SOURCE: "The Later Stories," in his Tolstoy: A Critical Introduction, Cambridge University Press, 1969, pp. 230-46.

In the excerpt below, Christian considers the theme of sex in The Kreutzer Sonata.

'One usually thinks that most conservatives are old men and most innovators young men. This is not quite so. Most conservatives are young people who want to live, but who neither think nor have the time to think how one should live, and so choose as their model the life they have always known.' These controversial words from "The Devil" have an unmistakably autobiographical ring, for Tolstoy as an old man was not a little proud of his nonconformity. The themes of nearly all his late stories were chosen to enable him to express his iconoclastic attitude to the organisation of society, the administration of justice and the relation between the sexes. Those on the subject of sex...