Quest of the Spirit: From Suffering to Acceptance

100. Emancipation of Women! Tolstoy's "Kreutzer Sonata"

                                                                Tolstoy's "Kreutzer Sonata"

         "The emancipation of women lies not in the universities and law courts, but in the bedroom. Yes, and struggle against prostitution lies not in the brothels but in the families" (Tolstoy 436). This passage from Tolstoy's "Kreutzer Sonata" suggests that mutual respect, not personal gratification, begins at home and that the problems associated with sexual inequality only be resolved by changing the cultural attitudes toward men and women. In "The Kreutzer Sonata," Tolstoy uses irony and paradox to indict Russian society based upon power and manipulation rather than love and compassion, a society that fails to teach moral values to its youth before marriage, and the consequences of living in a materialistic, promiscuous environment void of those values. The author expresses his aversion his country's mistreatment of women (383), the flaws of a culture that accepts sexual determinism as a justification the male exploitation of the female (384), the paradox of freeing women legally yet viewing them as objects of sexual gratification (388), and the awareness of the feminine influence over men which women employ to control and manipulate them as well. In essence, Tolstoy criticizes the problems associated with a sexually deviant society that perceives women as objects to attract and dominate males, a deplorable process beginning early in the lives of children whose role models dress and act the appropriate part. According to the author, "The principal poison lies in the demoralization of the world, especially of women" (388). Instead of loving their children, parents, in their selfishness, regret having them, and eventually use them as pawns to manipulate their spouses. The children, in turn, soon employ this devious practice on their friends and parents (392). Tragically, Pozdnyshev, the elderly narrator, reports "that ninety-nine percent of married people live in a similar hell to the one I was in and that it cannot be otherwise" (394). To reverse this destructive trend, Tolstoy suggests a radical change in attitudes and laws (374, 386). Just as men are taught that sexual gratification is natural and therefore justifiable within or without the framework, so are women taught to exploit their male counterparts by dominating and controlling them sexually (371). Relationships are established not though faith, love, and understanding but through power, and the struggle to maintain it. According to the narrator, "So it is with the emancipation of woman: the enslavement of woman lies simply in the fact that people desire, and think it good, to avail themselves of her as a tool of enjoyment. Well, and they liberate woman, give her all sorts of rights equal to man, but continue to regard her as an instrument of enjoyment, and so educate her in childhood and afterwards by public opinion. And there she is, still the same humiliated and depraved slave, and the man still a depraved slave-owner" (385). The outcome to this miserable condition, he says, can "only be changed by a change in men's outlook on women and women's way of regarding themselves" (386). Speaking through the persona of a who hears the narrator's tale, Tolstoy says, "The chief thing such people do not understand is that marriage without love is not marriage; that love alone sanctifies marriage, and that real marriage is only such as is sanctified by love" (360). Sadly, both males and females victims suffer from such an immoral practice which consumes their minds, bodies, and potential in their futile quest for social and emotional fulfillment. Their quest for meaning becomes blurred by the demands of society for acceptance and popularity. Just as they are deluded into accepting the material values of society, so are they deceived by science and psychology into believing that their appearance and sexual behavior are desirable (383). Theories of progress and competition overshadow the values of love, mercy, and toleration. Just as Einstein and Born suggested that ethics be employed before scientific weapons were unleashed, so does Tolstoy lament this country's abandonment of its moral principles, in favor of secular values which destroy both body and soul by leaving the spirit void of hope and purpose.

            In the "Sonata," the protagonist listens to an aged man with glittering eyes named Pozdnyshev who, like Coleridge's ancient mariner, is compelled to recount his crime, in an attempt to achieve atonement. The narrator murders his wife out of jealousy, and ends the tale in sadness and despair. (363). He recounts his own earlier acceptance of society's deceptive double standard that infidelity was acceptable for men but not for women. He laments that he had married for money and prestige rather than for love, another characteristic of the affluent society. He recognizes the suffering that his wife, as a typical young Russian woman, undergoes as a childbearing mother, while he cruelly resents her sexual attention to the children rather than him. He blames the culture that promotes sexual prowess as a foremost value instead of love and toleration. He recognizes his wife's eventual "blooming" after her children grow older, and his subsequent jealousy which added to his earlier cruelty toward her. These factors, all cultural elements, he recognizes and indicts. Despite his wife's guilt, and the guilt of her lover Trukhachevski, who was also in the eyes of Russian society, merely fulfilling his need for sexual gratification. Frustrated, the husband considers the possibility of murder, yet recognizes that no human justification for it can efface the guilt and despair that it engenders. Tolstoy even suggests that a husband's view of his wife as a sexual object is as much a crime as that from the unmarried subjects. Following the knife murder of his wife, and a period of eleven months in prison, Pozdynshev ends his tragic account by desperately pleading with the traveler to forgive him! In response to the protagonist's suffering and the moral depravity of his homeland, Tolstoy strongly admonishes his countrymen to alter the course of their lives through moral purity. In his lithograph of "The Kreutzer Sonata," Tolstoy's conclusion is different, but the message is more poignant. The final paragraph describes the desperation of the aged husband overwhelmed by guilt and grief. The tragic realization of his crime lives forever to haunt him, as he acknowledges, "Yes, that is what I have done, and what I have gone through. Yes, a man should understand that the real meaning of the words in the Gospel--Matthew V:28—where it says that everyone that looks on a woman to lust after her commits adultery, relates to woman, his fellow human being—not merely to casual women or strangers—but above all to his own wife" (499).

                                                    Works Cited for Tolstoy's "Kreutzer Sonata"

Tolstoy, Leo. "The Kreutzer Sonata." Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy. John Bayley, Introduction.                Louise and Aylmer Maude, Trans. New York: Harper & Row, 1967.