SOURCE: "Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata: Archetypal Music as a Demonic Force," in her Music, Archetype, and the Writer: A Jungian View, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988, pp. 58-74.

In the following essay, Knapp details the archetypal influence of Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata on Tolstoy's novella, especially as it manifests in the narrative's structure and themes and correlates with both Tolstoy's psychological condition and that of his fictional protagonist.

Leo Tolstoy drew the title of his short novel The Kreutzer Sonata (1891) from Beethoven's violin sonata (opus 47), an archetypal musical composition that was instrumental, according to the Russian novelist, in bringing out the animal in man. It affected Tolstoy's protagonist subliminally, exciting him to such an extent that he became victimized by a series of inner upheavals of volcanic force, which annihilated in him any semblance of rational behavior, balance, or logic. As Tolstoy's protagonist states:

Music instantaneously transports me into that mental...