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Tolstoy was always in trouble with the censor and the Czar’s police. He was expected by the common people and the liberal opposition to take a stand – and he did – on every kind of humanitarian issue, from famines mishandled by the government, to persecutions by an arbitrary and often cruel regime. He was known as much as a social critic and moralist as an author. ‘There are two czars in Russia,’ pronounced one liberal spokesman, ‘and the other is Tolstoy.’ He was described as the conscience of the world. The Kreutzer Sonata, published in 1889 when Tolstoy was 61, caused instant scandal. The censor was going to ban it but a compromise was reached by allowing an edition too expensive for ordinary people. Not that banning Tolstoy did much good: his works were copied out by disciples and distributed in hundreds of copies. Samizdat was not invented by the Soviets. (Samizdat was the illegal distribution of works banned by the Communist Party.) Because of Tolstoy’s moral authority it was not possible to ignore it or pretend that these unappetising views were of no importance. In the United States the US Postal Service banned the mailing of newspapers serialising The Kreutzer Sonata. Theodore Roosevelt said that Tolstoy was a sexual moral pervert. The nascent women’s movements were furious: this was the time of the New Woman. Chekhov, who revered Tolstoy, defended the book because of its aesthetic virtues and because, he said, the whole subject needed discussion. The emotional reactions to the novel have always been inordinate, but something written at white heat must provoke incandescent reactions. Reading it now I think people will feel first of all, curiosity – what was all that fuss about? – and then almost certainly, disquiet, dismay, and incredulity that anything so wrongheaded could be written by a favourite author: War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Resurrection.

Reading it now something has to strike you. The tale originated in a true story, which was in all the newspapers, and used by Tolstoy for polemic purposes. A husband did kill his wife from jealousy, but the tale as told by Tolstoy makes you ask, ‘Wait a minute, but what, in fact, did this erring wife do?’ Nothing much, even according to the stricter modes and morals of that time. A furore of suspicion and rage is built on atmosphere, glances, possibilities by a husband’s jealous imagination. We may imagine her defending herself. ‘But, Your Honour, nothing happened! I have the misfortune to be married to a jealous maniac who has made my life a misery. He himself introduced this man who is supposed to be my lover into our house and encouraged his visits to play music – we are both keen amateur musicians. The evening my husband returned unexpectedly and found me having supper with this supposed lover I had thought that for once I could invite him around without being made to feel a criminal. Sir, nothing could have been more innocent. How could I possibly have done anything wrong? The servants were up, serving supper, and the children were awake and watching everything, the way children do. Nothing happened. Nothing could have happened.’ She never did get the chance to defend herself because her husband killed her dead, in a jealous fury.

The novel could be read as a brilliant account of unjustified male jealousy. There could not be a better description of a man working himself up into jealous madness. It could be analysed, and almost certainly has been, by psychiatrists presenting it as a case history of latent homosexuality, textbook stuff, really.

It is useful to contrast the fevered voice of Tolstoy in The Kreutzer Sonata with Anna Karenina, a panoramic account of sexual and marital relations. In it, a newly married couple, Kitty and Levin, are just settling into their life together in the country. Levin is modelled on the young Tolstoy. He is described as eccentric in his social views, awkward in company and immoderately in love with his wife. It is summer, the house is full of visitors, and one of them is a young man from the fashionable life that Levin (and Tolstoy) despises. He is a comic character, stout, wearing a ridiculous Scottish bonnet and streamers, is greedy, and he has a crush on Kitty. Flirting with her is normal behaviour for the Moscow and St Petersburg salons, but Levin suffers and throws him out of the house. His worldly male relatives mock him and call him ‘a turk’. Wonderfully observed are the absurd quarrels of the young couple, instigated always by the husband, who is ashamed of himself and cannot stop watching his imagined rival and putting the worst possible interpretation on everything he sees. Levin is seen as an oddball by family and neighbours – all those ridiculous ideas about the peasants and agriculture – and as foolishly jealous, but held in the sweep and power of that novel, when Levin throws the society peacock out of the house Tolstoy’s affectionate portrait tells us that he thinks Levin is no more than rather touchingly absurd. But the same author wrote The Kreutzer Sonata. The same author wrote War and Peace, whose great quality is balance, the command of a panoramic sweep of events and people. That dispassionate eagle eye is nowhere here. What we have in The Kreutzer Sonata is the power and the energy, but not the sanity of judgement. His position could not be more extreme, and in case anyone might imagine that he regretted The Kreutzer Sonata he wrote an apologia, Sequel to The Kreutzer Sonata, some time later, where he reiterated it all, like hammering nails into a coffin, burying any possibility of joy, enjoyment, even the mildest fun in sex, love, lovemaking. Yet the author of the two great novels describes all kinds of passion, enjoyment, the emotions that we sinful lesser mortals might associate with sex.

In the grip of his fanaticism, Tolstoy advocated chastity for the entire human race, and when it was objected that this would end the human race, his reply was the equivalent of ‘And so what!’ Or, rather tant pis, as this member of a francophile caste would have put it.

But he could not have believed in the possibility of chastity, for his own life taught him otherwise. His struggles with his sexuality are documented, and by himself, sometimes confusingly, not because he tried to conceal them, but because his behaviour and his principles did not match.

Before marriage he was corrupt and debased – so he said. He slept around with peasant women and there was at least one illegitimate child. There were always the gypsies, too, rather, THE GYPSIES! always charming young men from the paths of virtue, and Tolstoy went off to the gypsies, like so many of the characters from the novels of that time. After marriage no gypsies, and he tried hard to be a faithful husband. He was strongly sexed, going at it well into his seventies.

Late in his life Tolstoy became what we would call a born-again Christian. He had a religious experience which changed him. A type of religious conversion is described in Anna Karenina. Levin is in despair because he has no faith. Hard for us now to understand this, unless it is transposed into political terms, but people in the nineteenth century went through torments over losing faith, lacking faith, longing for faith. I myself met, when a girl, survivors of that struggle, much battered by the experience. Now, looking back, we may hear, louder than any other voice, Matthew Arnold’s ‘melancholy, long withdrawing roar’ – the loss of faith in God.

Levin was suicidal. In a beautifully moving chapter Tolstoy describes him at last achieving faith: now we would say that the psychological conflict and tension was so great it would have to be resolved one way or the other.

Christianity’s great contribution to human happiness has been a hatred of the body, and of the flesh; distrust of women, dislike of sex. In this it is unlike the two other Middle Eastern religions. Judaism, far from denouncing sex, prescribes lovemaking for the faithful on their Sabbath, thus sanctifying and celebrating sex. Islam is not a puritan religion. Not in Judaism and Islam do we find celibate priests who use nuns or their housekeepers as their mistresses, or are driven to sex with little boys. But Christianity might have been tailored to fit Tolstoy’s needs and nature.

He became what he always had the potential for – a fanatic. There are descriptions of him, after his conversion, his fevered fervid face, his bullying manner, telling people of their duty to become like him, because being a fanatic, there was only one truth, his. There is such a thing as the logic of the fanatic, who begins with a proposition or a set of them, and from there develop inexorably all the rest.

It was wrong, it was wicked, to have sex with a pregnant woman or a lactating one. His wife Sonya protested at his inconsistencies, but Tolstoy was never afraid of contradicting himself. Thus he is driven – by logic – at least for the period of the argument, to support polygamy, for the sensible Tolstoy knows that celibacy is impossible. He is rather like those politicians, their fiery years forgotten, who tell teenagers that it is easy to ‘just to say No’. Say No – that’s all there is to it! Anyone with an ounce of common sense, or even with a working memory of their young selves, must know it is absurd: but we are in the grip of fanatic logic.

My favourite is the Inquisition which, having burned a heretic alive, used to send their police around to collect from the relatives money to pay for the wood used for the bonfire. Who else? The relatives might not have wanted their loved one incinerated, but obviously it was they who were responsible for the monster and therefore they must pay. It makes an entertaining, if painful, pastime, watching the logic-chopping of extremists, unfortunately so numerous in our sad times, and Tolstoy’s recommendation for celibacy for the entire human race is an excellent example.

What women might think about these prohibitions (and his wife had many loudly-voiced ideas of her own) did not interest Tolstoy. He insists that women are ‘pure’. Even ‘as pure as doves’. The sane Tolstoy knows this is rubbish, but he has to insist that women all hate sex, which is vile, shameful and even unnatural – these are only some of his epithets. A pure maiden will always hate sex.

Chekhov, who stood by him in the fuss over the book, told him that he talked nonsense about female sexuality. At some point one does have to ask if perhaps the trouble was really a simple one: Tolstoy was no good in bed. There must be some explanation for his insistence that women dislike sex. His Sonya did not like it but saw sex as a way of keeping him at heel. When he did ask to sleep alone, she refused. She welcomed sex with him because he became friendly, simple, affectionate: if his disciples knew, she mocked, the reason for his saintliness, that his good moods were the result of sex with his wife, then they too would mock this apostle for total celibacy.

If Tolstoy was bad at sex, there is a parallel, D. H. Lawrence, who clearly knew little about sex: at least, the author of his earlier books did not. Yet he also wrote wonderfully about love, sexual power struggles, the higher and lower reaches of passion. Very odd, that. Later, the earthy Frieda would have taught him better, but poor Sonya Tolstoy slept with only one man in her life, whose embraces were described as bear-like.

When he is writing his great novels there is no suggestion that his characters hate sex, but as a polemicist he says that women hate sex and after sex are cold and hostile, and that this hostility is the real relationship between men and women, concealed by the recurring cycles of sexual attraction and indifference.

When Tolstoy was very old, sex ceased, and Sonya Tolstoy complained that what she had always feared had happened: without the sexual bond all ties were cut between them. Yet, very old, they were writing loving notes saying they could not live without each other.

This cycle of sex and quarrelling has always fascinated me. Anybody who has enjoyed passionate sex will recall as passionate quarrels, but surely it is not surprising, when sex is such a promoter of strong emotions of all kinds that antagonism should sometimes be one of them. It is not unknown, either, for people to report enjoying the crazy quarrels that may spice and heighten sex. Enjoy – out with the word. Woman is an unwilling victim and man the guilt-ridden and driven aggressor.

Thirteen children did his countess and Tolstoy get between them. Sonya Tolstoy had eight children in eight years. Yes, there were nannies and nursemaids, but the implications of the simple physical fact are surely enough to explain a lot of that rioting emotion.

They lost three children, in three years, to illnesses that these days would not amount to more than a few days’ indisposition. Of the thirteen children they lost four. Sonya Tolstoy must always have been pregnant, nursing, and a good part of the time in mourning. Tolstoy was as affected by these deaths as his wife. After a particularly poignant death of a much loved child – the thirteenth, he said: ‘Yes, he was a delightful wonderful little boy. But what does it mean to say he is dead? There is no death; he is not dead because we love him, because he is giving us life.’ This apparently monstrous egotism was not what it looks like, for we have an account of Tolstoy, crazed with grief, running across the fields to escape from his emotion, repeating ‘in a jerky savage voice’ ‘There is no death! There is no death!’

The Kreutzer Sonata was written after hearing the music played, which affected him strongly: he was white and suffering, and arranged to have it played again. As a result of the first hearing he made love to Sonya – if that is the word for it – and as a result of that she got pregnant with the little boy Ivan, who died seven years later and caused Tolstoy to insist: There is no death.

By this time he was claiming that there was no justification for art that is not polemical. In 1865 he wrote ‘The aims of art are incommensurable with the aims of socialism. An artist’s mission must not be to produce an irrefutable solution to a problem, but to compel us to love life in all its countless and inexhaustible manifestations.’ By the time he was writing socialist and religious tracts art nevertheless sometimes triumphed over polemics, in Resurrection, for instance, in The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

Not very long after this tract against sex, The Kreutzer Sonata, which no one could say is not a compelling read, came Bohemianism, to be intensified by the First World War and its social aftermath, Free Love and ‘Live, Drink and Be Merry for Tomorrow We Die’. As early as 1907 there was a scene like a rude riposte to Tolstoy and his Kreutzer Sonata. Ida John dying in Paris of her fifth, of puerperal fever, lifting her glass in a toast of champagne ‘to Love’ with her rapscallion of a husband, Augustus John, then at the height of his fame. In the next room his mistress is looking after the children.

The Bohemians, who repudiated all conventional sexual morality as thoroughly as did Tolstoy, though from the opposite viewpoint, were then a minority which set out to shock. Epatering the bourgeoisie was their raison d’être. And then, not so long after that, came the Second World War, and wartime morality, and then what a witty friend used to call ‘The horizontal handshake’, and now young women depart from all over Europe in droves for holiday shores where they screw, presumably enjoyably, with males who wait for them like Inuits for migrating caribou.

Hedonism rules, okay?

What has happened? Birth control has.

In Anna Karenina Dolly, overburdened with children, visits bad Anna the outcast from society who confides that she knows how to prevent conception. She is kind enough not to point out that she is still young and pretty while Dolly is worn out with childbearing. Shock and horror is what Dolly feels. She is repulsed. And that is what Tolstoy feels about birth control. It is unnatural, says he, and women make monsters of themselves, destroying in themselves their capacity of being women, that is, mothers, so that ‘men may make no interruption of their enjoyment’. Note that it is the men who are doing the enjoying.

Anna Karenina, is always talked of as the story of Anna, a society beauty, and her seducer Vronsky, a variation of the great nineteenth-century theme of adultery. Its fame as the greatest of the adultery novels (some claim that for Madame Bovary) tends to obscure the scope of the novel: Tolstoy portrayed a gallery of women of that time. Dolly is the unhappy wife of a bad husband. Kitty is the happy wife of a jealous and loving husband. There are court ladies, whom Tolstoy detests, and peasant women, whom he admires. One is Levin’s housekeeper, more of a friend than a servant, and another the peasant woman who came to rescue Dolly from her domestic disorders. A young peasant woman shocked Dolly by saying that ‘The Lord has relieved me of a burden’, talking of the death of a child – one mouth less to feed. A spinster fails to get a husband and is doomed to a life of being a guest in other people’s houses. A bad woman – Anna Karenina’s mirror – is a prostitute and can have no future. This is a novel about the situation of women in that time. Anna now would not have to throw herself under a train. Dolly would not have so many children. Kitty perhaps would not be so content as the wife of an unreasonably jealous man. The spinster would have a career, might be a single mother. Nowhere in Anna Karenina does that great artist describe a wife or mistress disgusted with sex and full of implacable hatred for men’s sexuality. Anna hates Vronsky at the end because he is free and she is not, but she does not hate him sexually.

There is just a hint of the conflict between the moralist and the artist in this novel, which begins with the inscription, like a curse, ‘“Vengeance is mine, I will repay” saith the Lord.’ But there is no vengeance, the novel is irradiated by Tolstoy’s love and understanding of everything.

Understanding of everything and everybody but not of himself. He said to Gorki, ‘Man can endure earthquake, epidemics, dreadful diseases, every form of spiritual torment, but the most dreadful tragedy that can befall him and will remain, is the tragedy of the bedroom.’

We have the diaries of two people with a gift for complaint, invective, and a relish for recording the minutiae of the ups and downs of their love. For it was that. In between the storms were days of tranquillity. We have all the facts, or think we have, but few of us now have the experiences that could tell us what life in that family was like.

Yasnaya Polyana – which can translate as Aspen Glades, or Bright Glades – the Tolstoys’ country house, is now a shrine, and visited by thousands every year. It was the estate’s manor house, a large villa, with many rooms that turned out not to be enough to accommodate all those children, and so a wing was built on. There were all kinds of sheds, outhouses and annexes. Now it has to impress us by its potentialities for discomfort, because of the numbers of people it had to house. Large, high-ceilinged rooms, which must have been hell to heat. In summer, set as it is in fields and woods, what a paradise – but there is a long Russian winter. The furniture is adequate. The sofa where Tolstoy was born and where the countess laboured thirteen times is hard, slippery, ungiving.

Fresh water did not come gushing from taps: it was brought in by the bucket and there was a bathhouse. No electric light. There is a scene of Tolstoy, an old man, writing in his study with the aid of a single candle.

The house held the parents, thirteen children, servants, nursemaids, tutors – one lived there with his wife and two children – governesses, relatives and many visitors. There were also the disciples, who expected to be fed and, often, housed, sometimes for weeks. They would fit themselves into the servants’ rooms in the attic – what happened to them? – or doss down in the corridors. It was usual to have 30 people sit down for a meal. Comfort of the sort we take for granted there was none. Privacy, which we have learned to need, was not easily got. Tolstoy had his study but it was permeable by anyone who decided they had the right – Sonya, and his chief disciple, the appalling Chertkov, and people demanding spiritual counselling. Once out of his study, then he was part of everything. The quarrels of adults, the squabbles of children, the crying of babies, the arguments of the disciples must have reverberated in those wooden walls. The countess understandably complained of ‘nerves’ and surely Tolstoy was entitled to them too.

Thirteen children. Thirteen. Thirteen. Four, dead. We are not talking about a peasant woman, a farm woman, with expectations for a hard life, but an educated sensitive woman who could never have dreamed of the kind of life she in fact had to lead.

There is a tirade in The Kreutzer Sonata about the unhappiness that children bring, mostly the misery of the fear of them dying: the slightest indisposition could become a serious illness. In both Anna Karenina and War and Peace the difficulties of childbearing and childrearing are depicted. Tolstoy was not a father removed from the burdens of the family. How could he have been, in that house? He knew all about pregnancy and morning sickness, and milk fever and cracked nipples. He knew about the discomforts of breast-feeding and sleepless nights. His great novels accepted life’s ills, as they accepted its delights, everything is in balance, in proportion; but somewhere, at some point, it became impossible for him to stand his life. A skin had been ripped off him: it must have happened. It is often enough suggested that Sonya Tolstoy was a bit demented; though we must remember that she copied out War and Peace and all the other novels, many times, while she was carrying and giving birth and nursing and serving her Leo who, she complained, insisted on his marital rights before she was even healed after childbirth. Surely Leo Tolstoy became a bit demented too, quite apart from the old man’s infatuation with his disciple Chertkov, who was like a horrible caricature of himself.

Those of us who have known people with clinical depression, or suffering the dark night of the soul, have heard descriptions of spiritual landscapes so dreadful that attempts at consolation ring as false as badly tuned pianos. And so they are received by the sufferers who look at you with a contempt for your superficiality. ‘What I am feeling now, that’s the truth’ they may actually spell out to the stupid one. ‘When you are depressed you see the truth, the rest is illusion.’ So one feels reading The Kreutzer Sonata. Here is a landscape of despair – no exit! Remember the cage he had made for himself, this highly sexed man. Sex – bad. Sex with a pregnant or nursing woman – bad. No sex outside marriage. A recipe for guilt and self-hatred. The wasteland he describes that lacks any joy, pleasure – one hardly dare use the word love – is the truth. So be it.

Let us imagine ourselves back in that house. It is night, supper over, the visitors and disciples in their nooks and corners. The older children are still up, studying or playing, and their voices are loud and so are their feet on the wooden floors. The little ones are in their rooms with their nurses and are as noisy as small children are.

Tolstoy wants to be a husband tonight – so he puts it. God is not coming to his aid in his battles with lust.

Sonya’s newest baby is six months old. She is afraid that she is pregnant again. She has to be in a state of conflict as her Leo approaches, smiling and affectionate: carefree sex has not yet been invented in the world’s laboratories. She has never known it, never, in her long married life. If she is not pregnant already then she may become so tonight. The count and countess, Leo and Sonya, make sure the doors are shut, and hope the children won’t come up wanting something. The new baby is in the next room with his nurse. He is hungry and can be heard grizzling. Leo must be careful not to touch Sonya’s breasts, which are swollen with milk. She tried hard at first to refuse breast-feeding, and use wet nurses, because her nipples always crack, and nursing is a torture, but Leo insisted on her breast-feeding. And he must remember that her cracked nipples sometimes bleed, if he is impatient or clumsy. The baby is really going at it now: his hungry howls will bring the nursemaid in with him if she and Leo can’t get a move on. The nursemaid, a girl from the village, is singing a peasant lullaby, and the sound and the rhythms become part of Leo’s thrusting, which in any case has extra vigour because he rather fancies the girl. Oh God, thinks Sonya, please don’t let me get pregnant. Oh I do hope I’m not pregnant, my poor nipples will never get a chance to heal. In spite of her care, trying to shield her breasts with her hands, milk suddenly spurts all over the bed, herself, his hands. She is weeping with self-disgust and discomfort, but quite pleased she has this excuse to make Leo feel the greedy beast he is. The sheets will need washing: they were put on clean that morning. The girl who does the washing will complain again: too much washing with all these people as well as the children and it is so hard to get things dry, when the weather is bad, as it is now. Sonya’s weeping infuriates Leo, and he is full of guilt and self-dislike. She is thinking that all this milk is being wasted, though she is trying to stop it flowing, while the baby’s yells from next door are making it flow. The baby, who is now screaming, is a big feeder and not easily satisfied. ‘I’ll have to heat up a little milk for him,’ she is thinking. ‘I hope the children didn’t finish it all at supper. They never bring up enough milk for the house, how am I to manage with all these people?’ She tells Leo to get right out of bed and leave her in peace to clean up. Yes, he can come back later, if he likes, when she’s fed the baby. He says he’ll sleep in his study tonight. Yes, she thinks, you’ve got what you wanted and now you can forget me. She feels abandoned and punished.

He goes off, praying that God will answer his prayers and damp down his lusts.

This scene, or something like it, must have happened a hundred times.

No wonder prostitutes were popular, to take the strain off such marriage beds: so Leo himself once said, but now he has changed his mind and says that prostitution is wicked. Why should poor innocent women be degraded by the filthy lusts of men?

To read this book now is like listening to a scream of anguish from a hell women have escaped from, and men too. But, wait a minute: it is in what we call the West that people have escaped, or most of us. When we read that a woman in Africa, or India, or anywhere in the poor countries of the world has had eight children, and three died, then the world of Yasnaya Polyana and The Kreutzer Sonata is not so far away.