói

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

These two novellas are available together as one seven+-hour unabridged audio download. The recording I listened to was dated 2002 and the sound quality was not great, although the narrator was completely understandable. There is a separate 2013 audio version of “Kreutzer Sonata” only (3.5 hours).

I think the lo-fi quality of the audio I listened to might actually be a feature, not a bug. “Kreutzer Sonata” is incredibly intense and the tinny, flat narration might help you step back and concentrate on the ideas rather than get completely sucked into the febrile awfulness of the narrator/Tolstoy-surrogate's emotional life. I am told by my Long-Suffering Wife (a brainy chick and a Germanist) that this forcing the listener/spectator to step back and not get to involved in the story is called the “Alienation Effect” and, when done deliberately, not accidentally as here, was a favorite theatrical wheeze of Bertolt Brecht.

A little alienation might be needed in this case. This is an intense listening (or reading) experience, and is made more so by the knowledge that the emotions and ideas of the narrator are certainly a mirror of Tolstoy's experience. Every day, be glad you are not Tolstoy, or somebody who lived in his era.

The joke nowadays is: “The sexual revolution is over. Sex lost.”, but damn if you get a load of the knots that people twisted themselves into over sex in late 19th-century Europe, you might feel a lot better about our day and age. For example, it's pretty common knowledge today that, in spite of (or perhaps because of) the pervasiveness of sex in everyday life, a person's actual first sexual experience is often somewhat difficult and/or disappointing. Like drinking beer, it's a practice that improves with repetition. Imagine if you didn't know that other people often did not initially find sex to be astonishingly wonderful from the get-go, you might wonder “That's it?! Really?” after which you might move onto “Is there something wrong with me?” That's pretty much what happens (in my interpretation) to the young lady in the story, after which things do not improve for her. My take-away from the story is that even Tolstoy himself, a great thinker, didn't have a lot of the folk-wisdom that today is common knowledge among even the densest teenagers. That is why I say: in some ways, life is easier now.

Tolstoy was not the type to let lack of knowledge stand in the way of a strongly-held opinion, so later on in this novella, his narrator-surrogate lets us know that sex during pregnancy leads to epilepsy, women who do not breastfeed are likely to commit adultery, and contraception is “disgusting”.

I guess I can't help going for the cheap joke, but I also feel that this was the best version of an unhappy marriage ever to appear in literature, and also is a cautionary tale about why so many people, even in our day, end up miserable in marriage, and then not much happier in divorce. I don't think it would do any harm if more people read and thought about this novella before taking the plunge themselves.

Is this novella misogynous? Yes, but at least he's not trying to dress it up as something more acceptable.

After “Kreutzer, “Family Happiness” is much much easier to experience. It was written by a much younger (40 years), much less grumpy man. It's nearly a pleasant story, of a marriage that has its rocky moments but everybody comes out of it more or less intact. Perhaps illusions get blown up on the way to realizing some limited form of domestic bliss, but, well, that happens in life as well.

[Tatiana Jančáriková · Rating 3 out of 5]

Toto bolo zvlastne. Dve stostranove novely o vztahoch. Kreutzerova sonata - mizogynny rant stareho dedka, ktory rozprava spolucestujucemu vo vlaku svoj zivotny pribeh. Okrem zien nenavidi deti, lekarov a hudbu, to veru chces pocuvat cestujuc krizom cez Rusko 🤷🏼‍♀️🚂
Rodinne stastie - pitva jedneho manzelstva, rozpravackou je zena, ktora trochen moc riesi a rype sa vo veciach, ale to bude asi tiez ruska kratochvila.
Anyway, napisal to Tolstoj, takze 3,5 z 5, still better love story than Twilight.

[Victor Carson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love Tolstoy but found little to like in the Kreutzer Sonata. Most sounds like a rant by an old man on the treachery of women. Family Happiness is a little better. I listened to the audiobook. Might be better to look for a free e-book on Project Gutenberg.