Why Tolstoy Didn’t Want You to Have Sex

It’s one of life’s beautiful ironies that Count Leo Tolstoy, a reactionary who loathed doctors and the government with a virulent passion, became a pandemic reading meme. When they weren’t busy baking bread, many people turned to reading his great novel-cum-discourse on the philosophy of history, War and Peace. It’s safe to say that most of his lockdown fans knew little of Tolstoy’s opinion on the value of medical advice (he thought doctors were the “priests of science … who deprave youths” and who are “ruining the lives of thousands and hundreds of thousands of human beings”). And likewise of his views of relations between the sexes, which came to the fore in his late work—as shocking and transgressive today as it was in his time. Late-period Tolstoy has been too often dismissed as nutty or irrelevant owing to the author’s religious conversion in the twilight of his life. However, an incendiary masterwork of this period, the long 1889 short story, “The Kreutzer Sonata,” has only become more interesting. “The Kreutzer Sonata” is a work of utopian gender theory equal to our era of utopian gender theories. It deserves a fresh hearing.