[In the excerpt below, Bayley contrasts Pozdnyshev's views about marriage expressed in The Kreutzer Sonata with those of Tolstoy.]

If one married, along what lines might the relation proceed? What would happen if one became murderously jealous, or obsessed with desire for another woman? Suppose one were to contract a fatal and painful disease, or gave up the world to become a monk and hermit? These hypotheses are specialised; they depend on the rest of life being left out, so that we can concentrate on one particular possibility and problem. Yet all ask the question which is implicit in all Tolstoy's fictions: how should a man live?

Only one hypothesis became a fact for Tolstoy. He got married, and in some ways his married life resembled his forecast. Yet even Family Happiness . . . remains an abstract analysis, on the mental plane. In all of [his stories] Tolstoy forsakes the life of the body, even though it is problems and predicaments of the body with which most of them are so acutely concerned.

In general the characters in these stories act as Tolstoy's agents, representing his interests as if in some obsessive lawsuit. He does not imagine them, as he imagined the characters in his great fictions, and he does not on the whole identify himself with them, as he might be said to do with the hero of The Live Corpse and with Hadji Murad. The narrator of Family Happiness is the most successful agent, because she benefits from Tolstoy's understanding of a woman's life, even though this understanding has not the marvellous physical quality that it has in the two novels. . . .

The thankless task of acting as Tolstoy's agent in the story falls with particular weight on Pozdnyshev of The Kreutzer Sonata. He is required to express Tolstoy's views, but with a pathological violence and peculiarity supposedly his own. It is as if we knew that Shakespeare hated sex, but not so much as Hamlet does; and was disgusted with human beings, but not in quite so sensational a fashion as Timon. Tolstoy can neither release Pozdnyshev nor conceal himself behind him. The technical flaw in the stories, more marked in The Kreutzer Sonata than in the others, is that they employ a mechanism that makes for simplicity and rigidity without any compensatory detachment.

When the 'I' of The Kreutzer Sonata objects that if Pozdnyshev's ideas were really practised life would die out, he replies: "But why live? If life has no aim, if life is given us for life's sake, there is no reason for living." And "he evidently prized this thought very highly." So in a sense did Tolstoy, but he bestows the overt absurdity of priding himself on such a conviction upon the unfortunate Pozdnyshev. This is not the "self-derision genuinely Russian" which made Pierre so engaging a character [in War and Peace] and his relation to his creator so successful. The gradual externalisation of Pozdnyshev, as the climax of his story mounts, and his becoming—at the end—so touching a figure, makes this Tolstoyan use of him seem particularly jarring. When Prince Andrew denounces marriage to Pierre, or Levin tries vainly to see what makes Sviyazhsky tick [in Anna Karenina], we are drawn into a real dialogue, an interchange, a familiar discussion—the index of familiarity being that we know Tolstoy will address us soon in his own person. But the dramatic dialogue here is stilted and artificial, and its artifice largely thrown away.

All marriages in Tolstoy, whether described before or after his own took place, are, we feel, the same marriage—not his own, but an archetypal one. He presents the marriageness of marriage more directly and exhaustively than any other writer. In Family Happiness he envisages it; in War and Peace and Anna he describes it; in The Kreutzer Sonata he denounces it. Everything depends on the point of view; many of the events of the two stories might have happened in the novels—indeed have happened—but they have not been isolated and concentrated on. Andrew and the Little Princess, Pierre and Helene, Anna, Karenin, Vronsky—they have all gone through the same kinds of disillusionment, rage, disgust, acquiescence, as the characters in the stories, but they were not able to remain in these states of mind for long. Life—the novel—carried them along; dissipating these impressions, creating new ones, and returning them to the first state without their being fully conscious of the repetition. The process of the stories is not a living one in this sense but a mental one. Like so many much more ordinary stories they have a strong element both of nightmare and of daydream in them.

I think of running away from her, hiding myself, going to America. I get as far as dreaming of how I shall get rid of her, how splendid that will be, and how I shall unite myself with another, an admirable woman—quite different. . . .

Most married men, and women, would have to admit to occasional day-dreams something like those of Pozdnyshev. That is the intended power of the tale—to compel the individual to own up, to confess that his bosom returns an echo, and that there is some force in Pozdnyshev's contention that all marriages are secretly alike. But the accusing finger fails to disconcert us as much as it intends. For one thing, such fantasies are for most people occasional rather than obsessive; and a more serious weakness is that behind Pozdynshev's day-dream is another—that of Tolstoy himself. Tolstoy is letting himself go, and there is an element of self-indulgence in the display. The realism with which he describes the killing is particularly out of place here. The resistance of the corset; the sheath of the dagger dropped behind the sofa, and the reflection "I must remember that or it will get lost"—this is the realism of the self-told day-dream and it is highly imitable. Any competent sensationalist is Tolstoy's equal in this region of the mind.

And yet we still have the old directness—Tolstoy infects us with the terror that the fantasy arouses in him, where for most people it would be a comparatively harmless way of letting off steam inside themselves. We have something of the same feeling of horror in Dickens's description of the murder of Nancy in Oliver Twist, and Dostoevsky's of Nastasya Philippovna in The Idiot; but Dickens is fascinated rather than appalled—it was his favourite scene for recitation and used to excite him to the point of frenzy—while Dostoevsky's imagination is always on equable terms with every kind of violence. In all three we are aware of the pressure of a preoccupation—not uncommon in nineteenth-century fiction—with murder as a sexual act, but only Tolstoy seems to become fully aware as he describes it of the contrast between the insulated fantasy of the murderer and the outraged otherness of his victim. Pozsdnyshev's wife is not, as Nancy and Nastasya are, a natural murderee who appears to acquiesce in the atmosphere which the murderer and his creator have generated. It is significant that Norman Mailer's revival of the imagined murder as a sexual act, in his novel An American Dream, follows the Dickens-Dostoevsky pattern, not Tolstoy's.

Involuntarily, at the climax, the real argument of The Kreutzer Sonata comes out, the argument overlaid by the various diatribes indulged in through Pozdnyshev. Sex is often a hostile act, even in marriage; its consummation resembling murder in its indifference to the reality of another separate and independent being. Jealousy and hatred "have their own laws" and require their climax as inexorably as sexual passion. Only after the climax does Pozdnyshev reach the dazed awareness that his wife is, after all, "another human being".

After the evacuation of Moscow in War and Peace, when Natasha gets up in the night to see the wounded Prince Andrew, she says: "Forgive me". "Her face, with its swollen lips, was more than plain—it was dreadful", but Prince Andrew only sees that the jealousy which has obsessed him for months has no connection with the reality of Natasha. When he sees his wife's face, as if for the first time, and bruised and swollen where he has struck her, Pozdnyshev too says: "Forgive me". But she only looks at him "with her old expression of cold animal hatred". The ultimate horror of his act is to have put her beyond the possibility of recognising him, as he now recognises her. At the end of the story the narrator goes up to Pozdnyshev in the railway carriage to say goodbye.

Whether he was asleep or only pretended to be, at any rate he did not move. I touched him with my hand. He uncovered his face, and I could see he had not been asleep.

"Goodbye," I said, holding out my hand. He gave me his and smiled slightly, but so piteously that I felt ready to weep.

"Yes, forgive me—" he said, repeating the same words with which he had concluded his story.

'Forgive' is almost the same word in Russian as 'Goodbye'. Since his wife's death deprived him of recognition and forgiveness, Pozdnyshev has to ask both of strangers.