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Pozdnyshev
also: Позднышев, Fyodor Vasilyevich Pozdnyshev, Позднышев Федор Васильевич
The narrator-protagonist of Tolstoy's novella "The Kreutzer Sonata", who murders his wife out of jealousy and afterward preaches total sexual abstinence even within marriage. Chekhov invokes his "recipe" as a sardonic byword for an impossible, joyless universal chastity, reflecting Chekhov's own skeptical, often mocking attitude toward the novella's sexual asceticism elsewhere in his letters of this period.
Reading notes
- To V. A. Tikhonov, 14 September 1891. Moscow. §5 chaste according to the recipe of Tolstoy's Pozdnyshev
Translates "целомудренны по рецепту толстовского Позднышева": Chekhov invokes Pozdnyshev, the jealous wife-murderer and subsequent preacher of total sexual abstinence in Tolstoy's "The Kreutzer Sonata", as a sardonic byword for an impossible, joyless universal chastity -- a joke measuring how remote the end of his Sakhalin labor feels. See also the allusions record for this letter.