SOURCE: "Tolstoy, Lermontov, and Others," in Russian Literature and Modern English Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Donald Davie, University of Chicago Press, 1965, pp. 164-202.

In the following excerpt, Davie analyzes the central conflict between human intelligence and the will to act in The Kreutzer Sonata, observing Tolstoy's inconsistency of method.

In general, we regard The Kreutzer Sonata as a didactic tract disguised as a novel. Such tracts in disguise can be works of literary and artistic value. Perhaps they are necessarily of the second rank as works of art. But at least the novel of ideas is a thoroughly respectable literary kind, having methods and conventions proper to it. One may cite, in our day, the novels of Mr. Arthur Koestler. But is The Kreutzer Sonata a novel of ideas, of this sort? I think that it is not. It is a novel and a...