SOURCE: "The Kreutzer Sonata: Tolstoy and Beethoven," in Melbourne Slavonic Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1967, pp. 11-23.

In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture in 1966, Green discusses the connections between The Kreutzer Sonata and Beethoven's musical composition, focusing on similarities of dramatic feeling and structure in both works.

The origin of this paper was a strong impression that there is a closer connection between Tolstoy's novel and Beethoven's music than is usually allowed for in criticisms of the book. The paper is also an attempt to counter a tendency to regard the book merely as an expression of a thesis. Before anything else, Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata seems to me a complete work of art, as much a thing made and existing in its own right as Beethoven's sonata, obeying the laws of a particular kind of literary form, as the sonata obeys those of a particular kind of...