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 11-17Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 11 Summary
Pozdnychev experienced an extreme sense of disillusion on the honeymoon. The “ennui” of the period was untenable. He now considers it inevitable that the honeymoon would be unpleasant given that he was acting immorally by corrupting his wife. He purports that, contrary to popular wisdom, sex isn’t actually a natural or blameless act, otherwise it would not seem so strange and frightening to young women and children.
Pozdnychev recalls his sister’s wedding night. She married a much older man and fled the wedding chamber upon discovering what he expected from her. Pozdnychev suggests that any form of procreation is immoral and that humans should look to achieve nirvana by annihilating the species through universal chastity.
Chapter 12 Summary
Pozdnychev describes how there was no period of joy during the honeymoon. From the instant that he and his wife had sated their sensual appetites, they began to fight. On the third day of their honeymoon, they had their first quarrel, and although they soon reconciled, it wasn’t long before they argued again. Thus, the pattern for the relationship between Pozdnychev and his wife throughout their married lives was already laid out in the early days of their honeymoon.
Chapter 13 Summary
Pozdnychev asserts that it was love that actually killed his wife. Sensual passion is brutality and ultimately leads to the dehumanization of women. He says that as long as women are desired carnally and are seen as a means of enjoyment, they will be enslaved and abased, even by those who claim to respect women as equals. He asserts that having sexual relationships while avoiding conception is an abomination.
Chapter 14 Summary
Pozdnychev explains in great detail all the ways in which a woman is trained and educated for the sole purpose of attracting a man. He imagines that the lives of all women revolve around the pursuit of men and claims that the only respite a woman has from “coquetry” is in pregnancy and while nursing an infant.
He recalls an event that he believes to be the moment during which his wife’s murder became inevitable: when she was unable to nurse their first child. In order to properly nourish the sickly infant, doctors recommended that they hire a wet nurse. Pozdnychev views this as an absolute betrayal of every womanly virtue and an indication that his wife’s sensuality was irrepressible. This, he claims, is the origin of his most frightful jealousy.
Chapter 15 Summary
Pozdnychev identifies jealousy as one of the major torments of married life. He describes the torments that he felt whenever he even contemplated another man lusting after his wife and the cold anger that his wife would sometimes show. She would never admit it, but Pozdnychev assumed that she, too, experience jealousy whenever he paid undue attention to another woman.
He says that by depriving a woman of the respite from sensuality afforded by the duties of motherhood, through contraceptives and abortions and recommendations against nursing, doctors incite the worst kind of jealousy in husbands.
Chapter 16 Summary
Pozdnychev discusses the torments and trials that come with raising children at a time when infant mortality rates are so high. Mothers are obsessed with keeping their children alive because they love them as animals do: physically rather than spiritually. However, women cannot grieve simply and briefly as animals do, and instead they try to avoid the pain of grief by either distancing themselves from their children or going to any lengths to keep them alive.
With young children in a household, every effort is focused on avoiding or curing diseases, and doctors take advantage of this to prescribe all kinds of remedies. The children themselves proved to be just another cause for Pozdnychev and his wife to argue, both of them weaponizing the children against each other.
Chapter 17 Summary
Pozdnychev says that, had he not ended up murdering his wife, he could have lived his entire life in such a miserable and immoral way and would still have considered himself to have lived an ordinary, relatively good life. Despite this, their situation was desperately unhappy. He despised his wife because he didn’t understand the value of her role as a mother, and she despised him, too, because of the “immoral” life they were living together. Their sensual love and increasingly violent arguments were two sides of the same coin, and the two of them never had anything to say to each other save for banalities relating to everyday life or recriminations and insults.
Pozdnychev’s wife distracted herself by obsessing over the well-being of the children and paying excessive attention to household trifles. Pozdnychev distracted himself with his vices. Pozdnychev says that their issues did not stem from within but resulted from the problems with the life that they were leading. Just as this mode of life became untenable, they were obliged to move to the city for their children’s education.
Chapters 11-17 Analysis
In this section of The Kreutzer Sonata, Pozdnychev discusses the early years of his marriage from his honeymoon, through the birth of his children, to the point at which his family move to the city. Tension builds through this section of the narrative; the relationship between Pozdnychev and his wife sours almost immediately, and the hostility between the two characters that will ultimately prove deadly begins to bloom.
The incompatibility of the two characters, and the suffering that this will cause them both, is foreshadowed in the descriptions of the honeymoon period. Tolstoy shows how the pattern for the relationship between Pozdnychev and his wife was already laid out from the earliest days of their marriage. Sensual passion draws them together, and then as soon as their desires are sated, hatred drives them apart: “Love was exhausted with the satisfaction of sensuality. […] this cold hostility was our normal state” (12, 8-9). Notably, although Pozdnychev had considered his wife an “innocent” prior to their marriage, following their wedding and her initiation into the “baseness” of sensuality, she is consistently presented as equally culpable for the “immoral” and unhappy life that they lead together. This is an instance in which the novella presents Sensual Passion as a Corruption of Purity.
As Tolstoy presents their marriage, one of Pozdnychev’s main arguments is that a woman’s “whole life is spent in preparations for coquetry, or in coquetry itself” (14, 6) and that without a man present, “life stops.” This perspective epitomizes Pozdnychev’s tendency toward making assumptions and generalizations about women from his self-centered point of view. Just as he defines his own wife through her relationship to him—Tolstoy never gives her a name, defining her only with the possessive “my wife”—so too does he imagine that the lives of all women revolve around men. The only exception to this is when a mother nurses her children. Pozdnychev does not credit his wife, or any other woman, as an individual outside of the roles ascribed to her by men: seducer, wife, and mother.
The two major “torments” that Pozdnychev and his wife face during this period are jealousy and fear for the well-being of their children. Both of these troubles are attributed to the “immorality” of their living a life of conjugal sensuality together. Through emotive language and the question-and-answer dialogue, Tolstoy suggests that all of this misery could have been averted had they defied societal expectations and lived lives of abstinence. This speaks to the theme of Conflict Between Social Expectation and Moral Duty. However, these “torments” are exacerbated by doctors whom Pozdnychev refers to as “rascals.” Pozdnychev is staunchly critical of doctors and the services that they provide to society in general and upper-class families in particular. Medical practitioners thereby symbolize the drawbacks of modernization (as Tolstoy perceives them) in the fast-changing society of late 19th-century Russia.
Pozdnychev’s wife follows her doctor’s advice not to nurse their first child. In Pozdnychev’s opinion, which echoes that of the author, the duties of motherhood are more sacred than society is currently willing to acknowledge and should therefore be done regardless of the health risks to mother or child. Pozdnychev therefore considers the fact that his wife chose to follow their advice as a failure of her maternal duty, one which confirmed her “immorality.” Pozdnychev’s focus on nursing as a symbol of a woman’s maternal virtue echoes Tolstoy’s own reverence for childbearing and motherhood.
Furthermore, doctors recommend actions and treatments to combat high rates of infant mortality, which Pozdnychev considers to be disruptive to family life. His hostility serves to uphold patriarchal power structures regardless of the fact that these efforts focus on improving the health and well-being of women and children. That trust in doctors is presented as a negative, something that undermines Pozdnychev’s authority in the home and destabilizes the family structure, highlights the link between traditional family dynamics and The Subjugation of Women in the novel. The moral duty that Tolstoy presents in the novella demands that one rely on faith as a balm for grief and accept death rather than resorting to medicine as a means of avoiding it. This further addresses the theme of Conflict Between Social Expectation and Moral Duty.
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