The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories
already committed adultery,’ do not apply to the wives of others, but
notably and especially to our own wives. I did not understand this, and
I thought that the honeymoon and all of my acts during that period were
virtuous, and that to satisfy one’s desires with his wife is an
eminently chaste thing. Know, then, that I consider these departures,
these isolations, which young married couples arrange with the
permission of their parents, as nothing else than a license to engage
in debauchery.
“I saw, then, in this nothing bad or shameful, and, hoping for great
joys, I began to live the honeymoon. And very certainly none of these
joys followed. But I had faith, and was determined to have them, cost
what they might. But the more I tried to secure them, the less I
succeeded. All this time I felt anxious, ashamed, and weary. Soon I
began to suffer. I believe that on the third or fourth day I found my
wife sad and asked her the reason. I began to embrace her, which in my
opinion was all that she could desire. She put me away with her hand,
and began to weep.
“At what? She could not tell me. She was filled with sorrow, with
anguish. Probably her tortured nerves had suggested to her the truth
about the baseness of our relations, but she found no words in which to
say it. I began to question her; she answered that she missed her
absent mother. It seemed to me that she was not telling the truth. I
sought to console her by maintaining silence in regard to her parents.
I did not imagine that she felt herself simply overwhelmed, and that
her parents had nothing to do with her sorrow. She did not listen to
me, and I accused her of caprice. I began to laugh at her gently. She
dried her tears, and began to reproach me, in hard and wounding terms,
for my selfishness and cruelty.
“I looked at her. Her whole face expressed hatred, and hatred of me. I
cannot describe to you the fright which this sight gave me. ‘How?
What?’ thought I, ‘love is the unity of souls, and here she hates me?
Me? Why? But it is impossible! It is no longer she!’
“I tried to calm her. I came in conflict with an immovable and cold
hostility, so that, having no time to reflect, I was seized with keen
irritation. We exchanged disagreeable remarks. The impression of this
first quarrel was terrible. I say quarrel, but the term is inexact. It
was the sudden discovery of the abyss that had been dug between us.
Love was exhausted with the satisfaction of sensuality. We stood face
to face in our true light, like two egoists trying to procure the
greatest possible enjoyment, like two individuals trying to mutually
exploit each other.
“So what I called our quarrel was our actual situation as it appeared
after the satisfaction of sensual desire. I did not realize that this
cold hostility was our normal state, and that this first quarrel would
soon be drowned under a new flood of the intensest sensuality. I
thought that we had disputed with each other, and had become
reconciled, and that it would not happen again. But in this same
honeymoon there came a period of satiety, in which we ceased to be
necessary to each other, and a new quarrel broke out.
“It became evident that the first was not a matter of chance. ‘It was
inevitable,’ I thought. This second quarrel stupefied me the more,
because it was based on an extremely unjust cause. It was something
like a question of money,—and never had I haggled on that score; it was
even impossible that I should do so in relation to her. I only remember
that, in answer to some remark that I made, she insinuated that it was
my intention to rule her by means of money, and that it was upon money
that I based my sole right over her. In short, something
extraordinarily stupid and base, which was neither in my character nor
in hers.
“I was beside myself. I accused her of indelicacy. She made the same
accusation against me, and the dispute broke out. In her words, in the
expression of her face, of her eyes, I noticed again the hatred that
had so astonished me before. With a brother, friends, my father, I had
occasionally quarrelled, but never had there been between us this
fierce spite. Some time passed. Our mutual hatred was again concealed
beneath an access of sensual desire, and I again consoled myself with
the reflection that these scenes were reparable faults.
“But when they were repeated a third and a fourth time, I understood
that they were not simply faults, but a fatality that must happen
again. I was no longer frightened, I was simply astonished that I
should be precisely the one to live so uncomfortably with my wife, and
that the same thing did not happen in other households. I did not know
that in all households the same sudden changes take place, but that
all, like myself, imagine that it is a misfortune exclusively reserved
for themselves alone, which they carefully conceal as shameful, not
only to others, but to themselves, like a bad disease.
“That was what happened to me. Begun in the early days, it continued
and increased with characteristics of fury that were ever more
pronounced. At the bottom of my soul, from the first weeks, I felt that
I was in a trap, that I had what I did not expect, and that marriage is
not a joy, but a painful trial. Like everybody else, I refused to
confess it (I should not have confessed it even now but for the
outcome). Now I am astonished to think that I did not see my real
situation. It was so easy to perceive it, in view of those quarrels,
begun for reasons so trivial that afterwards one could not recall them.
“Just as it often happens among gay young people that, in the absence
of jokes, they laugh at their own laughter, so we found no reasons for
our hatred, and we hated each other because hatred was naturally
boiling up in us. More extraordinary still was the absence of causes
for reconciliation.
“Sometimes words, explanations, or even tears, but sometimes, I
remember, after insulting words, there tacitly followed embraces and
declarations. Abomination! Why is it that I did not then perceive this
baseness?”
CHAPTER XIII.
“All of us, men and women, are brought up in these aberrations of
feeling that we call love. I from childhood had prepared myself for
this thing, and I loved, and I loved during all my youth, and I was
joyous in loving. It had been put into my head that it was the noblest
and highest occupation in the world. But when this expected feeling
came at last, and I, a man, abandoned myself to it, the lie was pierced
through and through. Theoretically a lofty love is conceivable;
practically it is an ignoble and degrading thing, which it is equally
disgusting to talk about and to remember. It is not in vain that nature
has made ceremonies, but people pretend that the ignoble and the
shameful is beautiful and lofty.
“I will tell you brutally and briefly what were the first signs of my
love. I abandoned myself to beastly excesses, not only not ashamed of
them, but proud of them, giving no thought to the intellectual life of
my wife. And not only did I not think of her intellectual life, I did
not even consider her physical life.
“I was astonished at the origin of our hostility, and yet how clear it
was! This hostility is nothing but a protest of human nature against
the beast that enslaves it. It could not be otherwise. This hatred was
the hatred of accomplices in a crime. Was it not a crime that, this
poor woman having become pregnant in the first month, our _liaison_
should have continued just the same?
“You imagine that I am wandering from my story. Not at all. I am always
giving you an account of the events that led to the murder of my wife.
The imbeciles! They think that I killed my wife on the 5th of October.
It was long before that that I immolated her, just as they all kill
now. Understand well that in our society there is an idea shared by all
that woman procures man pleasure (and _vice versa_, probably, but I
know nothing of that, I only know my own case). _Wein, Weiber und
Gesang_. So say the poets in their verses: Wine, women, and song!
“If it were only that! Take all the poetry, the painting, the
sculpture, beginning with Pouschkine’s ‘Little Feet,’ with ‘Venus and
Phryne,’ and you will see that woman is only a means of enjoyment. That
is what she is at Trouba,[*] at Gratchevka, and in a court ball-room.
And think of this diabolical trick: if she were a thing without moral
value, it might be said that woman is a fine morsel; but, in the first
place, these knights assure us that they adore woman (they adore her
and look upon her, however, as a means of enjoyment), then all assure
us that they esteem woman. Some give up their seats to her, pick up her
handkerchief; others recognize in her a right to fill all offices,
participate in government, etc., but, in spite of all that, the
essential point remains the same. She is, she remains, an object of
sensual desire, and she knows it. It is slavery, for slavery is nothing
else than the utilization of the labor of some for the enjoyment of
others. That slavery may not exist people must refuse to enjoy the
labor of others, and look upon it as a shameful act and as a sin.
[*] A suburb of Moscow.
“Actually, this is what happens. They abolish the external form, they
suppress the formal sales of slaves, and then they imagine and assure
others that slavery is abolished. They are unwilling to see that it
still exists, since people, as before, like to profit by the labor of
others, and think it good and just. This being given, there will always
be found beings stronger or more cunning than others to profit thereby.
The same thing happens in the emancipation of woman. At bottom feminine
servitude consists entirely in her assimilation with a means of
pleasure. They excite woman, they give her all sorts of rights equal to
those of men, but they continue to look upon her as an object of
sensual desire, and thus they bring her up from infancy and in public
opinion.
“She is always the humiliated and corrupt serf, and man remains always
the debauched Master. Yes, to abolish slavery, public opinion must
admit that it is shameful to exploit one’s neighbor, and, to make woman
free, public opinion must admit that it is shameful to consider woman
as an instrument of pleasure.
“The emancipation of woman is not to be effected in the public courts
or in the chamber of deputies, but in the sleeping chamber.
Prostitution is to be combated, not in the houses of ill-fame, but in
the family. They free woman in the public courts and in the chamber of
deputies, but she remains an instrument. Teach her, as she is taught
among us, to look upon herself as such, and she will always remain an
inferior being. Either, with the aid of the rascally doctors, she will
try to prevent conception, and descend, not to the level of an animal,
but to the level of a thing; or she will be what she is in the great
majority of cases,—sick, hysterical, wretched, without hope of
spiritual progress.” . . .
“But why that?” I asked.
“Oh! the most astonishing thing is that no one is willing to see this
thing, evident as it is, which the doctors must understand, but which
they take good care not to do. Man does not wish to know the law of
nature,—children. But children are born and become an embarrassment.
Then man devises means of avoiding this embarrassment. We have not yet
reached the low level of Europe, nor Paris, nor the ‘system of two
children,’ nor Mahomet. We have discovered nothing, because we have
given it no thought. We feel that there is something bad in the two
first means; but we wish to preserve the family, and our view of woman
is still worse.
“With us woman must be at the same time mistress and nurse, and her
strength is not sufficient. That is why we have hysteria, nervous