Russian Literature XL (1996) 405-410 North-Holland

'THE THE TRUTH OF THE INNER BEING: KREUTZER SONATA' AS A TRAGEDY OF

FORGIVENESS

ROBERT BIRD

Ho - BeKa CbIH! IIIeCTI4~eCflTblX FO,I~OB 3eM,rlH pOCCHI~ICKO~ THH, "I/IHTeYfflI, IFeHT ", cHpeqb "l'lpOKIIffTblX BonpocoB" >repTBa - r~J~b 9~j4rt. (Baaec~aB HBarlOB)

(But son of his age! "Intelligent', A type of the Russian eighteen-sixties, Of accursed questions a victim, Or, otherwise, Oedipus-Rex.)

At the end of Tolstoj's 'Kreutzer Sonata', the hero Pozdny~ev twice repeats his final word: forgive me. It is addressed, as it were, first to the narrator, and then to all of his readers, reflecting the double narration of the story. Pozdny~ev narrates his own tale, a personal search for his guilty self. At the same time, a much broader drama is being played out, the social drama of modem humanity, in which the reader is himself entangled. Both layers reach for self-knowledge of the respective heroes in a tragic realization of respon- sibility and guilt.

0304-3479/96/$15.00 © 1996 - Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

406 Robert Bird

Pozdnylev tells his tale with the intention of achieving a tragic reso- lution. Such a resolution would neither explain nor justify his crime, but would open to him the fateful irreversibility of what he has done, making possible repentance. In his narration he repeatedly shows that a full fathom- ing of his crime and the possibility for repentance have so far eluded his grasp. His childhood and married life, as he would have it, were full of illu- sion, a trap set up by those around him. He could never find the firm ground of his true self. He remained without knowledge of his real desires and feelings. This failure he attributes to victimization by outer forces, be it the environment, social mores, family expectations or just blind fate. Pozdny- ~ev's narration provides him with the opportunity to reenact his past in order to illuminate his guilty present.

The lack of a personal resolution so far in his life makes Pozdny~ev's tale into a continuous discourse over the possibility of personal guilt. The tale is as a self-made trial, at which he is catching for his own guilty verdict. If he were to acknowledge that his life made his crime inevitable and that the responsibility lies on him alone, the tale would obtain a tragic ending, or, at least, an ending. If, however, he continues to assert the chance nature of the crime, or blame outside forces, the story would remain a painful and tortured exercise in escapism, The drama of Pozdny~ev's search for his mae self creates the suspense of the tale; the murder itself is announced at the very beginning. Will Pozdny~ev achieve a self, and, if so, will it be strong enough to accept the tragedy of the situation?

Pozdny~ev's search for selfhood is hindered by his inability to free himself from the rule of sensual being, or passion. Since he himself is full of hatred, hatred is all he sees in the people and institutions around him. Therefore any attempt to assert commonality or community is for Pozdnylev artificial and forced. But he does recognize, at least instinctively, that a life which is limited to sensual existence must remain exterior to the self, insufficient for inner being. He feels the inadequacy of prescriptive morality, which addresses only the outer expression of a being which itself remains concealed inside. To the merchant's claim that "man was given the Law" (136), 1 Pozdnylev later replies: "Fury also has its own laws" (206), showing the essential arbitrariness of exterior moral guidance without inner morality. The reduction of consciousness to passion, like the reduction of society to sexual relations, bounds the self in a realm of arbitrariness, in which one is rendered incapable of realizing fundamental being. Pozdny~ev admits that however perceptive and subtle he might be, without inner moral guidance he is "very good at aiming wide" (191). Pozdnylev correctly senses the exist- ence of a self lying beyond the realm of arbitrary law-making and sensuous desire, but this intuition remains locked in his negative dialectic, while essential selfhood, independent of passions and exterior rules and influences, remains elusive.

'The Kreutzer Sonata' as a Tragedy of Forgiveness 407

Limiting himself to the passionate and sensuous realm, Pozdny~ev sees in his self-searching the twin danger of becoming horrible and becoming ridiculous: "I didn't want to be ridiculous, I wanted to be awesome" (206). The double possibility of horror and ridiculousness is presented from the beginning of the story as the dual limit of human consciousness. The laughter of the merchant, the steward, and of Pozdny~ev himself, echoes hollow throughout the story, concealing a deeper evil. Yet only Pozdny~ev, whose laughter is always mixed with tears, has an inkling of the horror lurking behind the exterior smiles. On the other hand he is fearful that others will find his life a source of laughter. He therefore blocks his consciousness of this truth:

Again I walk around, smoke, drink vodka and I achieve what I unconsciously desire: I don't see the stupidity, the baseness [podlost'] of my situation. (182)

This fear of his own low comic potential, however, cannot raise his consciousness of self to that of tragedy. Locked again in the mortal combat of purely exterior and therefore superficial concerns, Pozdny~ev is unable to stand and face what is sought: the truth of the matter.

Pozdny~ev presents several confessions to his listeners and readers. All, however, leave a typical loophole through which Pozdnylev evades personal responsibility. First, he declares his guilt to the passengers of the train in the third person:

I am Pozdny~ev, the one with whom occurred that critical episode at which you are hinting, that he killed his wife. (141)

Pozdnygev later gives the following explanation as to why he has entered into a long discourse on modern sexual practices:

I am still telling you how I killed my wife. At the trial they asked me with what, how I killed my wife. Fools! They think I did it then, with a knife, on the fifth of October. I didn't kill her then, but much earlier. Just as they are killing now, everyone, everyone... (162-163)

The narrator does not see the full connection and asks, "But how?", which question Pozdny~ev answers with more talk of the harm of sexual inter- course. He now has himself on trial and he can still not ascertain the moment of his wife's death, the moment of his own guilt. The last full paragraph is devoted to a profession of guilt:

I realized that I, I killed her, that it was because of me that it occurred that she was alive, moving, warm, but now has become

408 Robert Bird

immobile, waxen, cold, and that this can never, nowhere, in no way be corrected. (211)

Yet even here it is left unclear whether he really relates this act to himself or whether it remains locked in the furious current of independent forces. It remains unclear whether he has indeed achieved a sense of self. In either case, he is looking outside of himself, to the narrator, for forgiveness without having reached a full inner repentance.

What is especially disturbing is Pozdny~ev's inability to confront his own inner intuition of the scale of the problem he faces. First, he does not command the will to step in front of the throttling train of his life in order to keep it from plummeting into murder. Then he creates subterfuges for himself as if his consciousness consisted of a constant flight from con- sciousness itself.

A full realization of what he has done and of the deed's irreversibility would require Pozdny~ev to raise himself to a tragic view of his own life. Pozdny~ev's inability to reach such a tragic understanding leaves him strand- ed in reminiscences of his past and empty hopes for the future. What remains lacking is a sense of being in a state of guilt in the present, of being im- manent to himself as this very being in this very state of guilt. The past is subject to scornful and paranoid constructions of cause and effect. The future is one of non-being, tinged with an apocalyptic asceticism, based not on hope but on hatred. All of the characters of the story have, as it were, an "untimely consciousness", belonging not to the present but to some other, constructed time. The merchant is hopelessly stranded in the past, the young couple in a superficial, liberal idyll. The present remains elusive to the very end, lost in the current of inessentialities.

Comparison of 'The Kreutzer Sonata' with Shakespeare's Othello, which bears some resemblance in plot, illuminates this turning away from the present. Othello, unlike Pozdny~ev, battles for the truth of his present until, in his crime, it is revealed to him in all its tragic awesomeness:

I should have found in some place of my soul A drop of patience; but, alas, to make me A fixed figure for the time of scorn To point his slow unmoving finger at! (Othello, IV, ii, 52-55)

Pozdny~ev's own search for truth circles around outer "demi-devils", while the concealed Iago within him remains unrevealed: "Some devil, as if against my will, imagined and pronounced the most awful thoughts" (198). Othello's assumption of responsibility affirms the ethical nature of life and the self by identifying fate with personal will. Pozdny~ev remains under the spell of his fate.

'The Kreutzer Sonata' as a Tragedy of Forgiveness 409

This scorn for a constructed past and hope for a non-existent future pours itself out in Pozdnylev's theories of sexual relations. He seems to understand that the very reduction of life to these biological processes is at the bottom of the conflict. He hints at a mythic past when natural relations were able to exist in a natural state due to the spiritual orientation of people. But in our sensual age people exist only as sensual monads, with no real means of establishing relations. Between the monads there inevitably remains a chasm (160), which itself becomes as a native soil. But between two abysses only a chasm can lie. The mire of social relations in which we are yet caught can be bridged only by people who have overcome the depths within themselves.

Pozdnygev is caught in his age. The rule of sensuality, or, in other words, materialism, engenders inequality, inequality can only be fought sensuously, sensuous fighting leads to murder... It takes this last crime to create a barrier, across which it is murderous to step. One must come to one's senses before another's life; even Hegel's dialectic of master and servant recognizes this. But Pozdnygev finds himself stuck in his circle, as he likes to put it. Spiritual reality remains hidden by an iron curtain of spite and conflict. But it is with this very reality that one must come to grips in order to break the deathly circle of sensuousness. As Othello puts it:

But there, where I have garner'd up my heart, Where either I must live, or bear no life, - The fountain from the which my current runs, Or else dries up... (Othello, IV, ii, 57-60)

Pozdnytev does not come to grips with the reality of his age, nor does he find himself and his guilt. The discovery of the tragedy of the tale and the culture in which it takes place is left to the artist Tolstoj. The tragedy which eludes us in Pozdnytev's tale occurs in Tolstoj's story, in fact it is Tolstoj's story. This tragedy is the bringing to consciousness of modern man's identity with all of his fateful contradictions and murderous inclinations. The loss of a spiritually founded self entraps the self in a devil's circle. But the devil is each one of us, who continue the unconscious slide.

In the light of Tolstoj's tragic narration it is curious to contemplate the significance of the 'Afterword to the Kreutzer Sonata'. This piece of moralizing contradicts the wrenchingly profound rise to consciousness within the story itself. It is unconvincing as a direct answer to Pozdnytev's plea for forgiveness, because it completely ignores the matter of Pozdnytev's per- sonal guilt and indifference to repentance. Therefore, it is also unconvincing as Tolstoj's personal statement of guilt, ignoring the complicity of Tolstoj's self in the wider cultural tragedy. It seems to prove Nikolaj Berdjaev's

410 Robert Bird

statement that "it is immoral to speak of 'good' before the face of tragedy; here one needs something more elevated [vys]ee] than 'good'". 2 This conflict points to Tolstoj's own double role in the Russian tragedy of culture. On the one hand, he is a participant no less than any nihilist, as he clutches onto illusionistic solutions to the general fall. On the other, he is the "madman" who is able to embrace the tragedy of the fall and loss of timely con- sciousness. His personal complicity, however, only makes more dramatic the ripening of tragic realization in his works, and, one might add, of his own life.

The tragedy of 'The Kreutzer Sonata' is the tragedy of modern western culture, especially as developed in Russia. This tragedy continues around us, which is why the story still speaks, or rather, screams so loudly to us. The story demands that we read honestly and earnestly, accepting complicity in the crimes we commit daily, admitting our guilt to ourselves before we ask the forgiveness of others. The tragedy of 'The Kreutzer Sonata' is not a matter of judging Pozdny]ev in his crime, or Tolstoj in his 'Afterword'. It is rather a call to accountability of each person before his or her self. 'The Kreutzer Sonata' is the "heavy hour" of our present, for which we assume responsibility and seek redemption only through a personal tragedy of selfhood.

NOTES

1 All page numbers refer to L.N. Tolstoj, Sobranie sodinenij v dvadcati tomach, t. 12. Moskva 1964.

2 Nikolaj Berdjaev, 'Tragedija i obydennost". Tipy religioznoj mysli v Rossii. Sobranie sodinenij, t. 3. Pads 1989, p. 382.