The Kreutzer Sonata

Reading notes

• To M. I. Chaykovsky, 17 January 1890. Petersburg. §3 the "Kreutzer Sonata."

  Lev Tolstoy's novella \emph{The Kreutzer Sonata} ("Крейцерова соната," shortened here in Chekhov's own hand to "Крейц соната"), completed in 1889. The Russian censor barred it from ordinary publication in early 1890 on grounds of its frank treatment of jealousy, marriage, and sexual morality; in the months before an authorized edition finally appeared (within Tolstoy's collected works later in 1891, under Imperial dispensation obtained by Sofia Tolstaya), the text circulated almost entirely through hand-copied manuscripts and lithographed reproductions passed reader to reader among literary Moscow and Petersburg. This note is exactly that circulation caught in the act: Chekhov is not lending a printed book he could simply replace, but passing along his own scarce copy on the understanding that it will complete a loop and come back to him.

• To A. N. Pleshcheyev, 15 February 1890. Moscow. §4 the boldness with which Tolstoy pronounces on what he does not know

  Chekhov's defense of \emph{The Kreutzer Sonata} is pointedly two-sided: he ranks it above nearly everything else being written at the time for the importance of its design and the power with which it forces the reader to think, while simultaneously and explicitly refusing Tolstoy any authority on the specific claims the novella makes about syphilis, foundling homes (see the next note), and women's sexuality. This is not a hedge or a softened compliment -- Chekhov states plainly that Tolstoy, on these subjects, "has not troubled in the course of his long life to read two or three books written by specialists," i.e. is simply ignorant of the medical and social-scientific literature he is pronouncing on. Chekhov, a trained physician, is speaking with some professional authority of his own here. The judgment is rendered at full force per the corpus's no-softening policy; nothing in the translation blunts the bluntness of the original.

• To A. N. Pleshcheyev, 15 February 1890. Moscow. §4 his judgments about syphilis, about foundling homes, about women's aversion to copulation

  \emph{The Kreutzer Sonata} includes an afterword and interpolated arguments in which Tolstoy makes sweeping claims about venereal disease, the fate of children born outside marriage (placed in state "foundling homes," воспитательные дома -- institutions with notoriously high infant mortality), and the moral and physiological nature of female sexual desire. Chekhov, writing as a practicing doctor, treats these as amateur overreach: the novella's literary power is real, but its author's confident diagnoses on subjects requiring specialist medical knowledge are not to be trusted.