One particularly enthusiastic young Romanian castrated himself. Banned both in Russia (where Tolstoy had long struggled with the censors) and in the United States, the novella led many men and women to embrace celibacy and modesty, in keeping with Tolstoy’s Christian asceticism, which also emphasized nonviolence, vegetarianism, physical labor, and poverty. “The Kreutzer Sonata” caused an international scandal at a time when sexuality and gender roles were the subject of widespread debate. He added that he didn’t mean that no one should ever have sex-only that everyone should try never to have sex, because it is noblest to strive for an impossible ideal. In an afterword written in response to many letters asking him to explain the meaning of the novella, Tolstoy confirmed that he shared Pozdnyshev’s opinions. He concludes that “sexual passion, no matter how it’s arranged is evil, a terrible evil against which one must struggle.… The words of the Gospel that whosoever looks at a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery relates not only to other men’s wives, but precisely-and above all-to one’s own wife.” The only righteous path is abstinence if it leads to the end of the human race, so be it. Though there was no evidence that his wife was unfaithful, and although he feels guilty for his crime, Pozdnyshev argues that he and his wife were equal partners in their submission to lust, and equal victims of corrupt sexual standards that turn all women into prostitutes. The marriage curdled, and he became jealous of his wife’s relationship with a musician who kept coming over to play duets. He married a much younger woman, provoked by her youthful beauty and sexy sweater they had five children, but Pozdnyshev was disgusted by family life. In Tolstoy’s 1889 novella “The Kreutzer Sonata,” an aristocrat named Pozdnyshev tells a stranger on a train the story of his unhappy family.

Like her husband, Sofiya Tolstoy criticized the sexual double standard, but she was far more sympathetic to women.

Black Square by Sophie Pinkham