Blavatsky’s
support of Leo Tolstoy is fairly well-known. The autographed copy of The Voice
of the Silence still exists in the Tolstoi archives and he even quotes from
it in one of his non-fiction works. In Lucifer, Vol. VI, No. 35, July, 1890, pp. 353-364, in an article called “Diagnoses
and Palliatives” (Collected Writings, 12, 239-256), she reviewed his controversial Kreutzer Sonata
(along with another work, The Girl of the Future by Grant Allen (1848 – 1899), a Canadian science writer and novelist), showing that she could be right on top of some
the day’s most pressing social questions, with an alternative view to the mostly
negative critiques it received and also showing a strong feminist voice in her writings. The work has been the subject of more recent
discussion:
Tolstoy
& The Kreutzer Sonata: Literature & Music
Dick Strawser
September 22, 2011
Sofiya Tolstoy’s Defense
Sophie Pinkham - October 21, 2014
Tolstoy’s
Kreutzer Sonata - Olga Kerziouk 17 October 2017
Some extracts from Diagnoses and Palliatives, July 1890:
Tolstoy, however, “preaches” nothing of the sort; nor does his Pozdnisheff
say so, though the critics misunderstand him from A to Z, as they do also the
wise statement that “not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but
that which cometh out of the mouth” or a vile man’s heart and imagination. It
is not “monasticism” but the law of continence as taught by Jesus (and
Occultism) in its esoteric meaning—which most Christians are unable to
perceive— that he preaches. Nothing can be more moral or conducive to human
happiness and perfectibility than the application of this law. It is one ordained
by Nature herself. Animals follow it instinctively, as do also the savage
tribes. Once pregnant, to the last day of the nursing of her babe, i.e., for
eighteen or twenty months, the savage squaw is sacred to her husband; the
civilised and semi-civilized man alone breaking this beneficent law. Therefore,
speaking of the immorality of marriage relations as at present practised, and
of unions performed on commercial bases, or, what is worse, on mere sensual
love, Pozdnisheff elaborates the idea by uttering the greatest and the holiest
truth, namely, that:
For morality to exist between men
and women in their daily life, they must make perfect chastity their law.* In
progressing towards this end, man subdues himself. When he has arrived at the
last degree of subjection we shall have moral marriages. But if a man as in our
Society advances only towards physical love, even though he surrounds it with
deception and with the shallow formality of marriage, he obtains nothing but
licensed vice.
A good proof that it is not “monasticism” and utter celibacy which are
preached, but only continence, is found on page 84 where the fellow traveller
of Pozdnisheff is made to remark that the result of the theory of the latter
would be “that a man would have to keep away from hiswife except once every
year or two.” Then again there is this sentence:—
I did not at that time understand that the words of the Gospel as to
looking upon a woman with the eyes of desire did not refer only to the wives of
others, but especially and above all to one’s own wife.
“Monastics” have no wives, nor do they get married if they would remain
chaste on the physical plane. Tolstoy, however, seems to have answered in
anticipation of British criticism and objections on these lines, by making the
hero of his “grimy and revolting book” (Scot’s Observer) say:—
Think what a perversity of ideas
there must be, when the happiest, the freest condition of the human being, that
of (mental) chastity, is looked upon as something miserable and ridiculous. The
highest ideal, the most perfect condition to be attained by woman, that of a
pure being, a vestal, a virgin, provokes, in our society, fear and laughter. (245)
We maintain that to call Kreutzer Sonata pointless, and “a vain book,” is
to miss most egregiously the noblest as well as the most important points in
it. It is nothing less than wilful blindness, or what is still worse—that moral
cowardice which will sanction every growing immorality rather than allow its
mention, let alone its discussion, in public. It is on such fruitful soil that
our moral leprosy thrives and prospers instead of being checked by timely
palliatives. It is blindness to one of her greatest social evils of this kind
that led France
Has it never occurred to any grave judge or critic either— any more than to
Pozdnisheff—“that immorality does not consist in physical acts alone but on the
contrary, in liberating one’s self from all moral obligations, which such acts
impose”? (Kreutzer Sonata, p. 32.) And as a direct result of such legal
“liberation from any moral obligations,” we have the present marriage system in
every civilized nation, viz., men “steeped in corruption” seeking “at the same
time for a virgin whose purity might be worthy” of them (p. 39); men, out of a
thousand of whom “hardly one could be found who has not been married before at
least a dozen times” (p. 41)! (CW12, 246)
Aye, gentlemen of the press, and humble slaves to public opinion, too many
terrible, vital truths, to be sure, are uttered by Pozdnisheff to make the
Kreutzer Sonata ever palatable to you. The male portion of mankind—book
reviewers as others—does not like to have a too faithful mirror presented to
it. It does not like to see itself as it is, but only as it would like to make
itself appear. Had the book been directed against your slave and
creature—woman, Tolstoy’s popularity would have, no doubt, increased
proportionately. But for almost the first time in literature, a work shows male
kind collectively in all the artificial ugliness of the final fruits of
civilisation, which make every vicious man believe himself, like Pozdnisheff,
“a thoroughly moral man.” And it points out as plainly that female
dissimulation, worldliness and vice, are but the handiwork of generations of
men, whose brutal sensuality and selfishness have led woman to seek reprisals.
Hear the fine and truthful description of most Society men:—
Women know well enough that the
most noble, the most poetic love is inspired, not by moral qualities, but by
physical intimacy . . . . Ask an experienced coquette . . . . which she would
prefer, to be convicted in the presence of the man she wishes to subjugate, of
falsehood, perversity, and cruelty, or to appear before him in a dress
ill-made. . . . . She would choose the first alternative. She knows very well
that we only lie when we speak of our lofty sentiments; that what we are
seeking is the woman herself, and that for that we are ready to forgive all her
ignominies, while we would not forgive her a costume badly cut . . . . Hence
those abominable jerseys, those artificial protrusions behind, those naked
arms, shoulders and bosoms. (CW12, 247)
Create no demand and there will be no supply. But such demand being established
by men, it . . . .
. . . explains this extraordinary
phenomenon: that on the one hand woman is reduced to the lowest degree of
humiliation, while on the other she reigns above everything . . . . “Ah, you
wish us to be merely objects of pleasure? Very well, by that very means we will
bend you beneath our yoke,” say the women [who] like absolute queens, keep as
prisoners of war and at hard labor nine-tenths of the human race; and all
because they have been humiliated, because they have been deprived of the
rights enjoyed by man. They avenge themselves on our voluptuousness, they catch
us in their nets . . . . [Why? Because] “the great majority look upon the
journey to the church as a necessary condition for the possession of a certain
woman. So you may say what you will, we live in such an abyss of falsehood,
that unless some event comes down upon our head . . . . we cannot wake up to
the truth. . . (CW12, 247)
And would you know why? It is an old truism, a fact pointed out by Ouida,
as by twenty other novelists. Because the husbands of the “ladies in good
Society”—we speak only of the fashionable majority, of course—would most likely
gradually desert their legitimate wives were these to offer them too strong a
contrast with the demi-mondaines whom they all adore. For certain men who for
long years have constantly enjoyed the intoxicating atmosphere of certain
places of amusement, the late suppers in cabinets particuliers in the company
of enamelled females artificial from top to foot, the correct demeanor of a
lady, presiding over their dinner table, with her cheeks paintless, her hair,
complexion and eyes as nature made them—becomes very soon a bore.
A legitimate wife who imitates in
dress, and mimicks the desinvolture of her husband’s mistress has perhaps been
driven at the beginning to effect such a change out of sheer despair, as the
only means of preserving some of her husband’s affection, once she is unable to
have it undivided. Here, again, the abnormal fact of enamelled, straw-haired,
painted and almost undressed wives and girls in good Society, are the handiwork
of men—of fathers, husbands, brothers. Had the animal demands of the latter
never created that class which Baudelaire calls so poetically les fleurs du
mal, and who end by destroying every household and family whose male members
have once fallen a victim to their hypnotism—no wife and mother, still less a
daughter or a sister, would have ever thought of emulating the modern hetaera.
But now they have. The act of despair of the first wife abandoned for a demi-mondaine
has borne its fruit. Other wives have followed suit, then the transformation
has gradually become a fashion, a necessity.( CW12, 248)
How true then these remarks:
The absence of women’s rights
does not consist in being deprived of the right of voting, or of administering
law; but in the fact that with regard to matters of affection she is not the
equal of man, that she has not the right to choose instead of being chosen.
That would be quite abnormal, you think. Then let men also be without their
rights. . . . . At bottom her slavery lies in the fact of her being regarded as
a source of enjoyment. You excite her, you give her all kinds of rights equal
to those of man:* but she is still looked upon as an instrument of pleasure,
and she is brought up in that character from her childhood. . . . She is always
the slave, humiliated and corrupted and
man remains still her pleasure-seeking master. Yes, to abolish slavery,
it is first of all necessary that public opinion should admit that it is
shameful to profit by the labor of one’s neighbor; and to emancipate woman it
is necessary that public opinion should admit that it is shameful to regard her
as an instrument of pleasure.
Such is man, who is shown in all
the hideous nakedness of his selfish nature, almost beneath the “animals” which
“would seem to know that their descendants continue the species, and they
accordingly follow a certain law.” But “man alone does not, and will not, know.
. . . . The lord of creation—man; who, in the name of his love, kills one half
of the human race! Of woman, who ought to be his help-mate in the movement of
Humanity towards freedom, he makes, for the sake of his pleasures, not a
helpmate but an enemy. . . .” (CW12 ,249)
And now it is made abundantly clear, why the author of the Kreutzer Sonata
has suddenly become in the eyes of all men—“the most conspicuous case out of
Bedlam.” Count Tolstoy who alone has dared to speak the truth in proclaiming
the whole relation of the sexes to each other as at present “a gross and vile
abomination,” and who thus inteferes with “man’s pleasures”—must, of course,
expect to be proclaimed a madman. He preaches “Christian virtue,” and what men
want now is vice, such as the old Romans themselves have never dreamed of.
“Stone him to death” — gentlemen of the press. (CW12249)
* This, only in “semi”-civilised Russia England
