TOLSTOY'S BESTIARY: animality and animosity in the kreutzer sonata

Abstract

Tolstoy's remarkably economical novella The Kreutzer Sonata manages to create one of the most intense, vivid, and thought-provoking portraits of jealousy in the canon, and is as disturbing to read today as it no doubt was in 1889. The rather unhinged protagonist, Pozdnyshev, explains to his traveling companion and narrator: “Of all the passions, it is sexual, carnal love that is the strongest, the most malignant and the most unyielding” (48). This article identifies not only the “bestial” element of human sexuality in Tolstoy's story but also the array of animals which the author offers to ventriloquize a certain complex (and times confused) polemic about gender relations. In other words, this analysis offers an interpretation of The Kreutzer Sonata as bestiary; one which offers a moral taxonomy of creaturely life and creaturely love. From the green-eyed monster of jealousy itself, through the Venus fly-trap and porcine couple, right up to the wild murderous beast, Pozdnyshev's confession is read via this zoological trope in order to emphasize, and question, that mobile border which separates the human from the inhuman, the civilized from the uncivilized. And it does so in order to highlight the incoherencies of the anthropocentric discursive regulation of this very same borderline. Animality and animosity are thus presented as the twin avatars of Tolstoy's intense and challenging vision.

Keywords:

• animality
• animosity
• Leo Tolstoy
• The Kreutzer Sonata
• sexual jealousy
• zoological tropes

Notes

While the precise origin of the phrase is unknown, it was certainly popularized by Shakespeare's usage in Othello.

Given its resonance with Pozdnyshev's account, it is worth quoting Nietzsche in full:

In the three or four civilized countries of Europe, a few centuries of education would suffice to make women into anything we want, even into men – not in the sexual sense, admittedly, but at least in every other sense. Acted upon in this way, they will at some point have assumed all the male virtues and strengths, at the same time, of course, having to assume their weaknesses and vices as part of the bargain: this much, as noted, we can accomplish by force. But how will we endure the intermediate state that this will bring about and that might itself last for a few centuries, during which female follies and injustices, their age-old birthrights, will still assert their supremacy over all that has been newly won and acquired? This will be the time when anger will comprise the essential male affect, anger at the fact that all the arts and sciences have been inundated and clogged with an unprecedented dilettantism, that philosophy has been talked to death by bewildering chatter, that politics have become more fantastic and partisan than ever, that society is completely dissolving because the keepers of the old morality have become ridiculous to themselves and are striving to stand outside of morality in every possible way. For if women had their greatest power in morality, what would they have to grasp in order to regain a comparable amplitude of power after having given up morality? (230–31)

It is also worth noting the recurring motif of connection between trains and confessional encounters, as practiced also by Maupassant and Buñuel, amongst many others. Anna Karenina herself, of course, is tragically linked with this rather totemic form of transport, singled out by Freud as a privileged stimulator of the libidinal sensorium. At one point Pozdnyshev exclaims, “Oh, I'm so afraid, so afraid of railway carriages; I get stricken with horror in them” (122), swallowed up inside this new mechanical beast. He also tells of killing time by visiting “a Jew” in a third class compartment, “the interior of which was spattered with the husks of sunflower seeds” (123), emphasizing the circus-like aspect of train travel, in which the passengers are little more than animals in transit.

The Domostroy was a sixteenth-century collection of archconservative domestic rules and guidelines pertaining to common public and private matters of Russian society. The core values contained therein uniformly endorsed obedience and submission to God, Tsar, Church, and Father, especially through modest dress, prayer, the veneration of icons, and charity.

While not a daily practice, let us not forget that the practice of putting animals on official trial, and holding them accountable to human law, was only phased out altogether in Europe in the first decade of the twentieth century.

Nowadays, rather than simply pulling on the proverbial reins, husbands use a passive-aggressive species of “trust” to try to control the behavior of their spouse.

“It's horrible,” exclaims Pozdnyshev, “[t]he abyss of error we live in regarding women and our relations with them” (20).

In her diary, Sofia Andreyevna reflects on her husband's hypocrisy:

If only the people who read The Kreutzer Sonata so reverently had an inkling of the voluptuous life he leads, and realized it was only this that made him happy and good-natured, then they would cast this deity from the pedestal where they have placed him! Yet I love him when he is kind and normal and full of human weaknesses. (In Meek n. pag.)

According to Pozdnyshev, the very engine of the luxury economy is driven by the libidinal economy of women's covetous desires: “Women are like empresses, keeping nine tenths of the human race in servitude, doing hard labour. And all because they feel they've been humiliated” (40). An observation with perhaps a disconcerting grain of truth even today, if we cast a cold eye on the mediascape's share dedicated to feminized consumables.

In a line which no doubt echoes Tolstoy's own thoughts later in his life, Pozdnyshev confesses, in almost a fit of male hysteria, that when he sees a woman in a ball-gown he wants to call the police, “demanding that the hazardous object be confiscated and taken away” (41).

This curious tick of Pozdnyshev's – a kind of reverse anthropomorphism – is also in evidence when he paints a portrait of domestic banality, in which man and wife suffer “the sort of conversations I'm convinced animals carry on with one another. ‘What's the time? Bedtime. What's for dinner? Where are we going to go? Is there anything in the newspaper? Send for the doctor. Masha's got a sore throat’” (78).

For all of Tolstoy's gestures to “human dignity” and related elevated strivings, the question remains concerning the depth of his misanthropy. G.K. Chesterton, for instance, used the occasion of the famous author's eightieth birthday to criticize his attitude toward his own species, noting thatTolstoy is not content with pitying humanity for its pains: such as poverty and prisons. He also pities humanity for its pleasures, such as music and patriotism. He weeps at the thought of hatred; but in The Kreutzer Sonata he weeps almost as much at the thought of love. He and all the humanitarians pity the joys of men.Moreover, addressing his target directly, Chesterton adds: “What you dislike is being a man. You are at least next door to hating humanity, for you pity humanity because it is human” (Illustrated London News 19 Sept. 1908).

Pozdnyshev enquires:

perhaps you're an evolutionist? The outcome's still the same. In order to defend its interests in its struggle with the other animals, the highest form of animal life – the human race – has to gather itself into a unity, like a swarm of bees, and not reproduce infinitely: like the bees, it must raise sexless individuals, that's to say it must strive for continence. (49)

A conclusion taken to a drastic degree by at least one disciple of the master, who sliced off his own penis – the source of animalistic desires, and constant saboteur of human aspirations – before making the pilgrimage to visit Tolstoy. As James Meek notes, in 1909, Sofia wrote in her diary:This morning we had a visit from a 30-year-old Romanian who had castrated himself at the age of 18 after reading The Kreutzer Sonata. He then took to working on his land – just 19 acres – and was terribly disillusioned today to see that Tolstoy writes one thing but lives in luxury.Apparently Tolstoy himself wrote in his diary: “An exceedingly interesting man.”

For a critique of this position, see my article “After the Beep.”

We see echoes of this inclusion/exclusion dynamic in the widely held contrary position, that “only parents truly know what it is to be human.”

The OED explains that

The origin of the sense is supposed to be found in the cuckoo's habit of laying its egg in another bird's nest; in Ger., gauch and kuckuk, and in Pr., cogotz, were applied to the adulterer as well as the husband of the adulteress, and Littré cites an assertion of the same double use in French; in English, where cuckold has never been the name of the bird, we do not find it applied to the adulterer.

If the reader will forgive me: literary criticism seems to call for such anachronistic pronouncements of incontrovertible aesthetic fact. Or perhaps I've just been reading too much George Steiner lately.

What Women Want, dir. Mel Gibson (2000). As I write, Gibson is in legal hot water for threatening his ex-lover over the phone with highly sexualized violence, and thus providing the very voice of hyper-phallic jealous panic. One wonders if this is indeed the voice of Pozdnyshev himself.

Two years after Maupassant's death, Tolstoy wrote: “In this last novel the author does not know who is to be loved and who is to be hated, nor does the reader know it, consequently he does not believe in the events described and is not interested in them” (viii). Which only makes it even more ironic that Theodore Roosevelt described The Kreutzer Sonata as the product of “a sexual moral pervert” (in Lessing 27).

Both the cuckold and the rook are vulnerable to indulging in a particular instance of “the plague of fantasies”; one which represents a variation on the famous fable of Buridan's Ass – the beast of burden that died of hunger, unable to choose between two equally delicious bales of hay. In this instance, when it comes to extra-marital affairs (such as the one in The Kreutzer Sonata), neither man has a choice. And yet both are haunted by an impossible emotional alternative: to be the husband, and make love to the beloved while she thinks of another; or be the lover, whose solace-cum-torture is to know that he is in his beloved's mind as she makes love to her husband.

Amazingly, as I write this, the blogosphere is a twitter about an alleged new “sex fetish for intellectuals” called Cuckolding. To quote the original article introducing this concept to the wider world, “It's S&M for Ph.D.s […] in which men watch their wives have sex with other guys” – a trend which “is catching on among people with high IQs who revel in the psychological agony.” The piece quotes one avid practitioner, “The high point of cuckolding is when your wife says she wants the other guy all the time and never wants you.” This fetish is thus presented as a self-reflexive exploration of the libidinal economy, whereby jealousy can be something other than a hostile take-over bid, launched on behalf of an unwise over-investment in the self. As one behavioral expert puts it, jealousyis a social construct based on the notion that husbands own their wives, and is thus “much more recent, evolutionarily speaking, than the competition that turns guys on. That's why it's mostly intellectuals who are into cuckolding: because other guys are crippled by jealousy. They're aroused and upset and don't know why.”The problematic and elitist implications of such statements are obvious enough without metacommentary here. (All quotes from Rufus n. pag.)

Luhmann believes that “it is impossible in love to calculate the costs or weigh up the accounts, because both one's profits and one's losses are enjoyed; indeed, they serve to make one aware of love and to keep it alive” (67).

Pozdnyshev notes: “In our section of society all husbands are jealous” (102).

One cannot help but consider this as a symptom of Lacan's dictum, “There is no sexual relationship.” However, in some cases, the more that this metaphysical obstacle is felt, deep in the heart or loins of the lover, the more frenzied and disturbing the attempt to bridge the unbridgeable, to catch the uncatchable. Exhibits A and B for twentieth-century literature would be John Fowles' The Collector and Nabokov's Lolita.

A fascinating, emotionally scarring, postmodern twist on the “tolerant husband” can be found in Lars von Trier's film Breaking the Waves. From a certain angle, Bess could be considered a strange love-child of Anna Karenina's – a woman who dies not because of possessive jealousy but quite the opposite, because her (invalid and possibly insane) husband pushes her out into the public sphere, to have sex with as many strange men as possible.

Today's “polyamorous” community puts much stock in the concept of compersion – a notion originally conceived by the Kerista Commune in San Francisco. Compersion is an extended erotic form of empathy, in which the subject experiences joy via a third term, up to and including the figure usually considered to be a threat or rival. In other words, compersion is the positive and inclusive flip-side of jealousy. (Just as some would say a smiling unicorn is the positive and inclusive form of a snorting, angry stallion.)

A fascinating case in Russian life and literature of the same period is Turgenev, who not only enthusiastically introduced Maupassant's writings to Tolstoy but who wrote of unjealous husbands (cf. Spring Torrents) from his literally eccentric position. As one critique notes, “It was a constant refrain of Turgenev that he failed to ‘weave himself a nest’ in life and had been forced to perch on the edge of strange nests” (Schapiro 197) – most notably the nest inhabited by the Spanish singer Pauline Garcia-Viardot. Clearly Turgenev was not a rook, since he never presumed to poach a woman from another man, and yet neither did he consider wedlock to be an obstacle to living with his true love (and her exceedingly tolerant husband).

In the same piece, Green makes the interesting claim that

the reader of this novel, should be in a very real sense a listener. We need to remind ourselves again that Tolstoy conceived his story with the living voice of an actor in his mind. That is, it was written, as the sonata was, for an instrument. (447)

See the illuminating comments on “the refrain” in Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus (chapter 11), and on Vinteuil's phrase more specifically in Deleuze's Proust and Signs.

No doubt an evolutionary biologist, or even sociobiologist, would read such passion as the cultural froth of genetic imperatives. But as useful and sobering as such accounts are in reminding us of our mammalian heritage, they are almost universally reductive when it comes to interpreting and contextualizing human behavior. Psychology, affect, aesthetics, and other “cultural” factors are ignored, or, at best, alluded to as inessential contingencies (cf. Jonason et al.'s article “Positioning the Booty-Call Relationship on the Spectrum of Relationships”). A point I make not to preserve the exceptionalism of humans in this regard but rather to identify as underdeveloped influences in general within such fields. Of course, the humanities have been guilty of over-emphasizing the role of finer forces, and the more sharing of conceptual lenses we can have between the humanities and the sciences, the more comprehensive and revealing will be the readings.

The vast and growing literature around this is usually framed by questions of biopolitics (cf. the vast bibliography issuing from Agamben's rendering of Foucault's concept, especially in Homo Sacer).

For an insightful, and long overdue, reading of Nietzsche's nuanced relationship to the animal kingdom, look no further than Vanessa Lemm's book Nietzsche's Animal Philosophy.