52 pages • 1 hour read
Leo TolstoyThe Kreutzer Sonata
Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 1889A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses violence against women, domestic abuse, suicide, underage sex, and sex work.
Note: The parenthetical citations reference the chapter number and paragraph number, respectively.
An unnamed narrator is traveling by train and sharing a carriage with several strangers. Three passengers are, like him, bound for the furthest stop: a lawyer, his lady companion, and Pozdnychev. Other passengers come and go from the carriage through the course of the journey and make conversation, although Pozdnychev remains silent and “aloof.”
Several passengers—the lawyer, the lady, an old merchant, and a young clerk—begin to discuss the current state of marriage. The old merchant attributes a recent increase in the prevalence of conjugal separation to people becoming “too learned” and the fact that wives no longer fear their husbands, as he believes is necessary. The lady asserts that such fear is a thing of the past, and that things have improved since the days of arranged marriages because couples can now marry for love. The old merchant disagrees and argues that it is the husband’s duty to dominate his wife into submission and to force her to love him if she does not.
The clerk tells of his employer’s separation from his wife. The wife went “astray” and had numerous affairs despite her husband’s attempts to govern her, first through “kindness” and then through beatings. The husband now lives as a bachelor while the wife lives as a “fallen woman.” The old merchant blames the husband for not controlling his wife more harshly from the outset and says that all women need to be dominated. He then leaves the train.
Chapter 2 Summary
Conversation continues in the absence of the old merchant, whose views are now dismissed as “savage” and outdated. The lady declares that “only love consecrates marriage” (2, 6). Pozdnychev, who recently murdered his wife in a fit of jealous rage, is agitated by this statement and demands that the lady clarify what exactly love is. When she defines it as a “preference” for a particular individual over all others, Pozdnychev points out that such a preference can be fleeting. He says that he does not believe that such a love exists as can last a lifetime and that he does not credit the existence of any love but sensual love.
Pozdnychev states that the old template for marriage as a “sacrament” is now recognized as “hypocrisy” and “violence” and thus no longer stands. However, he says that a new standard must be created because the alternative of “free love” is equally unconscionable “sin” and simple “promiscuity.” He considers the current state of marriage to be a particularly brutal transitional state: Couples either enter falsely into marriages that they don’t believe in without any intent of remaining monogamous, or else they attempt to honor their vows and end up resenting and doing violence to one another.
The lawyer, unaware of the identity of his interlocutor, raises Pozdnychev’s own murder of his wife as an example of such conjugal violence. Pozdnychev, initially assuming that he has been recognized, introduces himself. He then promptly excuses himself from the conversation so as not to cause further embarrassment.
Chapter 3 Summary
At the next stop, the car empties of all passengers except for Pozdnychev and the narrator. Pozdnychev offers to share his life story with the narrator. Over the course of his narrative, Pozdnychev’s face changes appearance several times, to such an extent that it becomes “unrecognizable.”
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
These chapters establish the framing narrative: the setting in which Pozdnychev narrates the main plotline from his reminiscences to the narrator. Tolstoy introduces the protagonist Pozdnychev. His actions and the narrator’s descriptions of him in this section establish some of his key character traits and foreshadow the conflicts that unfold through the course of the novella: He is a “nervous gentleman” with changeable features, someone prone to intense but fleeting fits of temper, excessively emotional and suspicious. The climax of the plotline, Pozdnychev killing his wife in a fit of jealousy, is explicitly and plainly revealed in this section. Consequently, the main tension in the novella comes not from the unfolding of events but from the process of Pozdnychev and his wife’s development and the revelation of Pozdnychev’s motives and justifications.
The conversations between the characters introduce the main themes of the novella, both through the dialogue itself and the way the discussion and characters are presented. The Subjugation of Women is implied by the treatment of the lone woman passenger who is outnumbered by men, dominated in debate by first the old merchant and then Pozdnychev, and defined by her relationship to a man since she is referred to as the “lawyer’s companion.” The views on marriage expressed both by Pozdnychev and the old merchant introduce the theme of Conflict Between Social Expectation and Moral Duty by showing the dissonance between the norms of current society and a person’s individual concept of moral duty. Tolstoy also evokes the theme Sensual Passion as a Corruption of Purity when Pozdnychev argues in favor of sexual abstinence. Pozdnychev’s view that love is merely sensual passion, and that said passion only leads to immorality and suffering in conjugal relationships, foreshadows the events of his turbulent relationship with his wife.
These chapters of the novella function similarly to the introduction section of an essay. The reader is introduced to the themes of the novella, its main argument, and provided with a roadmap of how the rest of the work is to proceed: as a chronological narration of the events that lead to Pozdnychev’s murdering his wife, told through the protagonist’s own voice. Providing this information up front makes it easier for a reader to focus on the philosophical and moral points being made through the novella. It also attempts to lend credence to the opinions purported by Pozdnychev because Tolstoy suggests that his perspective is supported and justified by experience. The introduction section ultimately provides clarity to the messages that Tolstoy is trying to convey through the novella.
Related Titles
By Leo Tolstoy
