The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories
1889
Translated by Benjamin Ricketson Tucker
Three stories written in the wake of Tolstoy's spiritual crisis, each one a grenade tossed into the comfortable illusions of bourgeois existence. The Kreutzer Sonata opens on a train where a hollow-eyed stranger gradually confesses how jealousy, resentment, and his wife's perceived infidelity drove him to murder. It is not a confession seeking mercy but an indictment: of marriage as ownership, of society's lies about love, of the cage men build around women and then despise them for being caged. The Death of Ivan Ilych is perhaps the most devastating story ever written about dying: a respected magistrate discovers on his deathbed that his entire life has been performance, that his colleagues mock him behind his back, that his family cares only for the inheritance. Only in suffering does he glimpse something like truth. How Much Land Does a Man Need? strips the peasant tale of sentiment, showing a man who can never have enough, whose ambition becomes his own execution. Together, these stories constitute Tolstoy's ruthless accounting of what we pretend matters and what actually does.
