The Complete Works of Count Tolstoy/Volume 18/The Kreutzer Sonata/Chapter 3
III.
"Well, then I will tell you— But do you really want me to?"
I repeated that I wanted it very much. He was silent for a moment, rubbed his face with his hands, and began:
"If I am to tell it to you, I must begin from the beginning: I must tell you how I married and why, and the kind of man I was previous to my marriage.
"Before my marriage I lived like everybody else, that is, in our circle. I am a landed proprietor and a graduate of the university, and was a marshal of nobility. I lived before my marriage like the rest, that is, in debauchery, and, like all the people of our circle, I was convinced that, living in debauchery, I was living as was proper. I thought of myself that I was a nice fellow and entirely moral. I was not a seducer, had no unnatural tastes, did not make it the chief purpose of my life, as many of my contemporaries are doing, and abandoned myself to debauchery in a moderate and decent way, for health's sake. I avoided all such women as by bearing a child or by attachment for me might tie my hands. However, there may have been children and attachments, but I acted as though they did not exist. And this I not only regarded as moral, but I even was proud of it—"
He stopped, emitted his strange sound, as he always did whenever, apparently, a new thought struck him.
"Herein lies the main villainy," he exclaimed. "Debauchery is not anything physical,—no physical excess is debauchery,—debauchery, real debauchery, lies in freeing oneself from the moral relations with a woman, with whom one enters into physical communion. It was this liberation on which I prided myself. I remember how I was once tormented when I was not able to pay a woman who, having evidently fallen in love with me, had abandoned herself to me, and how my conscience was appeased only when I sent her the money, by which I showed that I morally did not regard myself as in the least under any obligations to her. Don't shake your head as though you agreed with me," he suddenly called out to me. "I know all about that. All of you, and you, too, if by some rare chance you are not an exception, hold the same views which I once held. Well, never mind, pardon me," he continued, "but the main thing is, this is terrible, terrible, terrible!"
"What is terrible?" I asked.
"That abyss of delusions in which we live as regards women and our relations with them. Yes, I cannot speak of this calmly, not because this episode, as he called it, has happened to me, but because, when this episode happened to me, my eyes were opened; and I suddenly saw everything in an entirely different light,—everything topsyturvy, everything topsyturvy!"
He lighted a cigarette and, leaning on his knees, began to speak.
I could not see his face in the darkness of the car, but above the rumbling of the car I heard his impressive and pleasant voice.