In Defense of Love by Ron Rosenbaum;

Author:Ron Rosenbaum; [Rosenbaum, Ron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC
Published: 2023-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Is She Guilty?

Murdered

Long Since Murdered

Gradual Murder

How She Was Murdered

How Husbands Murder Their Wives

One More Murdered Woman [or Wife]

Ultimately she chose a somewhat graceless alternative: Whose Fault?

So now, more than a century after Kreutzer’s 1889 publication, Tolstoy’s wife gets to have her say. It will take years to assimilate all the variations in Katz’s translation of Tolstoy family responses, but I want to focus on the single most impressive thing I found on my first reading: Sofiya Tolstoy can write! I’m still puzzled by the Times story’s somewhat cavalier unwillingness to consider her novella’s literary merit and even more by the subhead’s sexist characterization of her work as nothing but “a scorned wife’s rebuttal.” So condescending and so oblivious to the novella’s own remarkable transcendence of mere scorned-wife revenge novel genre. In fact, I think it’s more than just good. It is a superb compact nineteenth-century novel of marriage and fantasied adultery. A Russian Madame Bovary. At times one could almost say she’s…Tolstoyan. And when it comes to love and sex, she shows her fictional husband up for the demented fool he became.

Specifically, Sofiya pulls off a remarkable structural feat in mirroring Kreutzer’s wife-murder plot from the point of view of the murdered wife. And she does it with prose that (in English at least) comes across as graceful, emotionally intuitive, and heartbreaking.

Thematically, she counters her husband’s rage against sex and love with what is, cumulatively, a deeply affecting defense of love. Akin to Sir Philip Sydney’s defense of poetry. A portrait of love from a woman’s point of view unlike any you can find (or I have found) in Tolstoy.

Sofiya accomplishes something different in her novella, which, despite its defensive title, offers more than a he-said, she-said document. Instead, Countess Tolstoy counterpoises her husband’s mad denunciation of sex with a skillfully evoked account of the evolution of love. Love in all its facets, from the sexual to the familial to the fantasized adulterous. Love, in all its contradictory complexities and unresolvable mysteries, from a woman’s point of view. From inside a woman’s mind and heart, with a subtlety that makes her husband, Lev Nikolaevitch (at least in his late work), look like a blockhead. I don’t take any pleasure in saying this: I found it painful almost to write as I did for Slate a dissection of him as portrayed in Sofiya’s novella.

In the novella Sofiya gives us a touching portrait of a tender, hopeful young girl, Anna (not an accidentally chosen name), at first finding herself falling under the spell of an older man, an elegant-looking local landowner, a count like the one who became Sofiya’s husband. He’s not a successful writer, but he does seem to pen boring polemics she can’t really respect. He holds strong convictions, especially about sex and marriage. He’s very similar to the crank Sofiya’s husband became in his dotage—and almost identical in his opinions to the wife-murderer in Kreutzer. They are the opinions of an ignorant male presuming to be sophisticated about sex.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.