Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata, with Blavatsky's Comment

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Benjamin R. Tucker (T) · Living the Life Series · 84 pages

Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata complete in Benjamin Ricketson Tucker's translation, eighty-four pages, prefaced by Blavatsky's commentary on it and opened by an abstract and contents. Revised as recently as May 2025. Its argument about chastity and continence is developed at greater length in “The first step towards the Temple of Truth,” elsewhere in this batch.

Blavatsky's commentary occupies the first third and is framed as a question about censorship rather than about the book: why the Kreutzer Sonata was banned in Russia and England as obscene. Her answer is that prudish England will never allow a diagnosis of the state of its diseased morals and the hidden ulcers of its social life to be made — so that the offence taken is evidence for Tolstoy's case rather than against it. The distinctions she draws next are the ones she returns to elsewhere: that Jesus did not teach monasticism but the law of continence; that for morality to exist between men and women they must follow the law of chastity; and that moral continence and chastity are commonly mistaken for monasticism, which is a different thing altogether. The Gospel text about what defiles a man coming out of the mouth rather than going into it is brought in to the same purpose. A section then examines marriage from the philosophical, metaphysical and ethical points of view and appraises its religious, practical and political aspects, arriving at the position that there is no sanctity in worldly marriage of any kind. Two sets of questions and answers, on Theosophy and asceticism and on Theosophy and marriage, close the commentary before the novella itself begins.

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