Power can be a pernicious force. For not only can its possession encourage the sweet-natured to be tyrannical, its loss can leave us feeling helpless and enraged. Power stokes our ego, allowing us to feel useful and confident, but it can leave us numb to the suffering of those who don't have it, dismissing them as weak and foolish, unworthy of our notice. Power changes how we view the world. Thus, anytime it shifts, there is cause for anxiety. Though this cynical and short piece from the legendary Mr. Tolstoy primarily concerns the dissolution of a marriage, it is the consequences of the redistribution of power that underpins his tale. It is a point sublimely, if unintentionally, made.
On a commuter train journeying through 19th century Russia, a truculent passenger makes a startling confession to those of his fellow travelers inclined to hear him. He has murdered his wife. After a long and difficult marriage, characterized by emotional and verbal discord, Pozdnyshev, the confessor, returns home from business to find his wife entertaining her musical instructor in their home. Embittered by years of disharmony and utterly incapable of blessing his wife with a moment's happiness and freedom, he flies into a rage which culminates in the flight of the instructor and the violent assault of his wife. This leads to not only the dissolution of his family -- his wife, on her deathbed, vengefully removes their five children from his care and gives them to her sister to raise --, it brings about her painful demise for which Pozdnyshev is tried. Dismissing the crime as one of passion, Pozdnyshev is acquitted and allowed to go free, having ruined all for which he cared.
Constructed as a conversation between Pozdnyshev and the story's narrator, The Kreutzer Sonata is, in the main, a warning against carnal love and a dissertation on female power and the extent to which its ascendance stokes male paranoia. Pozdnyshev, made callous by a loveless marriage, lays the blame for his unhappiness at the feet of his own male weakness and the liberalization of womens rights. He holds the view that men and women are fundamentally animalistic creatures, that the purpose of womankind is to perpetuate the species. Consequently, if women are given control over their own bodies, their own destinies, it will yield only disastrous results for the weak-willed man for which woman was created. Repeatedly, he reveals how he expected marriage to be a beautiful and fulfilling engagement, but that his joy was ruined by his wife's willingness to disagree with him, fight him, thwart him. He is completely incapable of realizing that his intractable nature is the cause of all his misery.
The Kreutzer Sonata is cynicism at its most potent. In Pozdnyshev, Mr. Tolstoy has seemingly created a straw man in whom all the author's dismay over the condition of man's soul can be invested. He appears to argue that, by dint of man's weakness and woman's deceptiveness, marriage is bound to be loveless and broken. But of course, this is nonsense. Marriage may well constrain us in ways that it is less than natural for us to be constrained, but Pozdnyshev's problem is that he expected his wife to be his perfect servant, not his perfect partner. He anticipated domination and received, instead, defiance. His inability to understand, respect or cope with this is the cause of his unhappiness, not the weakness of his soul. This is true of any marriage, the dissolution of which is rooted in an inability to adapt and communicate, not in some fundamental flaw. Human nature is imminently malleable. The moment we believe otherwise is the moment we condemn ourselves to rigid lives.
Deeper yet, we fear the loss of power. Having held its reins for so long, we have expectations that, when flaunted, cause us to salve our wounded pride with anger and rage. How dare our lessers defy us! How dare they possess their own wills to choose what they wish! This is what plagues Pozdnyshev. He cannot fathom a world in which he must enmesh his own behavior, his own desires, his own expectations, with his wife's. He cannot conceive of a marriage that does not spring up, fully formed and perfectly blissful. He cannot bring himself to understand that he will only harvest bitterness from a partnership into which he contributed nothing but his arrogance and his preconceived notions.
Fascinating work. Of course, it's possible that Mr. Tolstoy intended this to be satire, but the epilogue to the piece makes that possibility sadly remote. Love exists, just not when the power is this unbalanced. (3/5 Stars)
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