Intercourse (4 page)

A few years earlier, in 1887, another great artist, Count Leo Tolstoy, had been inspired by another great work of art—“The Kreutzer Sonata” by Beethoven—to fuck his wife. His son and a music student played the sensual and wild sonata in a concert at his country estate. Tolstoy “listened with tears in his eyes; then, during the presto, unable to control himself, he rose and went to the window where, gazing at the starry sky, he stifled a sob. ”
³
That night, Sophie, the Countess Tolstoy, was impregnated with her thirteenth child. The Count was sixty, his wife sixteen years younger. She had known him since she was ten; she was eighteen, he thirty-four, when they married in September 1862.

Later, in Moscow, the Count heard “The Kreutzer Sonata” again, this time in the company of an actor and a painter. This time more restrained, he wanted each to create a work of art inspired by the sonata. Only he did. His story,
The Kreutzer Sonata, is a powerful and distressing one. It combines an unfinished short story, “The Man Who Murdered His Wife, ” with a story told to Tolstoy by the painter about a stranger he met on a train, who was distraught with marital troubles; but its basic text is the Tolstoy marriage. The story is autobiographical, as is much of Tolstoy’s fiction; and in
The Kreutzer Sonata
he uses the details of his sexual intercourse with Sophie, what the biographer Henri Troyat called “his periods of rut, ”
⁴
to show his feelings of deep repugnance for the wife he continues to fuck— and for the sex act itself. The repugnance is not only rooted in ongoing desire, but also in satiation, it too being real, a discrete phenomenon, and aversive. The desire is not free-floating or abstract, in the way of French philosophy. There is a real woman, Sophie, on whose body, inside whom, it is expressed; and when he is done with her, he puts her aside with rude indifference or cold distaste.

The story is dense, passionate, artful, crazed with misogyny and insight; the real woman was diagnosed in 1910, the last year of the Count’s life, as “paranoiac and hysterical, with predominance of the first. ”
⁵
The story has an argument: for chastity, against sexual intercourse. The story has an analysis: of the nature of sexual intercourse and its relation to the equality of the sexes. The woman had an argument: her husband should love her as a human being, not only use her as an object when he wanted to fuck her. The woman had an analysis: her husband was selfish to a rare and horrifying degree, also a hypocrite; people were real to him only insofar as they affected him personally; she was real to him only when and because he wanted physical love; he became cold when he was sexually sated, and indifferent to her. The man—artist and husband, wanting to be a saint, on the path toward the renunciation of all power, all wealth, all violence—managed not to cut off his nose to spite his face. “A man, ” he wrote in a letter, “ought not to set himself the task of chastity, but only the approach towards chastity. ”
⁶
And especially, he did not want to be caught. “And what if another baby came? ” wrote the author of
The Kreutzer Sonata
a month after finishing it. “How ashamed I should be, especially in front of my children! They will compare the date [of conception] with that of publication. ”
⁷
The first public reading of the story was in October 1889; by December 1890, Sophie was afraid that she was pregnant again (but she was spared a fourteenth pregnancy).

Sophie’s view of the great man was not reverential. One day at tea he spoke of a vegetarian menu that he had read and liked: almonds and bread. In her diary Sophie wrote: “I expect the person who wrote the menu practises vegetarianism as much as the author of the
Kreutzer Sonata
practises chastity. [Thirty-seven words deleted by surviving family. ]”
⁸
Her irony is seldom appreciated by Tolstoy’s biographers (Troyat being the distinguished exception). Most side with the pious Count and consider her vain, corrupt, selfish, the adversary of a saint. The author of
Tolstoy and Gandhi: Men of Peace,
for instance, blamed her for “a continual denial of Tolstoy’s beliefs, and an irritable and sometimes hysterical ridicule, ” also “moral triviality” and “inconsistency and brute egotism. ”
⁹
She would not have been surprised. “And his biographers, ” she wrote in 1895, "will tell of how he helped the labourers to carry buckets of water, but no one will ever know that he never gave his wife a rest and never—in all these thirty-two years—gave his child a drink of water or spent five minutes by his bedside to give me a chance to rest a little, to sleep, or to go out for a walk, or even just recover from all my labours. ”
¹⁰

Her labors were considerable, hard and sad. She had thirteen pregnancies, thirteen children; six died of difficult, painful illnesses—for instance, meningitis and croup. She had puerperal fever at least once, other fevers, inflamed breasts. She transcribed all the Count’s books and diaries, except for a brief period late in their marriage when he gave them to his grown daughters in order to exclude her (he had her start transcribing again with
The Kreutzer Sonata).
She educated their children. From 1883 on, she managed his estates, his money, his copyrights, fed and housed their children; she published his books, which sometimes included the necessity of pleading with the state censor for permission to publish them (she pled with the Czar for permission to publish
The Kreutzer Sonata). It was not until July 3, 1897, that she moved out of the marital bedroom, not wanting to have intercourse anymore, but Tolstoy continued to fuck her when he wanted and to ignore her the rest of the time. She hated “his coldness, his terrible coldness”
¹¹
—his indifference to her after intercourse, which changed only when he wanted intercourse again.

This coldness afflicts her marriage from its beginning until his death. After four months of marriage, she wants work like his “so that I could turn to it whenever he is cold to me. Such moments, ” she writes, “are bound to come more and more frequently; but in reality it has been like this all the time. ”
¹²

“I have changed immensely..., ” she writes in 1865, “and Lyova’s coldness has stopped affecting me, for I know that I deserve it. ”
¹³

In 1867, “[e]verything seems so cold and unfriendly, and I feel I have lost all his love... ”
¹⁴

In 1891, she fears that the time will come when he will no longer want her, “and then he will cast me out of his life— cynically, cruelly, and coldly. ”
¹⁵

After his death, she wrote that physical love never “meant an emotional game to me, but always something very much akin to suffering. ”
¹⁶
While he lived, she wanted, as she wrote in her 1891 diary, “warm, gentle affection” but instead endured “these outbursts of passion always followed by long periods of coldness. ”
¹⁷

For her, this coldness was the context in which intercourse took place. For him, intercourse was the context in which she existed; his heat, her existence; his coldness toward her experienced by him only as his real life, unambiguously chosen and pursued. He fucked her until he was eighty-one, a year before his death. “The devil fell upon me” was how he described wanting Sophie when he was old, “... and I slept badly. It was so loathsome, as after a crime. And on that same day... still more powerfully possessed, I fell. ”
¹⁸

Finally, in his last year, he really did not want her anymore. She was, now, “my ordeal. ”
¹⁹
She should, he thought, be having a simple old age lived in harmony and beauty with her husband, “not interfering in his work or in his life. ”
²⁰
Instead, not able to eat or sleep, crying uncontrollably, irritable, hostile, nervous, she was what “a selfish and pitiless man, ”
²¹
as she once described him, had left in the wake of his magnificent and great life as an artist and a saint. Now she was discarded, because he had finished with her; and she howled in an agony that passed for madness. After accusing her of only wanting to torment herself, he wrote that “one cannot help pitying her. ”
²²
But he never knew what pity was, not even that, such a small and condescending thing, not for her. Never, in art or in life, did he know her, except in the biblical sense. In
The Kreutzer Sonata, the husband sees the wife with some empathy, as human, only after he has brutally murdered her: “'I looked at the children and at her bruised and disfigured face, and for the first time I forgot myself, my rights, my pride, and for the first time saw a human being in her. ’”
²³
Art is merciful. Murder turns the woman one has fucked over a lifetime human. The ethos is not contemporary. Typically now, in books, in films, murder never risks an aftermath of compassion; there is no remorse. Instead, murder itself is the sex act or it is sexual climax. Tolstoy’s murder, full of hate and horror at woman as such, full of sexual inevitability and the artist’s passionate conviction that it is right and necessary, has fragility, recognition, remorse. It is a tragic story, because the sex act makes the killing as fated as if the gods from Olympus had ordained it. The killer’s recognition of the wife, finally, as human, makes one feel pity and pain. A human life has been taken, horribly; a human being has done it. For this one moment, even the reader’s interior rage at the author’s full-blooded misogyny is stilled in sorrow. In contemporary books and films, the murder of a woman is an end in itself. In this sad story, the murder of the woman signifies the impossibility of physical love in a way that means loss, not sadistic celebration.

Tolstoy’s repulsion for woman as such is not modern either. Now, this repulsion is literal and linear: directed especially against her genitals, also her breasts, also her mouth newly perceived as a sex organ. It is a goose-stepping hatred of cunt. The woman has no human dimension, no human meaning. The repulsion requires no explanation, no rationalization. She has no internal life, no human resonance; she needs no human interpretation. Her flesh is hated; she is it without more. The hatred is by rote, with no human individuation, no highfalutin philosophy or pedestrian emotional ambivalence. The repulsion is self-evidently justified by the physical nature of the thing itself; the repulsion inheres in what the thing is. For the male, the repulsion is sexually intense, genitally focused, sexually solipsistic, without any critical or moral self-consciousness. Photograph what she is, painted pink; the camera delivers her up as a dead thing; the picture is of a corpse, embalmed. The contemporary novelist does it with words: paints the thing, fucks it, kills it.

Tolstoy, in this story, locates his repulsion not in the woman’s body, not in her inherent nature, but in sexual intercourse, the nature of the act: what it means; the inequality of the sexes intrinsic to it; its morbid consequences to the dignity and self-esteem of men. The analysis is androcentric in the extreme; but still, the story does suggest that the repulsion is not simply deserved by its victims. The repulsion, Tolstoy insists, requires scrutiny and, ultimately, disavowal; the sex act that causes it needs to be eliminated. The radical social change demanded by Tolstoy in this story—the end of intercourse—is a measured repudiation of gynocide: in order not to kill women, he said, we must stop fucking them.
The Kreutzer Sonata
was censored by the state because it
opposed
intercourse, especially in marriage.

The story begins with a heated argument on a train between a young woman, a feminist type, mannishly dressed, outspoken, rudely caricatured by the author as having faddish, silly opinions on love and marriage; and an old man who represents the Old Russia of peasant-wisdom that Tolstoy venerated.

The woman argues for love as the basis of marriage; and for love in marriage as the essence of women’s emancipation: "'It’s only animals, you know, that can be paired off as their master likes; but human beings have their own inclination and attachments... ”’
²⁴
She wants feeling, love, a self-chosen passion, to be the basis for equality in a relationship, also the basis for the woman’s humanity in marriage. The old man dismisses her reformer’s zeal: "'You should not talk like that, madam... animals are cattle, but human beings have a law given them. ’”
²⁵
He does not mean just religious law, or the law of tradition, or the law of the state: he means the way patriarchy really works in its most orthodox mode. Men must make women afraid and compliant, including through beatings; women must be housebound and servile. The men, then, can attend orgies or engage in any other sexual activity. The old man is articulating the law of male domination, with special emphasis on its traditional sexual double standard. The sexual double standard repudiates the modern assertions of the woman that women have a right to love actively and passionately in marriage, a human right; and also a human right to be loved. Obedience, not love, is the proper basis of marriage for a woman, according to the old man; and masculinity is measured by how well a man controls his wife in the house and his horse in the field. The woman argues for a passion that is mutual.

Then the killer/husband intervenes with hostile, mocking questions to the woman: what is this love? what is true love? what sanctifies marriage? how long does true love last? He sarcastically confronts the sexual innocence behind her modern pose. ‘“Every man, ’” he tells her, “‘experiences what you call love for every pretty woman.’”
²⁶
He ridicules her belief that a husband and a wife can share a sensibility, principles, values: