chapter 19 Tolstoy’s Beethoven, Beethoven’s Tolstoy: The Kreutzer Sonata [1997/2006]
Leo Tolstoy’s infamous story “The Kreutzer Sonata” is the tale of a self-loathing husband, one Pozdnyshev, who murders his wife for her infidelity. Whether the infidelity occurs in a literal sense is moot, and really does not matter. The sex- ual performance is supposedly brought to light by a musical performance but actually consists in that musical performance itself. The music is Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata, as played, with a passion too great for its salon-like occasion, by the wife at the piano and the down-at-heels son of a bankrupt landowner at the violin. Pozdnyshev sees this violinist, Trukhachevski, as a monstrosity not because he, Trukhachevski, desires Pozdnyshev’s wife but because he resem- bles her. In Trukhachevski a cultural secret that must be kept at any cost, the inevitable presence of a certain “feminine” dependency and receptivity within the structure of masculine identity, ceases to be a secret; it becomes transpar- ent, even blatant. Is Tolstoy just using and abusing Beethoven here? Is he dragooning a great and independent work of music into the service of his own or his culture’s anxieties over sex and gender? (“I can detect no sex in the Kreutzer,” wrote E.M. Forster—who could, however, detect it in the Appassionata—“nor have I come across anyone who could, except Tolstoy.”1 Or has Tolstoy discerned some genuine possibilities of meaning in the music and chosen to realize them with ruthless honesty? Is he perhaps right to treat the “Kreutzer” Sonata as a nerve-center of social energies even if his particular understanding of them is idiosyncratic? And just how idiosyncratic (not to say perverse, and in some ways he is perverse) is that understanding? Is Tolstoy a necessarily flawed mod- el for how to do critical musicology, or for how not to? To propose some answers, we need both to read the text and listen to the music, both together and apart.
* For an account of Tolstoy’s other “intermedial” treatment of a Beethoven work, the “Moon- light” Sonata, in the story “Family Happiness,” see my Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2001), 33–45. 1 E.M. Forster, “On Not Listening to Music,” in Two Cheers for Democracy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1951), 128.
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Punta d’ arco. Pozdnyshev’s murder of his wife is an impromptu ritual meant to re-conceal what the music has revealed, the feminine flaw within the dia- mond of masculinity. To make it so, the details of the murder, which are par- ticularly brutal, fall into a symbolic pattern. Pozdnyshev’s dagger encounters a resistant substance—both his wife’s corset “and something else”—before plunging into “something soft”; the murder is initially a kind of rape. But the result is the production of a striking bloodstain, marked both as the immedi- ate gush of blood from under the corset and, later, as a black stain spread over the wife’s discarded dress. The eroticized murder produces the traditional sign of the virtuous wife’s deflowering. The resistant “something else” acts as a sur- rogate hymen; the murder re-enacts the original sexual act by which the hus- band, with or without his wife’s consent, ratifies his manhood by legitimately shedding her blood.
“Any man has to, wants to, needs to…” In relation to his wife, as he tells us repeatedly, Tolstoy’s Pozdnyshev acts like all men of his social class, the landed gentry. In relation to women in general, haunted by “woman, every woman, woman’s nudity,” he acts like all men: “nine-tenths, if not more, not of our class only but of all classes, even the peasants.”2 He is an absolutely typical figure; his individuality seems to consist of nothing but the excessiveness of his typicality, even when his typical rage at his wife vents itself in her murder. Yet this absolutely typical man has become something absolutely exception- al. Remorse over the murder has transformed him into an uncanny figure. He has become a charismatic stranger on a train, Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner as a chain-smoking modern neurotic, complete with a vocal tic, a strange tale to tell, and glittering eyes that rivet the listener-victim to the telling. The listener, who serves as a frame narrator for “The Kreutzer Sonata,” is a fellow-passenger on a railway journey who makes several failed attempts to engage Pozdnyshev in conversation. In the end, as with the Ancient Mariner, the initiative comes from the side of remorse and the uncanny. Compare:
We heard, behind me, a sound like that of a broken laugh or sob; and on turning round we saw my neighbor, the lonely gray-haired man with the glittering eyes, who had approached unnoticed during our conversa- tion…. He stood with his arms on the back of the seat, evidently much agitated; his face was red and a muscle twitched in his cheek.
2 Leo Tolstoy, “The Kreutzer Sonata,” trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude, in Great Short Works of Tolstoy. (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 366, 367. Subsequent citations appear in the text.