The Kreutzer Sonata A New Translation

On a night train crossing Russia, a man named Pozdnyshev - a Marshal of the Nobility, acquitted by a court of law of murdering his own wife - begins to explain himself to a fellow passenger.

His account is the novella: a confession that moves backward through the wreckage of a marriage, from a young man's dissolution to a wedding undertaken for the wrong reasons, through years of mutual contempt punctuated by reconciliation, five children, and a hatred each party has learned to disguise as love. He describes the evening his wife and a violinist named Trukachevsky performed Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata together, and what he saw on his wife's face as she played. He describes what he did when he returned home from a trip to find them together.

He was tried. He was acquitted. The court accepted his wife's apparent adultery as justification. He found the acquittal as disturbing as the murder.

Published in 1889 - and immediately suppressed by the Russian censors, who banned it from magazines and from Tolstoy's own collected works, forcing it to circulate in handwritten copies across Russia - The Kreutzer Sonata is the most extreme and the most honest expression of the views Tolstoy had been developing since his spiritual crisis of the early 1880s. In the Afterword he published separately in 1890, he confirmed that Pozdnyshev's views were essentially his own: that physical desire is degrading even within marriage, that the conventions governing relations between men and women in his society were organized around mutual deception, and that the ideal for human beings was complete chastity. Theodore Roosevelt called him a "sexual moral pervert." Émile Zola called the novella a nightmare. The US Post Office banned its distribution. The Russian tsar allowed it to be published only after Tolstoy's wife personally appealed to him.

The Beethoven sonata that gives the novella its title was composed in 1803 for a virtuoso named George Bridgetower, re-dedicated after a quarrel to Rodolphe Kreutzer, who thought it "outrageously unintelligible" and refused to play it. The music it was never meant to carry went on to mean everything Tolstoy said it meant. Whether he was right is a question the novella forces the reader to sit with on a moving train, with nowhere to go until the journey ends.