today's purchases 💸 in classics mode

La Sonate à Kreutzer, Éric Rohmer, 1956

Can we please talk about Sof'ja Tolstaya?

She became Leo Tolstoy's wife at 18, when he was 34. She was an amazing and strong woman, who had to deal with an incredibly misogynistic and lunatic husband, 13 children, and was forced to give up on all her literary aspirations – yet she wrote.

Her main works of fiction, two novellas she wrote as a response to her husband's The Kreutzer Sonata, didn't get published during her life, for they were extremely critical of Lev's work.

Whose fault? and Song Without Words were rediscovered and made accessible to a wider public only in the 21st century, along with her diaries, spanning through decades, and an autobiography.

Sofja (head of the table, to the right), and Lev (first man on her right) with their family; Cassell and Co, NY, 1911

Some useful sources:

Wikipedia article dedicated to her

short and eloquent article on The Guardian

free online copy of Autobiography of Sophie Andreevna Tolstoi on archive.org

SoundCloud podcast episode "Sofia Tolstoy" by John Sandoe Books (I haven't personally listened to it)

TKS, The Wake Of The World and Atlantic Blood from Cradle To Grave (2021).

René-Xavier Prinet - The Kreutzer Sonata (1901)

just finished the Kreutzer Sonata. tolstoy was kinda crazy ngl. viewing having sex with women as "destroying" them is some Advanced Misogyny stuff 😭. very catholic of him gotta say

also i think that since we already know that parts of this book strongly correlate to tolstoys own marriage (he too was very jealous of his wife and literally died bc he caught pneumonia while running away from her), its fair to assume that the last two pages in which the guy is saying forgive me after he literally kills his wife are related to tolstoys feelings that he had destroyed his wife by marrying her and having sex with her. food for thought

"It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness." - Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.

Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata, 1889

The book I ordered arrived in a damaged parcel… it’s okay. It’s art now

Music makes me forget my real situation. It transports me into a state which is not my own. Under the influence of music I really seem to feel what I do not feel, to understand what I do not understand, to have power which I cannot have. Music seems to me to act like yawning or laughter; I have no desire to sleep, but I yawn when I see others yawn; with no reason to laugh, I laugh when I hear others laugh. And music transports me immediately into the condition of soul in which he who wrote the music found himself at the time. I become confounded with his soul, and with him I pass from one condition to another. - Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata

Крейцерова соната (1987) The Kreutzer Sonata (1987)

Oleg Yankovsky as Poznyshev

The Kreutzer Sonata, a novel by Leo Tolstoy

The Kreutzer Sonata Variations: Lev Tolstoy’s Novella and Counterstories by Sofiya Tolstoya and Lev Lvovich Tolstoy - 3/5

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!

November 13, 2022

Slow slow day, but it managed to be quite productive. There's something about taking my time to prepare masala chai in the morning that just puts me in a good mood. Gathering all the spices, adding them one by one, keeping an (often too distracted) eye at the milk on the stove... And then there's obviously the tea' s amazing flavour! Dolly Parton stuck in my head surely helped, too. The rest of the moring was spent analysing The Kreutzer Sonata by Lev Tolstoy for my Russian Lit exam – let's just say I can't wait for it to be over. Tried to go on with the story in the afternoon, too, but I only managed to read a few pages before taking a break. Still – I read more than I'd done in a while!

💿 sotd: 9 To 5 - Dolly Parton

🍵 tea otd: homemade masala chai with Birchall's Great Rift breakfast blend

La Sonate à Kreutzer, Éric Rohmer, 1956

There is an old painting featured on the cans of TABU talcum powder that I have always very loved haha I have been meaning to redraw it for a while now, but each time I tried, it kinda stumped me. Let's see if I can stick to it this time