A literature course called Great Novellas beckoned me. I enrolled on it in order to discover writers or works I had not encountered before, and to sample fine writing I might learn from in order to improve my craft. This was one of the books on that course.
Click the link to see this book, which contains The Kreutzer Sonata, on Amazon (affiliate link)
You’re sitting on the 10:29 from London Victoria to Brighton, having a pleasant chat with one or two other passengers. (This is very unBritish, I know, but bear with me.) Another man sits nearby, and after several minutes snorting, grunting and hurrumphing, he announces: “I killed my wife, you know. Fancy a cup of tea? No milk, I’m afraid.”
He then pours himself tea which is so black and strong-looking that it might have been scooped up from the set of The Creature From The Black Lagoon.
“Women, eh?”, he continues. “Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em!”
At this point do you:
a) Say, “Ah, we appear to be coming up to my stop.”, then alight at the next station and pretend to exit, but sneak back once the train has gone on its way and wait half an hour for the next one;
b) Sneak a glance at the emergency cord and assess whether you would be able to reach it before this person pulls a machete out of his rucksack; or
c) Say, “Don’t mind if I do. The price of tea in the buffet car is eye-watering. Now what’s all this about killing your wife?”
Incredibly, that last option is exactly what the narrator of this story chooses, condemning the rest of us to a 70 page diatribe by someone who is clearly unhinged.
Now, I ought to say at this point that my rendering of the story so far is not quite accurate, at least not in a literal sense. But it does convey the gist, I think, in much the same way as Neville Coghill’s version of The Canterbury Tales is not a literal word for word translation, but is much closer to the original in tone and spirit than its more precise companions.
Click the pic to see the book on Amazon (affiliate link)
Anyway, this man is convinced that his wife is having an affair with a violinist. His fears are reinforced when they play Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata together.
He has some interesting views about women and men, and the way men treat women. There is certainly a grain of truth and even wisdom in what he says. For example:
“... if one percent of the efforts spent on treating syphilis was spent on eradicating depravity, there would long since been no syphilis to speak of.”
Even so, taking 70 pages to say it seems to me to be rather excessive.
A few things I would say in the novella’s favour:
Firstly, it was a clever idea to make the Kreutzer Sonata the focus of suspicion. It’s very fast, and the violinist and pianist have to be completely at one in order to execute it well. I think I can understand why that could tip someone into a murderous rage if they were an insecure, immature, sleep-deprived misogynist (I think the story-teller is a misogynist, though I can’t put my finger on why). I don’t know for sure because I am none of those things, except maybe sleep-deprived.
Secondly, it’s a good study in what can happen when someone has no sleep, followed by an arduous day-long journey, all the while with negative thoughts going round and round in their head. It’s a shame he couldn’t have called a friend who might have told him to chill.
Thirdly, despite everything I’ve said, I’m not sure that his wife was not having an affair. Maybe it wasn’t all in his head. Not that that would justify murder, of course.
Fourthly, his reflections at the end are quite profound, and constitute what in some ways is a far worse punishment than a long spell in prison.
Click the cover to see the book on Amazon (affiliate link)
Still. I read in a book called How to Write Like Tolstoy that Tolstoy wrote the story 9 times before he was satisfied with it. You’d have thought that by the time he got to the second or third draft he’d have concluded that someone “up there” was trying to tell him something.
Do I recommend reading it? I suppose on balance I do. It’s an interesting study in psychology, if you can get over the framing device (the narrator telling us about someone telling us a story) and the length.
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