I took The Kreutzer Sonata as black humour. When I read the tale for the first time, I happened to travel on a train, and it fitted perfectly to the two-hour duration of the ride from Helsinki to Tampere. There is an unintentional and irresistibly crazy sense of humour in the piece. Men and women should neither marry nor have sex, even if this means the extinction of mankind. This is a thesis piece and Tolstoy means literally what he says. She, a gifted pianist, had started to practise with the violin virtuoso Trukhachevsky, and the summit of their playing took place during Beethoven's The Kreutzer Sonata. The tale is an account during a train ride by the nobleman Pozdnyshev who has killed his wife. The patriarch of a big family - his wife gave birth to 13 children - preaches abstinence from sex. Re-read in anticipation of getting to see the film adaptation by Gustav Machatý the borderline crazy povest (tale) by Leo Tolstoy. Karisto (Kariston klassillinen kirjasto), 1959. Read in a Finnish translation by Valto Kallama. Notes: Adrian Daub (2014) "The Sonic Hearth and the Piano Plague" in Four-Handed Monsters: Four-Hand Piano Playing and Nineteenth-Century Culture, Oxford University Press, pp. Sotheby's, New York, 19th Century European Paintings, Drawings & Sculpture, 12 October 1994 Lot 146. René-Xavier Prinet (1861–1946): La Sonate à Kreutzer.
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