music, books, love and kindness

 

So bleak and disparaging of love (especially physical love) and marriage ever existing in the same space, The Kreutzer Concerto is best read only if you're in a strong enough mood to handle its darkness...or if you're already in agreement with main character Pozdnyshev. Either way, the short novel is gripping and overwhelming (not necessarily in a good way)...and best followed with something happy.

 I prefer the views of a woman who appears briefly in the opening scene where a small group of people are discussing their takes on women, men, love and marriage. The lone female says:

"Ah, but what you say is terrible...there certainly exists among human beings this feeling which is called loved, and which lasts, not for months and years, but life."

On the other hand, there is almost an appealing frankness to Tolstoy's that society was better off when marriages were arranged and none of "what is this?...The young girls are seated, and gentlemen walk up and down before them, as in a bazaar, and make their choice." Leo Tolstoy seems honestly conflicted between how things should be and how they are, what is natural and what is not.

Much of what he writes in The Kreutzer Sonata is not friendly to women or romantic love, but he's being true to his own views, good ones or bad. In Epilogue To The Kreutzer Sonata, published in 1890, Tolstoy shared see what he saw as the novella's central theme:

"Let us stop believing that carnal love is high and noble and understand that any end worth our pursuit -- in service of humanity, our homeland, science, art, let alone God -- any end, so long as we may count it worth our pursuit, is not attained by joining ourselves to the objects of our carnal love in marriage or outside it; that, in fact, infatuation and conjunction with the object of our carnal love (whatever the authors of romances and love poems claim to the contrary) will never help our worthwhile pursuits but only hinder them."