Ilya’s marriage, and the births of his son and granddaughter in quick succession, had a profound effect on Tolstoy, particularly the birth of Vanechka, which had been very difficult for Sonya. She was forty-three, he was fifty-nine, and he felt ashamed that while he had successfully been able to fight the temptation to drink wine and eat meat, he had been unable to master his physical desire for his wife, particularly knowing how reluctant she was to become pregnant again. He despised himself for his weakness, and ended up venting his self-loathing in his fiction, which Sonya perceived as barbs personally directed at her. Having exalted the sanctity of marriage in What I Believe a few years earlier, Tolstoy now regarded it as an institution to be roundly condemned. He had always taken violent exception to the idea of marriage without children, but now even procreation could not redeem its sinfulness. Not for the first time in his life the mercurial writer had changed his tune. Well might Sonya find her husband’s sudden advocacy of chastity, even within marriage, hypocritical and hard to take. According to her first Russian biographer, she became pregnant yet again in 1890, and was relieved to miscarry.111
Tolstoy had started The Kreutzer Sonata in 1887, but most of the work on it took place in the spring and summer of 1889. One book which made an impact on him during this time was a practical guide to gynaecology and midwifery called Tokology: A Book for Every Woman, which was issued by the Sanitary Publishing Company in Chicago in 1883 (‘tokology’ comes from the Greek word for obstetrics). It had been sent to him by its author Dr Alice Bunker Stockham, who had been brought up as a Quaker, and was one of the very first women to qualify as a doctor in the United States. Having specialised in gynaecology, she came to believe that women should not have continual pregnancies, and that men should control their sexual urges.112 She also advocated abstinence from alcohol and tobacco and campaigned against prostitution. The book was of interest to Tolstoy for religious rather than medical reasons, he later told his daughter Tanya, and he wrote in November 1888 to tell Alice Stockham in his slightly creaky but elegant English that it was ‘truly a book, not only for woman but for mankind’:
Without labour in this direction mankind cannot go forward; and it seems to me especially in the matter treated in your book in chapter XI [‘Chastity in Marital Relations’ – Stockham discouraged sexual relations during pregnancy], we are very much behindhand. It is strange, that last week I have written a long letter to one of my friends [Chertkov] on the same subject. That sexual relation without the wish and possibility of having children is worse than prostitution and onanism, and in fact is both. I say it is worse, because a person who commits these crimes, not being married, is always conscious of doing wrong, but a husband and a wife, which commit the same sin, think that they are quite righteous.113
Tolstoy had indeed just written to Chertkov to castigate himself for the fact that it was too late to atone for having lived ‘like an animal’.114 In October 1889, the month in which his sister Masha decided to take the veil (she spent a year living with 400 nuns at a convent in Tula before moving to the convent next to Optina Pustyn), Alice Stockham came to visit Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana.115 She probably quickly discovered that they were not in complete agreement about everything – she was not as uncompromising as Tolstoy, for example, when it came to condemning all sex that was not for procreative purposes,116 but they enjoyed rewarding conversations about the American sects which practised chastity. In 1892 a translation of her book with an introduction by Tolstoy was published in Russia. It was because Stockham viewed childbirth in such sacred terms that she promoted the idea of sexual continence. Nevertheless, her novel ideas about a spiritualised form of human intimacy were not always well received. In her later book on the ‘ethics of marriage’, her ‘method of promoting marital happiness [whereby] sexual intimacy may take place without completing the act’ received withering scorn from a critic writing for a scholarly journal.117
Completion of the ninth and final draft of The Kreutzer Sonata provoked the question of where it could be published. Chertkov wanted the story for The Intermediary, Sonya wanted it for the new edition of the collected works, while Tolstoy now only cared about renouncing his copyright and avoiding arguments. On this occasion Tolstoy’s story started circulating in samizdat even before it was submitted to the censor. The manuscript was taken to St Petersburg by Tolstoy’s niece Masha kuzminskaya, who arranged a reading attended by thirty friends, including Alexandrine and Nikolay Strakhov. After another late-night reading at the offices of The Intermediary, the editorial staff portioned the manuscript amongst themselves and then sat up all night to copy it before returning it to the kuzminskys the next morning. Within a few days, much to Tolstoy’s chagrin (he was only ever content to disseminate his work after the proofreading stage, which always involved him making myriad corrections), 300 lithographed copies appeared, which themselves were soon copied and distributed further. The story soon became the hottest property in St Petersburg, and sold for the exorbitant sum of ten, and sometimes even fifteen roubles (Sonya sold Tolstoy’s entire collected works for eight roubles).118
It was agreed that The Kreutzer Sonata would be published first in an ephemeral weekly newspaper which did not have such strict censorship, and then handed over to Sonya,119 but rumours that it would be banned even from this publication started spreading at the beginning of December 1889. They were confirmed later that month.120 In the detailed review of the story Pobedonostsev sent his colleague Evgeny Feoktistov in February 1890, he conceded it was a ‘powerful’ work, and that he could not in good conscience ban a story which promoted chastity in the name of morality, but the overwhelmingly bleak message this sent out about the future of the human race made it unacceptable for publication. Alexander III enjoyed the story as much as The Power of Darkness when it was read to him at the Winter Palace, but his wife was shocked – as Theodore Roosevelt would be when translations reached the United States later that year. As US Attorney General, he forbade the distribution of the newspapers which printed it. By February 1890 illegal copies of The Kreutzer Sonata were being read all over Moscow, as we know from statements by Anton Chekhov, who had largely left his medical career behind and was by now a celebrated writer. He had been publishing under his own name in Russia’s most prestigious literary journals for twelve years at this point, and was just beginning to appear on Tolstoy’s radar. In the letter that Chekhov wrote to his friend Alexey Pleshcheyev about The Kreutzer Sonata, his typically incisive, clear-sighted observations bring a breath of fresh air into a debate that was highly charged: