Family differences …

… Was Tolstoy An Enemy of Love? On the Russian Great’s Animosity Towards Desire.  (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Should you wonder why Tolstoy belongs in a book called In Defense of Love, think of Tolstoy as a not-well-recognized enemy of love. A new perception to me prompted by the startling surfacing in 2010 of an “answer novel” to Lev’s Kreutzer Sonata by Tolstoy’s wife, Sofiya. Her novella, called Whose Fault?, put a spotlight on the animus to women, sex, love, marriage, and human reproduction Lev portrayed in The Kreutzer Sonata. Such a critique of Lev’s dark, hate-filled final works had rarely been on the cultural radar, which has tended to exalt Tolstoy’s saintly “wisdom” uncritically.