Temptations of the flesh

Throughout his life Leo Tolstoy cannot control his insatiable sexual appetite and this makes him fear the power that women have over him. He is not even 20 when he writes the following in his diary: “Now I shall set myself the following rule: regard the company of women as an unavoidable social evil and keep away from them as much as possible. Who, indeed, is the cause of sensuality, indolence, frivolity, and all sorts of other vices in us, if not women? Who is to blame for the loss of our natural qualities of courage, steadfastness, reasonableness, fairness, etc, if not women?” (p60, Tolstoy, Crankshaw).

Thirty years later, after embracing God, he preaches abstinence unless it is for the purposes of having children. In the novel The Kreutzer Sonata, published in 1889, he goes one step further and advocates that married couples should abstain altogether. This leads to confusion because this thinking, taken to its conclusion, would mean the extinction of the human race. It is also potentially embarrassing for Tolstoy and his family because he clearly has no ability to resist his own urges: his thirteenth child was conceived as the book was being finished. His wife Sophia is humiliated because the novel is highly critical of marriage and she pleads in person with Tsar Alexander III to reverse the ban placed on it. This could be because she wants to include it in her ongoing project of publishing Tolstoy’s complete works. He agrees just to this usage.

At the beginning of the 20th Century, aged in his early 70s, he is still obsessing about the problem of desire. In his diary he writes: “The best thing one can do with the sexual drive is
1) destroy it utterly in oneself; next best
2) is to live with one woman, who has a chaste nature and shares your faith, and bring up children with her and help her as she helps you; next worse
3) is to go to a brothel when you are tormented by desire;
4) to have brief relations with different women, remaining with none;
5) to have intercourse with a young girl and abandon her;
6) worse yet, to have intercourse with another man’s wife;
7) worst of all, to live with a faithless and immoral woman” At around this time he tells Maxim Gorky: “Man can endure earthquake, epidemic, dreadful disease, every form of spiritual torment, but the most dreadful tragedy that can befall him is and will remain the tragedy of the bedroom” (p585, 598, Tolstoy, Troyat).

The marriage suffers
The essays