Tolstoy on the Couch: Misogyny, Masochism and the Absent Mother

279 Pages·1998·28.15 MB·English

by  Daniel Rancour-Laferriere (auth.)

TOLSTOY ON THE COUCH
Also by Daniel Rancour-Laferriere
FIVE RUSSIAN POEMS
OUT FROM UNDER GOGOL'S OVERCOAT
RUSSIAN LITERATURE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS (editor)
SELF-ANALYSIS AND LITERARY STUDY (editor)
SIGN AND SUBJECT
SIGNS OF THE FLESH
THE MIND OF STALIN
THE SLAVE SOUL OF RUSSIA
TOLSTOY'S PIERRE BEZUKHOV
Tolstoy on the Couch
Misogyny, Masochism and the Absent
Mother
Daniel Rancour-Laferriere
© Daniel Rancour-Laferriere 1998
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1998
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the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 1998 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
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and London
Companies and representatives throughout the world
ISBN 978-1-349-14781-6 ISBN 978-1-349-14779-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-14779-3
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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10987654321
07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98
Contents
Acknowledgements and Abbreviations vii
1 Introduction 1
1. The Paradoxical Tolstoy 1
2. Why Psychoanalysis Applies 3
2 The Arzamas Horror: A Sample of Tolstoy's Psychopathology 10
1. Separating from His Wife, His Family, His Novel 10
2. Alone and Anxious 14
3. Dabbling in Madness 16
4. Masochism as an Antidepressant 21
3 Tolstoy and His Mother 33
1. Death and the Mother 33
2. Tolstoy Slips up 35
3. Maternal Sexuality and Maternal Love 38
4. The Psychology of Early Maternal Loss 42
5. Ambivalence and Multiple Mothering 48
6. Sexuality and the Death of the Mother 55
4 Tolstoy's Case for Sexual Abstinence 58
1. Enter a Madman 58
2. Wives as Prostitutes 66
3. Some Intertexts 73
4. Harm to Women 78
5. Harm to Children: the Primal Scene 81
6. An End to Childbirthing 86
7. Mutual Enslavement of the Sexes 90
v
vi Contents
5 Sexual Abstinence: The Hidden Agenda 94
1. Narcissism, Jealousy, and the Maternal Icon 94
2. Tolstoy at the Breast 102
3. The Oral Hang-up 114
4. The Homosexual Element 119
5. Regress along with Beethoven 123
6. Murdering the Breast-Mother 130
7. Castration, Masochism, Guilt 141
8. Tolstoy's Moral Masochism 144
9. Guilt and the Matricidal Impulse 151
10. Repetition of Past Traumas 154
11. Attempted Reparation 160
6 Tolstoy's Problematical Self 164
1. Psychiatric Symptoms while Writing
The Kreutzer Sonata 164
2. The Self-Improvement Kick: God as Ideal Self 167
3. Low Self-Esteem and the Need for Attention 170
4. Unclear Boundaries of the Self 175
5. Finishing off the Novella: Interacting Self-Disturbances 181
7 The Relationship with Sonia: A Feminist Note 189
Notes 203
Bibliography 246
Index 261
Acknowledgements and
Abbrevia tions
I am indebted to many people who have commented in a constructive
way on ideas raised in successive drafts of this book. Most influent
ial was my wife, Barbara Milman, who encouraged me to look long
and hard at the dark, misogynistic side of Tolstoy'S psyche. Yuri
Druzhnikov, my Russian colleague at the University of California in
Davis, provided extensive consultations on Tolstoy'S often tricky use
of the Russian language. Other scholars who have been helpful in
clude: Joe Aimone, Kay Blacker, Catherine Chvany, Jackie Dello
Russo, Joanne Diehl, Carl Ehy, Alan Elms, Aleksandr Etkind, Jim
Gallant, Assya Humeska, Charles Isenberg, Kathryn Jaeger, Gary
Jahn, Andrew Jones, Lola Komarova, Ronald LeBlanc, Hugh McLean,
Karl Menges, Robert A. Nemiroff, Thomas Newlin, David L. Ransel,
James L. Rice, Mikhail Romashkevich, Lev Tokarev and Alexander
Zholkovsky. I am particularly grateful to the members of the UC
Davis Humanities Research Cluster in Psychoanalysis for their
attentive comments on a presentation I made in November of 1995.
Timothy Bartlett of New York University Press provided extremely
valuable editorial advice. For technical assistance I want to thank
Nina Anderson, Jackie DiClementine, Tamara Grivicic and Shidan
Lotfi. Opritsa Popa and the personnel of the Interlibrary Loan Office
of Shields Library at UC Davis were unfailingly helpful. Finally, I
want to thank UC Davis for providing a series of Faculty Research
Grants as well as a Publication Grant for this book.
As a basic working text for The Kreutzer Sonata I am using the
version published in volume 27 of the Jubilee Edition of Tolstoy'S
works (here indicated as 27: 5-92). All references to Tolstoy'S works
in the original Russian are from the Jubilee Edition. In some cases I
have made slight emendations in the cited translations of Tolstoy,
including the excellent translation of The Kreutzer Sonata by David
McDuff (= Tolstoy 1983). When translating diaries and drafts I have
not fixed them up, but deliberately left them in a semblance of their
rough, often stylistically imperfect condition. Many of the draft
and diary materials are here translated into English for the first
time. Translations of Russian texts are mine when not otherwise
vii
viii Acknowledgements and Abbreviations
indicated. Quotations of Freud will be from the Standard Edition,
here abbreviated SE.
Dates of events in Tolstoy's lifetime are given according to the Old
Style or Julian calendar, in use in Russia until 1918 (12 days behind
the New Style or Gregorian calendar in the nineteenth century, 13
days behind in the twentieth century).
1
Introduction
1. THE PARADOXICAL TOLSTOY
In the year 1888 Lev Tolstoy decided that human sexual intercourse
should no longer exist. Tolstoy was, as he later admitted, 'horrified' by
this conclusion. Yet for the rest of his life he honestly believed that
total sexual abstinence was best. Frequenter of brothels in his youth,
father of 13 children by his wife, and at least two children by peasant
women before he was married,1 Tolstoy now had the arrogance to
suggest that it would be a good idea if people stopped having chil
dren. This 'tireless fucker', as he referred to his younger self in con
versation with Maksim Gorky,2 was repudiating an essential part of
himself, and of humanity generally.
How can such a repudiation be explained? It was not merely a lit
erary fact - although it was first revealed to the world in a literary
work, entitled The Kreutzer Sonata (1889). It was not a religious belief
either, although Tolstoy did marshal quotations from the bible to
support his thesis. Tolstoy's repudiation of sex was, rather, a fact of
his particular biography, a strikingly personal declaration reflecting
the state of his psyche at the time he made it.
Tolstoy's rejection of sex was a personal matter, and personal matters
are an appropriate subject for psychoanalytic study. In this case, more
over, the personal concern arose within a specific time frame, and was
developed in a particular literary work of moderate length. It thus con
stitutes a well-defined and feasible topic for psychoanalytic study.
Some years ago I suggested that someone, someday, ought to
write a psychobiography of Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy.3 That someone
is not me, however. A true psychobiography of Tolstoy would be a
lifetime project (like Leon Edel on Henry James), and I have neither
the lifetime nor the desire to produce a full psychobiography of
Tolstoy. Even an ordinary scholarly biography of Tolstoy, lacking the
depth a psychobiography is supposed to achieve, seems impossibly
huge. One thinks of Nikolai Nikolaevich Gusev who, by the time of
his death at the age of 86, had only reached the year 1885 in his
monumental four-volume work Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi. Materials for
1