Tolstoy on the madness of a jealous heart

In an earlier entry I wrote that Tolstoy's "The Kreutzer Sonata" reminded me of Poe stylistically. Having finished the story, I can now say why.

It's because it focuses entirely on the emotional state of a single person while calling attention to the stability and reliability of that person.

Podnyshev is not saint turned from a pure life to one of hatred and vileness by some temptress or temptation.

Throughout the retelling of his life story he mentions the fact that he had lived a life of debauchery, like the men that he grew wary of as his wife stopped having children (after having five) and started focusing more on making herself noticeably beautiful, before marriage and thus knew their thoughts and feelings when they looked upon her.

Podnyshev also admits to being a jealous husband. Much of the final quarter of "The Kreutzer Sonata" is spent in his comparing this jealousy to a beast that he had to shackle to keep in check.

This combination of assumption and jealousy makes for a narrator who is much too much in his own head. So much so that there isn't enough room for readers to get in there with him. Yet, his thinking that his wife is having an affair with a travelling violinist is nonetheless something that we can see but that we doubt and hope against as much as he does.

We're lead to ask questions like "as an admitted owner of a jealous heart, surely he is remembering something incorrectly or embellishing words and actions, right?"

Probably.

Maybe.

Whatever the truth of the matter is, after having finished this story, I don't see it as Tolstoy's raging against the establishment of marriage or the ideals of love. I see it more as a cautionary tale.

Before you can love another in the ideal way you need to not be Podnyshev with his rushing into marriage. Nor can you be someone who sees the opposite sex as simply objects for animal release. Instead, you need to slowly build a relationship with another person in which you recognize and acknowledge that they are, in fact, another person.

I think that could be seen as a pro for pornography. As much as it denigrates its subjects, it also separates them from the people that you interact with every day, leaving you with the room to realize that those other people in your life are people. Ultimately, you could then go on to see those performing for the boudoir camera as people too, but that's much less likely, speaking generally.

Podnyshev's problem isn't that love as the poets sing of it doesn't exist, but that he has closed himself off from it making women into objects of sexual desire first rather than regarding them as fellow human beings.

Tolstoy's granting him this revelation in the climax of his story seals this interpretation for me. If you go down the road of Podnyshev, the only way you'll realize that the opposite sex are people too is if you exercise the ultimate power over one of them and look into his/her eyes as you plunge a dagger into his/her chest. Otherwise jealousy, a product of possessiveness, will lead you to madness. The madness that breeds murder in the mind.

Though that internal struggle is ultimately what makes "The Kreutzer Sonata" so much like Poe's stories in my mind. To the point where I have to highly recommend it, in fact.

Tolstoy's mad man on a train

"You know I am a sort of lunatic" (190).

Unlike most people on the far right, Tolstoy's Pozdnyshev (I'm reading it "Paused-nyeh-shev") at least admits to his madness. And he certainly lives up to his own admission.

Claiming that the Jews pull the strings of business in Russia. Claiming that love is perverse because, despite all of the ideals spoken of around it, its end is sex. Claiming that marriage is selfish. Claiming that children are a nearly intolerable source of worry and sparking point for spousal strife. Claiming that doctors conspire together to cure things that need no curing in any other animal. Claiming that the end of humanity is to come to a peaceable generation in which point the selfish and passionate need to love and be loved will cease and humanity will end. 

I won't say that it's all crazy. As a mouthpiece for Tolstoy's own beliefs about marriage and love, his thinking that love and marriage are at the least curious alternatives to what we still hear of the ideals of love on all media fronts. 

Though Pozdnyshev's reasons for believing what he does are to be found in his own experience - and there alone. That is, he does so, and readers are free to do so as well. His experience has not been very positive, however. 

He rushed into a marriage with a women that he really only had physical interest in. 

Not knowing much about her own desires he was left with little choice other than to agree reluctantly to having children with her. 

And these things done, his opinion of the doctors with whom he interacted fell to that of leeches. 

To top it all off, he has extrapolated from his own experience and painted everyone else with the same brush. 

So this short story about a random pulling aside our nameless "reader-stand-in" character and sharing his story has changed from being about someone pulling you aside to tell you about their day to being about someone pulling you aside to tell you how the world is run by lizard people via supersonic frequencies emitted by smartphones. 

Ivan Ilych's death before his death

Well, it didn't end quite as I had expected but "The Death of Ivan Ilych" certainly deserves its title.

After getting through the details of his life and the cause of his eventually fatal illness, the last third of the story is spent in Ivan's head. Things become quite introspective and as bleak as Russian literature is said to be.

In his throes of agony, Ivan looks back on his life and wonders if he has lived properly. Up until the story's end this question plagues him and he denies it consideration although doubts constantly bring it to the fore of his mind.

Was Ivan Ilych living his life properly, always keeping to whatever middle path appeared before him?

It's a question that anyone can ask of themselves, but I think that the only answer can be found in a They Might Be Giants lyric: "Who can say what's wrong or right?/Nobody can" ("Spiralling Shape").

Though Tolstoy doesn't give any definite answers himself, he does end his story on an up note. All of Ivan's wondering about whether or not he lived his life properly really reminded me of P.D. Ouspenky's The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin. Ouspensky's novel is about a man who's given a chance to relive his life with the aim of improving it thanks to his awareness of where he went wrong.

The influence of G.I. Gurdjief's teachings about the Fourth Way and self-remembering were also brought to mind as I finished "The Death of Ivan Ilych." In my mind, Ivan's reflections suggest that his death isn't just the event that closes the story, but something that happened to him once he entered the world of officialdom at his law school. From that point, his life became more regular and predictable, or, as Gurdjief would have it, mechanical.

That is, all of the organic happenings of Ivan Ilych's life were slowly leached out of him until he reached the point where he moved into the same sort of house that others of his social standing owned and he decorated it in the same way as those others. To my mind, Ivan's injuring himself during this decorating is his time of death. From then until near the end of his broken body's existence he is dead and only in his final hours does he regain lively clarity through the nagging question: "What if my whole life has really been wrong?" (148).

So, "The Death of Ivan Ilych" is definitely quite a bit richer than "Family Happiness." As "The Kreutzer Sonata" is started, we'll see just how much Tolstoy's changed over a much shorter span of time: a mere three years.

Cold reading a different culture

Since flashing back to the period before the death of Ivan Ilych, Tolstoy has not yet gone back. However, we have learned what probably started his illness off.

A little stumble while he was caught up in micromanaging the organization of his new home in a new city.

Or municipality.

Along with all of the personal names that are being thrown around (including the variations different characters use for the same person), nineteenth century Russian geography is not entirely clear for me.

However, rather than just going and looking up such things, I've decided to see how the work stands on its own.

Perhaps that's just a danger of having a readily available translation: Anyone, even those unfamiliar with the original language and culture of a work, can read it and misunderstand much. Although an unprepared peek into another culture can shake loose thoughts and ideas. That jolt to perception and conceptions of what is usual can be pretty useful.

Such a jolt may or may not have shaken loose an idea for a short story about wary parents giving their children a certain kind of pet.

At any rate, now 2/3 through "The Death of Ivan Ilych," I've read through his breakdown and am confident that I'll learn why Tolstoy is telling this story by its end. I really doubt that it'll be left open-ended on that front.