Sofiya Tolstoy -------------------------Newyorkercombookspage-turnersofiya-tolstoys-defense படித்தது -பிடித்தது

Like her husband, Sofiya Tolstoy criticized the sexual double
standard, but she was far more sympathetic to Women
.
Tolstoy’s 1889 novella “the Kreutzer Sonata,” an aristocrat named Pozdnyshev tells a stranger on a
train the story of his unhappy family. He married a much younger
woman, provoked by her youthful beauty and sexy sweater; they had five
children, but Pozdnyshev was disgusted by family life. The marriage
curdled, and he became jealous of his wife’s relationship with a
musician who kept coming over to play duets. In a rage, he stabbed his
wife to death. Though there was no evidence that his wife was
unfaithful, and although he feels guilty for his crime, Pozdnyshev
argues that he and his wife were equal partners in their submission to
lust, and equal victims of corrupt sexual standards that turn all
women into prostitutes. He concludes that “sexual passion, no matter
how it’s arranged is evil, a terrible evil against which one must
struggle.… The words of the Gospel that whosoever looks at a woman to
lust after her has already committed adultery relates not only to
other men’s wives, but precisely—and above all—to one’s own wife.” The
only righteous path is abstinence; if it leads to the end of the human
race, so be it. In an afterword written in response to many letters
asking him to explain the meaning of the novella, Tolstoy confirmed
that he shared Pozdnyshev’s opinions. He added that he didn’t mean
that no one should ever have sex—only that everyone should try never
to have sex, because it is noblest to strive for an impossible ideal.
“The Kreutzer Sonata” caused an international scandal at a time when
sexuality and gender roles were the subject of widespread debate.
Banned both in Russia (where Tolstoy had long struggled with the
censors) and in the United States, the novella led many men and women
to embrace celibacy and modesty, in keeping with Tolstoy’s Christian
asceticism, which also emphasized nonviolence, vegetarianism, physical
labor, and poverty. One particularly enthusiastic young Romanian
castrated himself. Other readers were appalled. In 1890, Zola told the
New York Herald that the novella was a “nightmare, born of a diseased
imagination.” Tolstoy himself had his doubts. In an 1891 letter, he
wrote, “There was something nasty in _The Kreutzer Sonata _… something
bad about the motives that guided me in writing it.”
The novella had an especially powerful effect on the author’s wife,
Sofiya. Friends sent their condolences, and she knew they weren’t the
only readers who understood “The Kreutzer Sonata”_ _as a personal
attack on her. She decided to shake off the shame by petitioning the
tsar (who loved Tolstoy’s fiction but felt very sorry for his wife) to
lift the publication ban on the novella: by defending it, she hoped to
persuade the world that it wasn’t really about her. When the tsar
granted her request, she wrote in her diary, “I cannot help secretly
exulting in my success in overcoming all the obstacles, that I managed
to obtain an interview with the Tsar, and that I, a woman, have
achieved something that nobody else could have done!”
“The Kreutzer Sonata Variations,” a new volume edited and translated
by Michael Katz, places “The Kreutzer Sonata” and its afterword
alongside what Katz calls “counterstories” by Sofiya and by the
Tolstoys’ son Lev, as well as excerpts from the diaries and memoirs of
various members of the Tolstoy family. There are two novellas by
Sofiya: “Whose Fault?,” the story of a jealous husband who murders his
innocent wife, and “Song Without Words,” about a depressed married
woman who becomes obsessed with a composer and his music, and
eventually checks herself into a “nerve clinic.” “Song Without Words”
is a response to “The Kreutzer Sonata;” “Whose Fault?” is a systematic
rebuttal.
The most well written of the counterstories and the most forceful
rejection of Tolstoy’s thesis, “Whose Fault?” is the most intriguing
part of “The Kreutzer Sonata Variations.” The heroine, Anna, is an
idealistic young woman who is fond of writing, philosophy, and
painting. The child of a happy family, she marries, in her late teens,
Prince Prozorsky, a family friend in his mid-thirties. She hopes that,
as a kind, well-educated older man, he will be her guide to artistic
and intellectual pursuits. But just before the wedding, she learns of
his premarital sexual adventures, and on their wedding night she is
disgusted by his advances. The peasants on Prozorsky’s estate mock
her, and she learns that one of them had a long affair with her
husband. Of Anna’s response to this news, Sofiya writes, “Despair and
horror couldn’t fail to leave their mark on a very young soul for her
entire life; they were the sort of wounds that a young child
experiences the first time it sees a decomposing corpse.” Anna is
overwhelmed by jealousy, shame, and sexual repulsion. Her husband is
disappointed by her sexual incompetence (an unfortunate side effect of
innocence) and lack of enthusiasm. (All of this corresponds to
Sofiya’s own experience.)
As in “The Kreutzer Sonata,” each episode of tenderness and physical
intimacy between husband and wife is followed by a bitter argument.
But in “Whose Fault?” this is not because sex itself is degrading but
because Anna is angry and disappointed at her husband’s indifference
to her feelings and needs. While Tolstoy writes that Pozdnyshev and
his fiancée were so consumed by desire in the days before the wedding
that they could find nothing to say to each other, Sofiya writes that
Prince Prozorsky was so agitated “that he couldn’t think of anything
to talk about; he kissed [Anna’s] hands in silence and sometimes
didn’t even hear what she was saying.” Deeply unhappy, Anna returns to
painting; now that they’re married, she finds that her husband no
longer shows much interest in her work.
After being married for a decade and giving birth to several children,
Anna, aware that she’s losing her husband’s interest, decides that sex
is her only source of power. She resolves to be beautiful, charming,
and seductive, to rejoin society, and she succeeds. But she’s unhappy,
feeling that she’s betrayed her ideals by living a frivolous life in
the city. During this period, she meets her husband’s old friend
Bekhmetev, a physically unattractive, sickly man with whom she quickly
becomes close. (He seems to have been modelled on a friend of
Tolstoy’s who often discussed philosophy with Sofiya.) Bekhmetev is
also an amateur artist, and he praises and respects Anna’s work.
Together, they paint, discuss literature, and spend time with her
children. This, for Anna, is the ideal relationship. Prince Prozorsky,
who’s been busy flirting with neighbors and ogling peasant women, soon
becomes jealous; Anna is disgusted by his hypocrisy and violent
behavior towards her. After she becomes ill, her doctor tells her that
she shouldn’t have any more children; she learns how to avoid
pregnancy. This angers her husband, as does her renewed interest in
philosophy and religion, which has given her an inwardness that he
finds offensive. In “The Kreutzer Sonata,” the husband stabs the wife
in the stomach; in “Whose Fault?,” he throws a paperweight at her
head. Sofiya takes the sex out of the murder and moves the action from
the wife’s body to her head.
“Whose Fault?” is the work of a thoughtful amateur. The prose is often
clumsy, and Anna is too obviously the bearer of the author’s
grievances, as in the passage in which the prince wonders “whether
this magnificent creature whom he had grown to know so well of late,
with her poetic, pure demands of life, her religious inclination, and
her noble ideals, would collide against his egotistical, carnal love
and his spent existence.” As its title suggests, the novella is too
open in its desire to settle scores, too much like a catalogue of
complaints. Sofiya heaps affection upon Anna, congratulating her on
her virtue, straining to prove her innocence, as if she is trying to
give her heroine all the encouragement and understanding that she
herself never received. Still, Anna’s character and predicament are
compelling enough that the reader feels tremendous sympathy for her
and for her creator. There are agonizing details, as when the prince
thinks, after Anna rejects his sexual advances, “What a strange and
incomprehensible woman.... And how plain she’s becoming: one of her
side teeth has already begun to turn yellow.” This scene is especially
painful when read alongside the moment in “The Kreutzer Sonata” when
Pozdnyshev thinks, of his wife, “True, she’s no longer so young, she’s
missing a tooth on one side, and she’s a little plump ... but what’s
to be done?”
Like Tolstoy, Sofiya criticizes the sexual double standard, but she’s
far more sympathetic to women, who are kept in ignorance until
marriage, then expected to satisfy their husbands and remain beautiful
and docile through a long series of pregnancies and betrayals. At one
point, Anna wonders, “Wouldn’t it be better to have memories of some
passionate love, even if illicit, but real and full? Wouldn’t it be
better than this present emptiness and immaculateness of my
conscience?” But she chases away the thought as soon as it arrives.
For decades, Sofiya was cast as the Tolstoy-family villain, a jealous,
greedy woman who denied her husband his destiny as an ascetic and a
prophet. Her novellas remained unpublished for more than a century;
her memoirs languished for nearly as long. In 2010, a sympathetic
biography by Alexandra Popoff provided the English-speaking world with
much new information about Sofiya’s life and marriage. Though this
suppression of Sofiya’s work had much to do with Tolstoy’s literary
executor, Vladimir Chertkov, who loathed Sofiya, and with Soviet
distortions, it started with her family. Sofiya’s son Lev told her not
to publish her “badly written novella,” because it would damage her
reputation as a “faithful wife and mother.” Lev’s sister Tatyana
proclaimed, “So long as we are alive, nothing that Mother writes will
be published.” In his later years, Tolstoy refused on principle to
read anything Sofiya wrote. Though he cited George Eliot’s novels
among the works that most influenced him during his great middle
period, in 1889, when his first granddaughter was born, he remarked,
“I now look on all girls and women with pity and contempt.” Still,
Sofiya wrote, she painted, she played the piano and attended concerts,
and she became a skilled photographer.
Tolstoy’s self-castrated Romanian fan nearly wept with disappointment
when he visited his idol and found that he lived on a huge estate,
surrounded by servants and children. More than anyone, Sofiya was the
one who paid the price for her husband’s inconsistency, for his broken
resolutions and self-disgust. He condemned her for her failure to
follow him into Christian asceticism, but he left her to manage their
estate and make purchases on his behalf. He preached celibacy, but he
impregnated her sixteen times, even when she couldn’t stand the
thought of having more children and a doctor had advised her not to
become pregnant again.
In “The Kreutzer Sonata,” Pozdnyshev speaks bitterly about the doctors
who “cynically undressed” his wife and “palpated her everywhere,” only
to conclude that she should no longer breast-feed. Once she stopped
breast-feeding, she became “a monster,” Pozdnyshev says, deprived of
“the only means that could’ve spared her from coquetry.” His sick wife
is advised by doctors, as Sofiya was, to use contraception. She
insists on doing so, “with frivolous obstinacy,” and as she regains
her health she comes to resemble “a fresh, well-fed, harnessed filly
whose bridle’s been removed.” Her husband is disturbed by her renewed
beauty, enraged at the thought that other men will desire her. His
jealousy turns murderous when he sees that she and her violinist
friend share “the bond of music, that most refined lust of the
senses.” Tolstoy was frightened by music, which moved him to tears:
perhaps, like sex, it reminded him of his own weakness.
Some years after the publication of “The Kreutzer Sonata,” in despair
over the death of her beloved youngest son, Sofiya found solace in the
music and friendship of Sergei Taneev, a composer and pianist who
became a frequent guest at the Tolstoy estate. (This episode was the
inspiration for “Song Without Words.”) She later wrote that Taneev
brought her back to life by opening her to an understanding of music,
just as her husband had once led her to understand literature.
Furiously jealous, Tolstoy put an end to Taneev’s visits. But music
stayed with Sofiya for the rest of her life.
Sophie Pinkham’s book “Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet
Ukraine” is out now.
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