Music and Motion in Tolstoy's the Kreutzer Sonata Author

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Title: Music and Motion in Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata Author: Nina Bond, Columbia University In his Dictionnaire de musique, Rousseau belittles the sonata for lacking words, insisting that without them no meaning or emotions could be communicated to its listeners. Owen Jander, a contemporary musicologist, convincingly argues in the article “The ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata as Dialogue” that Beethoven’s piece for violin and piano intentionally challenges definitions of the sonata as emotionless nonsense. Although named after that piece, Tolstoy’s novella is not, strictly speaking, “dialogic.” What starts off as a conversation about divorce among several train travelers dissolves into a dialogue between the first- person narrator and Pozdnyshev. Their conversation, however, is represented mostly through the words spoken by Pozdnyshev, from whose responses readers infer the narrator’s speech. In light of this, the novella’s title, which seems straightforward at first, becomes perplexing. Why name the entire seemingly “monologic” novella after a “dialogic” work? Perhaps it was because the story’s structure mimics that of a sonata as Dorothy Green suggests in “The Kreutzer Sonata: Tolstoy and Beethoven.” Or maybe it resembles a railway journey, which is strongly suggested by the story’s setting. What is the relationship between narrative and trains? Is there something more to the story of this “late arriver,” a rough translation of Pozdnyshev? What do “monologic” dialogues have to do with getting there? Where are we supposed to go, and how? My paper will answer these questions by examining the story through motion parallax, which Tolstoy describes in Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Il'ich. It causes nearby stationary objects viewed from a vehicle in motion appear as though they are moving in the opposite direction to that of the observer, thereby inducing a sensation of moving backwards. I will argue that motion parallax, though not explicitly mentioned, is key to understanding The Kreutzer Sonata. .

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