The Kreutzer Sonata: Chapter 18

Chapter 18

"So we lived in the city. In the city the wretched feel less sad. One
can live there a hundred years without being noticed, and be dead a long
time before anybody will notice it. People have no time to inquire into
your life. All are absorbed. Business, social relations, art, the health
of children, their education. And there are visits that must be received
and made; it is necessary to see this one, it is necessary to hear that
one or the other one. In the city there are always one, two, or three
celebrities that it is indispensable that one should visit.

"Now one must care for himself, or care for such or such a little one,
now it is the professor, the private tutor, the governesses, . . . and
life is absolutely empty. In this activity we were less conscious of the
sufferings of our cohabitation. Moreover, in the first of it, we had a
superb occupation,--the arrangement of the new dwelling, and then, too,
the moving from the city to the country, and from the country to the
city.

"Thus we spent a winter. The following winter an incident happened to us
which passed unnoticed, but which was the fundamental cause of all that
happened later. My wife was suffering, and the rascals (the doctors)
would not permit her to conceive a child, and taught her how to avoid
it. I was profoundly disgusted. I struggled vainly against it, but
she insisted frivolously and obstinately, and I surrendered. The last
justification of our life as wretches was thereby suppressed, and life
became baser than ever.

"The peasant and the workingman need children, and hence their conjugal
relations have a justification. But we, when we have a few children,
have no need of any more. They make a superfluous confusion of expenses
and joint heirs, and are an embarrassment. Consequently we have no
excuses for our existence as wretches, but we are so deeply degraded
that we do not see the necessity of a justification. The majority of
people in contemporary society give themselves up to this debauchery
without the slightest remorse. We have no conscience left, except, so to
speak, the conscience of public opinion and of the criminal code. But in
this matter neither of these consciences is struck. There is not a being
in society who blushes at it. Each one practices it,--X, Y, Z, etc. What
is the use of multiplying beggars, and depriving ourselves of the joys
of social life? There is no necessity of having conscience before the
criminal code, or of fearing it: low girls, soldiers' wives who throw
their children into ponds or wells, these certainly must be put
in prison. But with us the suppression is effected opportunely and
properly.

"Thus we passed two years more. The method prescribed by the rascals had
evidently succeeded. My wife had grown stouter and handsomer. It was the
beauty of the end of summer. She felt it, and paid much attention to her
person. She had acquired that provoking beauty that stirs men. She was
in all the brilliancy of the wife of thirty years, who conceives no
children, eats heartily, and is excited. The very sight of her was
enough to frighten one. She was like a spirited carriage-horse that has
long been idle, and suddenly finds itself without a bridle. As for my
wife, she had no bridle, as for that matter, ninety-nine hundredths of
our women have none."

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