I am currently reading Sofia Tolstoy’s tragic and expansive diaries, which is a long undertaking, so I decided to read Lev Tolstoy’s novella The Kreutzer Sonata for context. It’s horrifying! One of the vilest, most misogynist things I’ve ever read, which is why I sought out this hard-to-find edition which includes Sofia’s “counterstories,” never before published. 

The Kreutzer Sonata is a story about a man who kills his wife after he comes under the impression that she is having an affair with a violinist (note: she doesn’t ever have an affair, she just plays a duet a little too passionately! I believe this is a change Sofia made herself.) The “point” behind it which Tolstoy makes very clear in his “Epilogue” is an argument for chastity and sexual abstinence. Even if it weren’t the most misogynist thing I’ve ever read, it still would not be a very good story, because it’s so didactic and completely in service of one heavy-handed point. The most terrifying thing about The Kreutzer Sonata though is, when you read it alongside Sofia’s diaries, you realize Lev literally wrote it just to terrorize her: it was written at a time when Sofia (a pianist in her own right!) was acquainted with a composer friend. How was this seen as “literature” and not anything other than a death threat?

In her diaries, Sofia mentions a couple of prose fiction works. I couldn’t find all of them in print, because their publication has been suppressed by the family, but this edition contains her two rebuttals: Whose Fault? and Song Without Words. Both are half-retellings, referencing aspects of Lev’s in order to dismantle it, line-by-line, but they still stand on their own merit. While Lev’s novella is painfully didactic, in particular Sofia’s Song Without Words is an extremely effective psychological novel. I don’t want to give away the ending, but it’s very different than Lev’s! They are also so evocative of the countryside around Yasnaya Polyana, and it was really fun to listen to every classical piece referenced while reading (mostly Mendelssohn’s titular piece, with some Beethoven and Chopin). 

The only one in the whole Tolstoy family has got to be Sofia because I got absolutely nothing out of the final piece in this book, entitled Chopin’s Prelude by Sofia and Lev’s (fail)son, Lev Lvovich Tolstoy. I was reading up on him and wikipedia describes him as a belletristic author: “writing that focuses on the aesthetic qualities of language rather than its practical application.” What a joke that these two talentless men were published and even revered in their lifetimes, while Sofia’s prose work didn’t see the light of day until 2014!