How Tolstoy’s banned novella started a sexual revolution in Russia Getty Images; Private collection A father of 13, by the end of his life, the writer underwent a spiritual transformation - he revised his attitude to marriage and to relations between men and women in general. In his scandalous novella ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’, Tolstoy proposed giving up carnal love altogether! That book had an enormous impact on the youth of the late 19th century.
Some considered Tolstoy’s 1890 novella
The Kreutzer Sonata to be his best work, others, on the contrary, rejected Tolstoy’s views, while Theodore Roosevelt went as far as to call him a “sexual moral pervert”. Why did this short novella create such a stir among the public? And what does Tolstoy convey in it?