The Kreutzer Sonata (Modern Library Classics) by Leo Tolstoy

Author:Leo Tolstoy [Tolstoy, Leo]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2016-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XVIII

“Yes, I keep wandering from my story,” he began. “I have pondered over it a good deal. I look on many things in a different way from what most people do, and I want to talk it all out.

“Well, we began to live in the city. There a man may live a century and never realize that he has long ago died and rotted. One has no time to study himself—his time is wholly occupied: business, social relations, his health, art, the health of his children, their education. Now he must receive calls from such and such people; now he must return them; now he must see this woman; now he must hear that man. At any given moment there will surely be in the city one celebrity, generally several, whom it is impossible for you to miss. Now you have to consult a doctor for yourself or for this one or that; then you have to see one of the tutors or the governess, and so life is frittered away. Well, so it was we lived and seemed to suffer less from our life together. Moreover, we had at first the pleasant business of getting settled in a new city, in a new home, and then, later, in traveling back and forth between the city and the country.

“Thus we lived one winter. During the second winter the incident which I am going to relate took place. It seemed a trifling thing and we thought little about it then—still it led to all that followed.

“She became delicate in health, and the doctors forbade her to have any more children and they taught her how to prevent it. This was repulsive to me. I had no patience with such an idea, but with frivolous obstinacy she insisted on having her way and I had to yield. The last justification of the swinish life—children—was taken away. Our life became viler than ever.

“To the peasant, to the laboring man, children are a necessity; although it is hard for him to feed them, still he must have them and so the marital relations are justified. But to us, who already have children, more children are not desirable; they cause extra work, expense, further division of property—they are a burden. And therefore there is no justification for our swinish life. Either we artificially prevent the birth of children or we regard children as a misfortune—as the consequence of carelessness, which is worse.

“There is no justification. But we have fallen so low morally that we do not see the need for justification. The majority of men now belonging to the cultivated class give themselves up to this form of debauchery without the slightest twinge of conscience.

“No one feels any conscientious scruples, because conscience is a non-existent quality except—if we may so say—the ‘conscience’ of public opinion and of criminal law. And in this respect neither the one nor the other is violated; no one has to bear the brunt of public scorn, for all—including Marya Pavlovna and Ivan Zakharych—do the same thing.

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