SOURCE: "Epilogue: Sexuality's Wasteland," in her Women in Tolstoy: The ideal and the Erotic, University of Illinois Press, 1973, pp. 111-38.

In the following excerpt, Benson details Tolstoy's views on the nature of sex, women, and men represented in The Kreutzer Sonata and his other late fiction.

Conceived within a single year, homogenous in thought and style, three stories, The Kreutzer Sonata, "The Devil," and Father Sergius, present Tolstoy's final fictional statement on the relations between men and women. The Kreutzer Sonata appeared first in 1889, followed a few months later by "The Devil." Although Father Sergius was not finished until 1897, it is clearly kin to the other two. It is important to think of these stories not only as individual works but, taken together, as an epilogue on sexuality, love, and marriage to Tolstoy's life-work.

Though Tolstoy had renounced all his belles lettres written before 1880, including The Cossacks, Family...