work
Afterword to The Kreutzer Sonata
the Afterword
also: Послесловие, Posleslovie, Afterword to the Kreutzer Sonata
The programmatic postscript Tolstoy appended to The Kreutzer Sonata, restating in blunt, doctrinal terms the story's case for sexual asceticism within marriage. Chekhov, having just read it, calls it "stupider and stuffier" than the Letters to a Governor's Wife -- a rare instance of Chekhov ranking two Tolstoy works against each other and finding both wanting next to Tolstoy's fiction proper.
Reading notes
- To A. S. Suvorin, 8 September 1891. Moscow. §6 "Afterword"
The programmatic postscript Tolstoy appended to \emph{The Kreutzer Sonata}, restating in blunt doctrinal terms the story's case for sexual asceticism within marriage. Chekhov, having read it "the day before yesterday," ranks it below the \emph{Letters to a Governor's Wife} -- itself already an object of his contempt -- making this one of the corpus's sharpest concentrated attacks on Tolstoy the moralist, in the same letter that ends by valuing "one little filly" of Tolstoy the storyteller above the whole apparatus of both didactic texts.