Sexual repression and excitation is a theme in Tolstoy. Bet you never guessed that before, eh?
Kiera Knightley is one of those actresses who has become known more for her looks, her breasts (or lack thereof), and her southern genitalia than her talent. I happen to respect her acting talent first. Having found out that she’ll be starring in a certain film next year, I managed to give my husband (who is not a Russophile) a decent summary of Anna Karenina without having read this book, but I have studied others of Tolstoy.
Anna Karenina
Boy (Vronsky) meets girl, (Anna Karenina), who is stuck in suffocating marriage. Girl falls in love. Boy is a devastatingly handsome count (ah yes, we all go weak in the knees for guys with titles, don’t we?), but utterly unworthy of her love, and totally self-absorbed. Girl refuses to acknowledge this, and instead pines away and eventually throws herself under a train, leaving her only son and stuffy husband alone. Vronsky goes off into sunset, oblivious and unremorseful at the pain he caused Anna, presumably to get more skirt.
Tolstoy’s Novellas
Olenin…I wrote an essay about “The Cossacks”. This protagonist is so self-absorbed it’s enough to make anyone want to just chuck it all, abandon living in society and go live alone. Which, incidentally, is exactly what Tolstoy did!
“Family Happiness” – it’s about a man and a woman, who are discussing their brood of five or six children. It seems a very ordinary story at first…until you realize that the point of the story is that the husband’s children aren’t really his. They are all children by different men, with whom his wife has been having affairs with over the years. She knows, of course. He doesn’t. He doesn’t have a clue.
“The Kreutzer Sonata” – This piece of music caused a man to kill his wife and her lover because he heard them playing it together in the next room. It aroused such a fiery passion, sexual jealousy and hatred in him that this was all he could do.
Here is what the Kreutzer Sonata sounds like. Listen as you read the story, and you might feel what the protagonist felt. Just keep all the sharp knives far away, OK?
“Father Sergius” – a celibate priest is unable to cope with the repressed sexual urges he feels. He goes bonkers, sleeps around with various women, and we go bonkers with him.
“The Death of Ivan Ilyich” – Reading this is like going along a roller coaster of black, depressing, massive illness. You think about everything your body is doing, everything that could possibly kill you. The last page is like the longest, steepest drop, and when you hit the bottom it pulls you faster and faster, and you can’t escape. There’s no way out. The last sentence is almost finished, and when you’ve reached the last word, you’re DEAD! Except you’re really still breathing. Or are you? I had to check a few times to make sure I still had a pulse after I was finished reading this story.
Given how Tolstoy ended up living the life of an ascetic, I have to wonder why sex pervades and impregnates so much of his work.
*feedback whine*
Paging Dr Freud to the communal farm…Dr Freud…
