“What Did I Want?”: Theatricality and the Crisis of Modern Subjectivity in Tolstoi's Kreutzer Sonata

This article argues theatricality is at least as central to the dilemmas that preoccupy Tolstoi's Kreitserova sonata (Kreutzer Sonata) as sex and lust. The novella is riddled with dissembling and play-acting. Tolstoi worries that constantly performing for audiences causes the modern subject to lose track of its true desires, which renders us incapable of authentic being, makes us effectively identical to one another and hence anonymous, interchangeable, and incapable of love, and dooms us to misery as we begin to act exclusively on role-played, rather than real, impulses. The aim of this article is to demonstrate that the hero and the text are unable to escape theatricality themselves Such a reading has the virtue of being able to make sense of a number of puzzling twists in the plot that till now have been problematic or inexplicable.