This essay was originally published on 31 July 2022 for subscribers to our newsletter.

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I have just read two short novels on male violence, Lev Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata and Ernesto Sàbato’s The Tunnel. This was not a conscious decision as the Tolstoy was a book I had been meaning to get round to for some time, and after it I read Milan Kundera’s short essays on small countries which has recently been published in Italian, mainly with a view to making an offer for the translation rights from French. Then looking just for a read, I picked out The Tunnel from the pile and didn’t really think about the similarities until I was halfway through. They are very similar, but this does not mean that Tolstoy directly influenced Sàbato, and yet I wouldn’t be surprised if he did, given his admission of Russian mastery and in particular Dostoyevsky’s. While structurally very similar, there are differences and these are also quite illuminating. 

Both books suggest the existence of something dark and evil in male sexuality, though there are provisos which I will discuss later. A man who is extreme in his possessiveness kills “his” woman and we know of this murder right from the beginning, so all we need to know is why and, to a much lesser extent, how. Both men are unreliable narrators whose “confessions” vacillate between self-justification and moments of genuine guilt and self-hatred. Both appear to be deranged, particularly in the case of Sàbato’s protagonist Juan Pablo Castel, and both needed their partners and resented them at the same time. 

Here we encounter the differences, and I’ll start with the least significant example – essentially a minor technical point. Castel simply writes his story because he feels moved to do this while in prison, and this means that absolutely everything is filtered through his insanity as well as some moments of relative self-awareness which Sàbato really needs in order to narrate the story in a more rounded manner. During a train journey, Tolstoy’s protagonist Pozdnyshev imposes himself on his interlocutor, who is the only person left in the compartment once the murderer has revealed his identity. This interlocutor narrates the conversation, but essentially the speech is all from this Ancient Mariner character who killed a wife instead of an albatross. This allows Tolstoy to use his fairly hands-off narrator to occasionally describe the Pozdnyshev’s behaviour and expressions. The latter is an everyman or at least a typical Russian man of means in the late nineteenth century, and he is merely someone who took current attitudes to women to their logical conclusion, suggesting therefore a vast hinterland of violence that didn’t go as far as uxoricide. For the modern reader, there is something puritanical in Tolstoy’s work but it should be remembered that he constantly reminds the reader that this is “in our society” or in other words there could be other societies that could create more healthy relationships – ones not obsessed with property which naturally veer towards the ownership of women. Juan Pablo Castel, on the other hand, is a successful but fiercely misanthropic artist who is trapped in his own tunnel outside of which he feels that normal people – unexceptional people – live uncomplicated and banal lives and enjoy each other’s company and talk nonsense to each other. That of course is his view of the world, while in fact the reader can understand that other people – including men – have their problems but manage to deal with them, partly because they’re not mad.

The Tunnel is a work of quite stunning literary brilliance, but The Kreutzer Sonata, also very well written, is something different: a radical novel – like all of Tolstoy’s later works – which examines the shocking reality of relationships between men and women. I don’t think that all such relationships are unhappy and violent to various degrees, but then as now they are of epidemic proportions. Just like Tolstoy’s ruminations on prisons in Resurrection makes you feel that in more than a century very little has improved, so in The Kreutzer Sonata you wonder why relations between men and women haven’t improved more markedly. Tolstoy, with remarkable prescience, subtly puts across the point that it is not only about female emancipation because something is also going wrong at a deeper psychological level in our sexual behaviour. That – and I would agree – is due to property and consumerism which create male violence against women and to a much lesser extent female violence against men. One statistic about contemporary violence against men puts it at ten per cent of violence against women, which I consider to be too high not because I question the figure for male victims but because I think that violence against women is still grossly underestimated. In both directions the problem is that too many relationships are negotiated settlements which undergo constant renegotiation rather than something which resembles that very vague concept we call love. 

Both novels question the existence of love – particularly sexual love – but their approach is very different here as well. Tolstoy believes in humanity, and blames property. He wants us to change our ways, and learn to love each other rather than wealth – which is to put it rather crudely and we should remember that he writes these novels precisely in order to avoid putting it in such simple terms (this, I think, is why his non-fiction like A Confession is not particularly effective). Sàbato, however, is not explicitly pushing any moral message. If we examine the relationships involved, things become clearer: Pozdnyshev has been married to the woman he murders for a very long time and they have many children. He doesn’t love her although he is faithful. He married her at the right time in life to marry a woman and he chose her in a fairly offhand manner, perhaps as he may have bought a horse. In other words, he is utterly conventional and only after the murder does he start to understand the forces that were at play. Both books very sensibly leave the reader in the dark as to whether the women actually had lovers, because this is not the issue. Whatever evidence there is of their infidelity is immediately undermined by the insane jealousy of these two men (their act is insane in each case, but Pozdnyshev’s is social rather than psychological). While the children are growing up, the marriage holds together not in bliss but the routine of his work and her caring for their offspring. After that she wants to develop her own interests and returns to her love of music, which he encourages in spite of his awareness that this could lead to adultery (here he resembles Sàbato once more, because the successful artist is also driven by what could appear to be fate). Juan Pablo Castel kills a woman who is his lover – whom he has pursued and abused in a shocking and terrifying manner. Towards the end of the novel, he admits that before he started writing about what he has done, he never asked himself what love is, in spite of his supposed rationalism that never looks very rational and the fact that he has been demanding it of his lover as a little boy might demand something of his mother – an analogy that he himself uses on at least one occasion. The greatest paradox of this novel is that this really is a love affair – hence the tragic dimension. This is the extraordinary power of the novel, because the reader is pulled in all directions. Colm Tóibín’s rather scant introduction to the Penguin edition defines the work as one of “pure comedy”, but this doesn’t do the book justice: tragicomedy perhaps. Even though you know of the lover’s death, it comes in its succinctness as a blow to the reader – or at least to this reader. The incident in which Castel attempts to retrieve the registered letter he has just posted, and fails to do so because of the female postal worker’s entirely reasonable objections is quite rightly Tóibín’s example of the comedic element, but even here Castel’s immediate disgust at the woman’s wart with hairs growing out of it underscores his hatred of everyone except his lover and reveals his tragic loneliness. Although we know his lover Maria only through his viewpoint distorted by his self-obsession, she is a more powerful figure than Pozdnyshev’s unexceptional wife. She emerges as a mild, noble and sensitive person who loves her blind husband and she may love Castel but not his manic lovemaking. This leads us back to a theme in both books: love and sex are different things although obviously they can merge. Strangely, given its subject matter, there is great humanity in The Tunnel, which – for me at least – tell us something about how we fail to shape our own lives. 

I would be failing in my intent if I left you with the impression that The Tunnel is one of those modern novels that merely entertains the readers with some bizarre psychological condition. You could interpret the novel as a comment on artists and writers, and Sàbato was both writer and painter. And yet you’re not obliged to, as in the case of Tolstoy’s moral strictures. Castel hates critics and when his lover points out that they only say good things about his work, he rants about their stupidity and inability to understand. One of his arguments is that they are not artists and therefore cannot know, whilst no one would expect knowledgeable criticism of a surgeon from anyone but another surgeon. The obvious objection is that a surgeon, like so many other professionals, has a series of tasks and he is ultimately judged on his ability to complete those tasks in a satisfactory fashion, even if only another surgeon can explain the whys and wherefores of any failures. Artists produce articles that ultimately they wish to present to the public and when the public don’t understand, artists may think that the public and the critics who influence them are at fault, and in some famous cases the public have been, as in the case of Kafka. Or perhaps he was at fault for being so brilliantly ahead of his time. We have descended into platitudes, but ultimately on this much-visited theme there is comedy and perhaps even the subtle suggestion that lies in the very title of this book: self-obsession – not only of artists and writers trapped in their lonely professions – is a tunnel and it leads to various degrees of mental instability because we are a social animal. 

A man’s fear of something that falls short of complete ownership of a woman is what these two novels most importantly have in common, and the power of that fear is devastating for everyone: the victims of course, the murderers themselves, the children in Tolstoy’s novel and the lover’s blind husband who commits suicide in Sàbato’s. Don’t ask me which is the better book or which I “agree with” – if that is the right verb! They both speculate on different elusive truths using remarkably similar plots, and both books I would recommend anyone to read. Apart from their literary and even philosophical virtuosity, they remind us all of an evil that exists at the heart of our societies and elements of the psychological processes behind it. 

Allan Cameron, Pitigliano, late July 2022

Header image: The Kreutzer Sonata (1901) by René-Xavier Prinet