proustitute

Praised by many as Tolstoy's best short story—or novella, really—I'm shocked that I've never read this until now, if only for the reason that Tolstoy's best inevitably means one of the best novellas ever written. And The Kreutzer Sonata is definitely that; it's also one of the beginning texts of existentialist literature, and I can imagine Camus and even Proust reading this with relish. In a mere hundred or so pages, Tolstoy attacks everything: the oppressive system of gender inequality; the class system; capitalism, money, and the ignorance in which children are reared; marriage; religion; medicine; the legal system—in short, every subject under the sun is scrutinized and unashamedly bashed to pieces here, in a novella that renders the act of confession as the only means of redemption in a world of lost faith, principles, and morals, a motif that pairs this rather well with Camus's La chute, whose own narrator seems oddly reminiscent at times with Tolstoy's in Kreutzer. One can see why this was banned and why there was such a scandal when Tolstoy published this in 1889, and many of its subjects and concerns are still sadly relevant today.