Excerpt from programme notes written for Love's Delusion by Emma Eager
“All life is a struggle between the flesh and the spirit, gradually the flesh triumphs over the spirit.” (Tolstoy’s diary, 1895)
In 1887, the actor Vasily Nikolayevich Andreyev-Burlak came to visit Count Lev Tolstoy and his wife, Sofya, at Tolstoy's ancestral home, Yasnaya Polyana. He relayed to them a story of meeting a stranger on a train, a man tormented by his wife's infidelity. The genesis of The Kreutzer Sonata had been set in motion.
The following year Andreyev-Burlak attended a musical evening at the Tolstoy's Moscow home. On this occasion, Beethoven's Kreutzer sonata was played by Yula Lyasota, tutor to Tolstoy's children, and Tolstoy’s son Sergey. Yula played the violin, Sergey, the piano. The sonata was often played at such gatherings; Tolstoy was always moved by it. Perhaps because Andreyev-Burlak was present, Tolstoy came to associate the sonata with the heartbroken man on the train.
He thought of writing a monologue for the actor, incorporating parts of his unfinished short story, The Man Who Murdered His Wife. Though The Kreutzer Sonata subsequently became prose fiction, the monologue form remained integral to the structure. There is an important point to be made here. Tolstoy's original intention was not to write a polemic about love and marriage, it was to write a good murder story. The fact that his own views on sex albeit, in a distorted form, become the mouthpiece of the demented protagonist, Pózdnyshev, does not mean that Tolstoy is the ego to Pózdnyshev's id, as some critics would have us believe. The autobiographical details that Tolstoy gave to the character has added to this misunderstanding.
Tolstoy was born of the highest social rank; Pózdnyshev belongs to the less exclusive landowning gentry. When Tolstoy was fourteen, his older brother, Sergey, took him to a brothel. This first introduction to physical intimacy left him in tears and a lifelong struggle ensued between his rampaging libido and the spiritual remorse which the sex act engendered in him. Pózdnyshev is also wracked by sexual guilt, to the extent that he can no longer function as a human being: he is a ruin of a man. The two Lotharios spent their twenties drinking, gambling, and visiting prostitutes, but both decided on monogamy once married.
In his writings, Tolstoy (and the same is true of Proust) wanted to expose the nineteenth century novelistic notion of love as a fundamental untruth.