The Kreutzer Sonata

It's not usual for a writer to mention, within a novel, a book that a particular character is reading or has read. The names of other writers often make their way into novels. I've discovered quite a few writers, coming upon their names in a novel I'm reading. Elizabeth von Arnim, Mikhail Bulgakov and Mayne Reid are three examples.

At one point in 2010: Odyssey Two , Dr. Heywood Floyd attempts, unsuccessfully, to read The Kreutzer Sonata in the original Russian. I was a bit confused by that. I was familiar with Beethoven's Violin Sonata No. 9, known as The Kreutzer Sonata, but I was unaware of any book by that name - and certainly not a Russian novel.

With a little web search, I learned that Clarke was referring to a novella by Tolstoy named after Beethoven's sonata. According to the wikipedia article on the novella,"The work is an argument for the ideal of sexual abstinence and an in-depth first-person description of jealous rage. The main character, Pozdnyshev, relates the events leading up to his killing of his wife: in his analysis, the root causes for the deed were the 'animal excesses' and 'swinish connection' governing the relation between the sexes".

The work was banned by the Russian censors and in 1890, the United States Post Office Department attempted to prohibited the mailing of newspapers containing serialized installments of the translated novella. Theodore Roosevelt called Tolstoy a "sexual moral pervert."

Of course, with recommendations like that, I had to download a copy from Project Gutenberg.

I'm certainly no expert on Tolstoy - I've read Anna Karenina twice and attempted to read War and Peace more than that. I was not familiar with his somewhat bizarre take on Christianity. With The Kreutzer Sonata and the other four stories in the ebook I downloaded, Tolstoy goes full blast, bombarding the reader with his strange philosophy.

Reading the wikipedia article on Tolstoy's novella, I learned of a book by Arab Israeli author Sayed Kashua, Second Person Singular , which uses Tolstoy's novella as a major plot device. I'd never heard of Kashua prior to this, but now I'm currently reading Second Person Singular and I'm very impressed with his writing. His other books will (somehow) find their way to the queue.