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 4-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary
Pozdnychev begins by describing his life before marriage. He is a nobleman and graduated from law school before living what he considered to be the typical bachelor lifestyle until age 30. He slept with many women, making a concerted effort to remain ignorant and free of any attachments by paying them for their company. He recalls one incident when he forgot to pay a woman he slept with and was inconsolable until he managed to track her down and pay her, thereby freeing himself from any obligation toward her.
Through this period, he considered himself a morally upright person and always planned to eventually find himself the ideal wife and live a perfect, “pure” conjugal life. He now looks back on this period with shame and considers the freedom he once valued as the worst kind of “debauchery.”
Chapter 5 Summary
Pozdnychev now believes that living so debauched a lifestyle prior to marriage led to him killing his wife; he actually killed her before even meeting her.
He first had sex at the age of 16, when he and his brother went to a brothel along with their friends, who had already introduced them to other vices such as drinking and card games. Prior to visiting the brothel, he was already preoccupied with lewd thoughts, and at the time he considered having sex in this way as entirely typical for a boy his age. Nonetheless, he felt an inexplicable sadness afterward that made him want to cry. In hindsight, now believes that this first experience of sharing sensual pleasure with a woman without loving her forever ruined his ability to live a virtuous, conjugal life. Since then, he has been a “voluptuary,” a state which he likens to alcohol, morphine, or tobacco addiction.
Pozdnychev places the blame for his “fall” on the social conditions that encouraged him to seek out premarital sex. He was given the impression that having sex would be beneficial to his health and would elevate him in the eyes of his peers. The authority figures in his life considered such acts natural and did not adequately deter him. Additionally, doctors create methods and governments implement policies that ameliorate potential negative consequences of sex (such as STDs and unwanted pregnancies), thereby removing natural deterrents.
Chapter 6 Summary
Pozdnychev remained a bachelor until he was 30, always intending to settle down into a life of monogamy and wedded bliss with a young woman who lived up to his pure and perfect ideal of a wife. He became infatuated with his wife-to-be and proposed, believing himself in love. In retrospect, he now thinks that he was merely seduced by her attractiveness and her mother’s efforts to bring them together. Prior to the marriage, he showed his wife his memoirs which informed her of his prior liaisons, shocking the innocent girl almost to the point that she called off the wedding.
Pozdnychev observes that, in contrast to young men, young maidens are innocent. They do, however, wield their sensuality as a weapon on instinct and are encouraged to do so by their mothers who understand the necessity of luring a husband. A “coquette,” a woman who is aware of her own sensuality, makes men desire her body deliberately. In Pozdnychev’s opinion, such a woman is no different from a “fallen woman” scorned by society. All women outwardly adorn themselves in the same embellishments and abide by the same beauty standards, so Pozdnychev reasons that they are all the same internally and morally too.
Chapter 7 Summary
Pozdnychev likens the lifestyle of young noblemen to that of “reproductive stallions,” wherein an excessively hearty diet combined with limited physical exertion creates too much energy and excitement. He contrasts this to the typically meager nourishment on which peasants live, which is only augmented with meat for workers undertaking hard manual labor.
For Pozdnychev and his ilk, excess energy is spent in “sensual excess.” When such outlets are (even temporarily) curtailed, they get restless. This restlessness, when distorted by the influence of art and literature, creates an illusion of falling in love. Pozdnychev believes that, were it not for the flattering outfits and excursions organized by his wife’s mother, he never would have believed himself in love with his wife.
Chapter 8 Summary
Pozdnychev and the narrator discuss the fact that, in the past, Russian marriages were organized by matchmakers and the young woman’s family, as is still the case in the majority of the world. Now, in Russia, women are expected to exhibit themselves like livestock at a market to allure potential matches. Women are not permitted to make advances themselves, or even to admit that they are attempting to attract a husband, and so must try to promote themselves surreptitiously and under false pretenses.
Chapter 9 Summary
Pozdnychev reflects on gender in society and says that the true inequality in society stems from the fact that women are viewed as sensual objects by men and raised with an eye to attracting men and nothing more. He believes that, despite mainstream acknowledgment that women are subjugated in family life and society, it is women who actually hold the real power. He says that because they are unable to choose their own mate as men are, women get revenge by weaponizing the very sensuality that men use to dehumanize them and using their wiles to enslave men. His evidence for this is the industries dedicated to producing luxury goods for women. Pozdnychev considers a beautiful and well-dressed woman something dangerous and frightening—a threat to society that should be eradicated.
Chapter 10 Summary
Prior to their marriage, Pozdnychev considered his wife perfect and himself entirely moral. He was proud that, unlike many of his peers, he was marrying for love rather than for personal gain and had no intention to cheat on his wife after the wedding.
Through the brief period of their engagement, Pozdnychev and his wife had great difficulty talking to each other; neither ever had anything to say to the other, and they spent much of their time together in silence trying to think of conversation topics. They were occupied with preparations for the wedding and for their conjugal life together. In the past such details would be considered “sacred”; nowadays, they seem more like trinkets involved in the sale of the bride. Pozdnychev says that, in the present day, weddings are merely the means to an end. They are a necessary step for a man—who has most likely already engaged in premarital sex and intends to continue having extramarital affairs—to gain possession of a woman.
Chapters 4-10 Analysis
In this section of The Kreutzer Sonata, Pozdnychev narrates his life story up until his marriage. He describes his youth, his bachelorhood, and then his engagement. The character also provides retrospective analysis and commentary on the events as he recalls them, diverting into brief moral and philosophical tangents related to the themes of the novella.
This is the first section of the novella which is related through Pozdnychev’s voice. Pozdnychev is speaking from his own recollection and acting as an unreliable narrator, one whose account of events is filtered through his own biased perspective. This unreliability creates ambiguity because it means that a reader cannot be certain which events are related honestly and which Pozdnychev misrepresents. Tolstoy also exhibits Pozdnychev’s personality through his narration because he characterizes Pozdnychev as much through the way he describes events as through his actions in the events themselves. Pozdnychev’s speech frequently includes evocative and emotional language, for example in charged words such as “slave,” “abominable,” and “victim.” This language evokes pathos and sympathy for the character and the state of all who experience the effects of degradation. It also highlights Pozdnychev’s intense emotional state, as well as his tendency to be carried away by fits of passion or to succumb to self-pity.
Although characters consistently acknowledge the lack of rights of women’s rights in contemporary Russian society as a simple fact throughout the novella, Pozdnychev nonetheless insists that women are in fact the dominant gender and reign supreme by using their sensual wiles to “enslave” men. This argument reproduces contemporary misogynistic ideas without taking patriarchal power dynamics into account. Pozdnychev conflates personal feelings of powerlessness with a measurable lack of rights, freedom, and safety on a systemic scale. However, because the narrative is told from his perspective, it reinforces The Subjugation of Women.
This section particularly focuses on the theme of Sensual Passion as a Corruption of Purity. Tolstoy presents the idea through The Kreutzer Sonata that all forms of sexual activity, whether or not they are sanctioned by society, are immoral and ultimately harmful. The initial state of “purity” that Tolstoy idealizes in the novella is that of complete sexual abstinence. It is this perceived “purity” that Pozdnychev demands from a life partner and this perfection that Pozdnychev’s wife initially represents. Prior to their marriage, she represents the archetypal concept of a “virgin,” a “young girl” entirely “pure” and ignorant of the power that her beauty might afford her over men. That she is expected to remain thus until marriage when Pozdnychev is not shows one of many double standards that contribute to the theme of The Subjugation of Women; Tolstoy highlights the problem with double standards in “The Lesson of The Kreutzer Sonata.”
Pozdnychev himself relinquishes his own “purity” when he has sex for the first time in a brothel at the age of 16. In this passage, Tolstoy highlights the Conflict Between Social Expectation and Moral Duty. Pozdnychev goes into detail about how a single experience of sensual pleasure forever soiled his relationships with women and states that he “had become what is called a voluptuary; and to be a voluptuary is a physical condition like the condition of a victim of the morphine habit, of a drunkard, and of a smoker” (5, 9). This provocative simile suggests the extreme corruptive impact that even a single indulgence in sexual activity can have on both body and mind according to Tolstoy. Of his bachelor years, Pozdnychev says: “I led the life of so many other so-called respectable people,—that is, in debauchery” (4, 3). There’s a dark irony in his describing himself and others as “so-called respectable” when he in fact considers them to be the exact opposite. The juxtaposition of respectability and debauchery further emphasizes the gulf separating a person whose actions are sanctioned by society from those whose actions are truly righteous.
Tolstoy also examines the medical field in relation to the Conflict Between Social Expectation and Moral Duty. Pozdnychev discusses how doctors provide advice on how to avoid unwanted pregnancies and lay down rules of hygiene to help prevent STDs. These advances in the field of medicine are presented as a negative development because they remove or reduce the potential negative consequences of premarital sex which previously acted as natural deterrents. The doctors, backed by the government, represent untrustworthy establishments and authority figures in the novel. Tolstoy, as an anarchist Christian, is opposed to both establishments and authorities, particularly when obedience conforms with social expectations but not with moral duty.
Several times through this section, notably during Chapters 7 and 9, Pozdnychev’s narration strays away from the specific events of his life, and he instead discusses the current state of marriage in more general terms. In such tangents, Tolstoy uses the character voice of Pozdnychev as a mouthpiece for his own personal beliefs. These asides allow the author to include in-depth discussions on the themes of the novella without editorializing or disrupting the flow of the story. Several times, the more unconventional arguments that Pozdnychev presents lead to the unnamed, primary narrator objecting or questioning. In this way, Tolstoy anticipates a reader’s potential objections and counters them within the narrative. Such objections lead to a question-and-answer-style interaction between Pozdnychev and the narrator whereby Pozdnychev elaborates and argues his point more thoroughly. In this way, Tolstoy inserts clarifying or extrapolatory tangents and philosophical asides within the novel’s dialogue.
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