The Kreutzer Sonata caused a public sensation, but Tolstoy's wife felt angry and betrayed that he should have used details of their life together to add fuel to his scathing indictment of marriage. Tolstoy had become convinced that 'Christian marriage' was an impossibility, and here launches a tirade against human sexuality and the humiliating sexual ties which bind men to women. "The Devil" is devoted to many of the same themes as "The Kreutzer Sonata", and "Father Sergius" is also preoccupied with the material desire for the flesh - although the theme here is not as strong. Together these three stories give us a picture of a man obsessed with questions of moral, sexual and religious ambiguity, his treatment of female sexuality still having a resonance to our own times.

Author Biography

Count Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born in 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana in the Tula province, and educated privately. He took part in the Crimean war and after the defence of Sebastopol he wrote The Sebastopol Stories, which established his reputation. After a period in St Petersburg and abroad, where he studied educational methods for use in his school for peasant children in Yasnaya, he married Sofya Andreyevna Behrs in 1862. The next fifteen years was a period of great happiness; they had thirteen children and Tolstoy managed his vast estates in the Volga Steppes, continued his educational projects, cared for his peasants and wrote War and Peace (1865-8) and Anna Karenina (1874-6). A Confession (1879-82) marked an outward change in his life and works: he became an extreme nationalist and moralist, and in a series of pamphlets after 1880 he expressed such theories as rejection of the State and Church, indictment of the demands of the flesh, and denunciation of private property. His teaching earned him numerous followers in Russia and abroad, but also much opposition and in 1901 he was excommunicated by the Russian holy synod. He died in 1910 in the course of a dramatic flight from home, at the small railway station of Astapovo.