Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

should read The Kreutzer Sonata, a short novel by Tolstoy;fucked her; then left. She “lay awake, fearing the future, feelingthat she was on the verge of losing her courage and her will tosurvive. ”2A few years earlier, in 1887, another great artist, Count LeoTolstoy, had been inspired by another great work of art—“TheKreutzer Sonata” by Beethoven— to fuck his wife. His son anda music student played the sensual and wild sonata in a concertat his country estate. Tolstoy “listened with tears in hiseyes; then, during the presto, unable to control himself, herose and went to the window where, gazing at the starry sky,he stifled a sob. ”3That night, Sophie, the Countess Tolstoy,was impregnated with her thirteenth child. The Count wassixty, his wife sixteen years younger. She had known him sinceshe was ten; she was eighteen, he thirty-four, when they marriedin September 1862.Later, in Moscow, the Count heard “The Kreutzer Sonata”again, this time in the company of an actor and a painter. Thistime more restrained, he wanted each to create a work of art inspiredby the sonata. Only he did. His story, The KreutzerSonata, is a powerful and distressing one. It combines an unfinishedshort story, “The Man Who Murdered His Wife, ” with astory told to Tolstoy by the painter about a stranger he met on atrain, who was distraught with marital troubles; but its basictext is the Tolstoy marriage. The story is autobiographical, as ismuch of Tolstoy’s fiction; and in The Kreutzer Sonata he usesthe details of his sexual intercourse with Sophie, what the biographerHenri Troyat called “his periods of rut, ”4to show hisfeelings of deep repugnance for the wife he continues to fuck—and for the sex act itself. The repugnance is not only rooted inongoing desire, but also in satiation, it too being real, a discrete