‘Крейцерова соната’ и зарождение буржуазного брака

The silent revolution caused by the behaviour of the unfaithful Anna Karenina involved Russian readers in the second half of the nineteenth century, and later came into surface in ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’. Anna showed a new possible way of union based on feelings and the Great Reform created the conditions to realize it. In this way the transition from the aristocratic marriage of convenience to the bourgeois marriage, represented in ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’, was brought to fruition.In this late work, Tolstoi posed the sexual problem in new terms, as the modern marriage involved a new idea of love, sex and conjugal union. The first to pronounce this new word was Pozdnyshev, through a series of scandalous statements, which provoked violent reactions from all sides. Thus Tolstoi gave impulse to the rise of a new regime of sexual discourses connected with hygiene, medicine, pedagogy, criminality and demography.