Stories in Russian Novels

The narrator's attitude toward the prostitute who attends him is by turns contemptuous and solicitous. In one moment he says, " gay only likes to count his troubles; he doesn't calculate his happiness. If he judge as he should, he'd see that ein truthone gets his share" (Dostoevsky 65). He grills her on her unhappy bread and butter, noning that he "had turned her soul inside pop and had broken her heart . . . It was the sport, the sport that attracted me" (Dostoevsky 70). In a complaint of concern for her, invites her to call on him, but when she calls, sympathizing with his deep unhappiness, he brutally insults her. Her departure asserts a dignity he acknowledges for no one; he claims to be "satisfied with my theory astir(predicate) the use of insults and hatred, in spite of the fact that I myself nigh fell ill from anguish" (Dostoevsky 88). But the Notes author is a victim of his pose of nihilism, declaring the universe absurd but levorotary every attempt to embrace it. In other words, Dostoevsky is contend cowardly, poseuristic nihilism at others' expense and for some other behavior of being-in-the- adult male.

In Ward Number Six, Chekhov treats nihilism in a portrait of an aging doctor whose backwater practice has failed to invest his life with meaning. Ragin has become a creature of professional habit, gradually withdrawing medical checkup expertise from the village itself. If life lacks meaning, surely there the crazy and sick don't need curing. He does not insist on clean conditions for the local hosp

Pozdnyshev does not consider his torment unique but typical of the heavy(p) mass of men. That attitude positions his narrative not as an employment in psychological realism but at least(prenominal) partly as social critique born of covetous rage and the very fabric of social praxis. Sexuality in marriage fouls perceptions and resolves nothing. He deplores his wife's social predicament, "brought up in the article of belief that there was only one thing in the world worthy of attention--love" (Tolstoy 199). He rejects the notion that love can be enacted as sex and embraces the idea that "all husbands who live as I did, must either live dissolutely, separate, or down themselves or their wives as I have done.

If there is anybody who has not done so, he is a rare exception" (Tolstoy 202). The very cosmos conspires against him, poor chap.

Modern relevance for The Kreutzer Sonata seems obvious; Pozdnyshev's attitudes toward women and decorous marriage roles sound all excessively contemporary. Consider for type one Mr. O.J. Simpson's declaration of himself as woefully anguished beaten-up victim, loving as it were not wisely but too much. Having read The Kreutzer Sonata, one might be forgiven for being ball o'er but not surprised that Mr. O.J. Simpson's wife died as she did. It is to this troubling and squalid pass that spoiled marriage has traveled in the hundred-odd years since Tolstoy's degree: One suspects that, time being precious, no one on Bundy used it to whisper "Forgive me" over a bloodied carcass. One wonders, too, from which spoiled marriage the next corpse will come.

Tolstoy's philosophical orientation in The Kreutzer Sonata is that of nihilism enacted, and that makes Tolstoy's story more troubling and ambiguous than Chekhov's or Dostoevsky's. It is pessimistic as far as the fate of reasonable society in general and monogamy within that society in limited are concerned. Pozdnyshev's lost orientation derives from his experience of the emotional skulker that his marriage all too quickly became. As he te
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