Tn March 1889, during a visit to his friend Prince Urusov, he took up his manuscript again and revised it. "I read [The Kreutzer Somite] to Urusov," he noted. "He liked it very much. It is true that it is something new and powerful." Upon his return to Moscow, he received a package of books and pamphlets from America 011 the Shakers, a sect that preached the abolition of sexual relations, 'lliis coincidence struck him as a sign of divine approbation. "I read the writings of the Shak ers," he wrote 011 April 9, 1889. "Perfect. Total chastity. Odd to receive them just when I am concerned with the question." The next day he wrote to Chertkov: "I do not agree with the solution advocated by the Shakers, but I cannot deny that it is far more reasonable than that which results from our universally accepted institution of marriage. I shall not overcome this problem in a hurry, because I am a dirty, libidinous old man!"
The idea of innocence was so appealing to him that he wrote in his notebook, "Must propose the Shaker arrangement to [Sonya]." But he did not dare speak to her about it yet. If she had accepted, which of the two would have been more cruelly punished?
All summer long he worked on the book with grim passion. For the love of God he had given up property, hunting, meat and tobacco, one after the other. Now lie wanted to give up sex. For him, the enemy was woman; and the reason was that he was too strongly sensual not to be continually led into temptation. In physical pleasure he abandoned some part of himself; when the act was over he hated the woman who had gained that moment of power over him and he scurried back into his shell, determined not to come out of it again, for he was truly happy only in the solitary recital of his aspirations toward Christ and his grievances against his family, his literary projects and the gurgles of his stomach. Impenitent old Narcissus, eternally preoccupied with himself, he blew on his image in the water for the sheer pleasure of seeing it come back again when the ripples died away.
Superficially, there was nothing in common between Leo Tolstoy and Pozdnyshev, the hero of The Kreutzer Sonata who tells his fellow passenger in the train compartment how he murdered his wife out of jealousy. But the theories propounded by this character are so exact a copy of the author's convictions that, apart from the murder, the entire story might be autobiographical. A great deal of water had flowed under the bridge since Tolstoy propounded his views of love leading to domestic felicity in War and Peace. In Anna Karenina, he condemned adulterous passion while still glorifying marital affection, but the Levin/Kitty couple is already being undermined by malaise. In the third phase—The Kreutzer Sonata—even conjugal bonds are accursed. As coldly as he previously analyzed the death agony of Ivan Ilich, he now analyzes the death agony of the Pozdnyshev marriage. In passing, women in general and Sonya in particular are hauled over the coals. To give a touch of plausibility to his indictment, the author is continually enriching it with details from his own experience. Like Tolstoy, Pozdnyshev also shows his private diary to his fiancee: "I remember her distress, followed by alarm and despair, when she learned those facts. I saw her almost on the point of breaking off. Would she had only done so!" Elsewhere, Pozdnyshev-alias-Tolstoy tells how his wife refused to nurse her baby: "In this way she was deprived of her sole weapon against coquetry'. A wetnurse took the child; in other words, we took advantage of a woman's poverty, need and ignorance to tear her away from her own baby and give her ours and, in return for this service, put a beribboned cap on her head." And here is the old grievance of the move to Moscow: "Really, there are some curious coincidences: just when the parents cannot bear to live together a moment longer, it becomes essential to go to the city for the children's education." Or, better stilclass="underline" "When the children began to grow up and have definite personalities, they bccamc allies which each of us tried to draw into his camp. They suffered dreadfully, poor things, but in our un ending battle we had other things to consider besides their feelings."
It is hard not to imagine the irritation Tolstoy must have felt in Sonya's presence when Pozdnyshcv says, speaking of his wife, "1 watched her pouring out her tea, putting the spoon in her mouth and swinging her foot, noisily sucking on the liquid, and found myself loath ing her as though she were committing some hideous crimc. I did not notice, then, that these periods of animosity occurred with perfect predictability and corresponded to the other periods, which we call of love. Period of love, period of hate; period of violent love, prolonged period of hate; more feeble manifestation of love, shorter period of hate . . . We were two convicts serving life sentences of hard labor welded to the same chain, we hated each other, we were making each other's lives hell, and trying all the time not to see it. At that time I had not yet learned that this hell is the fate of ninety-nine per cent of all couples."
And how Pozdnyshcv's quarrels with his wife echo those of the author with Sonya. "I shout at her, 'Be quiet!' or something of the sort; she rushes out of the room and runs to the children. I want to hold her back and finish my explanation, I catch her by the arm. She pretends I have hurt her and screams, 'Children, your father is beating me!' I go back to my study, lie down and begin to smoke. ... I think of running away, hiding, going to America. . . . Around eleven o'clock her sister arrives as emissary. It begins as usuaclass="underline" 'She is in a dreadful State. What is the meaning of this?'"
The virtuoso's arrival on the scene, his playing of the Kreutzer Sonata, the birth of jealousy in Pozdnyshev's heart, and the murder, are all imaginary, of course. But from l>cginning to end, every line of the book reveals the author's disgust with marriage—nothing but 'legalized prostitution"; his hatred of women—"who take revenge upon us by playing on our senses"; his conviction that in order to obey the will of God, man must refrain from reproduction—"The strongest passion of all, the most perfidious, the most stubborn, is sexual passion, carnal love. ... As long as mankind shall endure, it has an ideal to strive for and its ideal is certainly not that of rabbits and swine, which is to multiply as often as possible, nor that of apes and Parisians, which is to enjoy sexual pleasure with the highest possible degree of refinement. . . ." Or, "Will the human race be wiped out because a dozen or a score of individuals refuse to behave like pigs?"