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Kreutzer Sonata, the husband sees the wife with some empathy, as human, only after he has brutally murdered her: “'I looked at the children and at her bruised and disfigured face, and for the first time I forgot myself, my rights, my pride, and for the first time saw a human being in her. ’” 23 Art is merciful. Murder turns the woman one has fucked over a lifetime human. The ethos is not contemporary. Typically now, in books, in films, murder never risks an aftermath of compassion; there is no remorse. Instead, murder itself is the sex act or it is sexual climax. Tolstoy’s murder, full of hate and horror at woman as such, full of sexual inevitability and the artist’s passionate conviction that it is right and necessary, has fragility, recognition, remorse. It is a tragic story, because the sex act makes the killing as fated as if the gods from Olympus had ordained it. The killer’s recognition of the wife, finally, as human, makes one feel pity and pain. A human life has been taken, horribly; a human being has done it. For this one moment, even the reader’s interior rage at the author’s full-blooded misogyny is stilled in sorrow. In contemporary books and films, the murder of a woman is an end in itself. In this sad story, the murder of the woman signifies the impossibility of physical love in a way that means loss, not sadistic celebration.
    Tolstoy’s repulsion for woman as such is not modern either. Now, this repulsion is literal and linear: directed especially against her genitals, also her breasts, also her mouth newly perceived as a sex organ. It is a goose-stepping hatred of cunt. The woman has no human dimension, no human meaning. The repulsion requires no explanation, no rationalization. She has no internal life, no human resonance; she needs no human interpretation. Her flesh is hated; she is it without more. The hatred is by rote, with no human individuation, no highfalutin philosophy or pedestrian emotional ambivalence. The repulsion is self-evidently justified by the physical nature of the thing itself; the repulsion inheres in what the thing is. For the male, the repulsion is sexually intense, genitally focused, sexually solipsistic, without any critical or moral self-consciousness. Photograph what she is, painted pink; the camera delivers her up as a dead thing; the picture is of a corpse, embalmed. The contemporary novelist does it with words: paints the thing, fucks it, kills it.
    Tolstoy, in this story, locates his repulsion not in the woman’s body, not in her inherent nature, but in sexual intercourse, the nature of the act: what it means; the inequality of the sexes intrinsic to it; its morbid consequences to the dignity and self-esteem of men. The analysis is androcentric in the extreme; but still, the story does suggest that the repulsion is not simply deserved by its victims. The repulsion, Tolstoy insists, requires scrutiny and, ultimately, disavowal; the sex act that causes it needs to be eliminated. The radical social change demanded by Tolstoy in this story—the end of intercourse—is a measured repudiation of gynocide: in order not to kill women, he said, we must stop fucking them.The Kreutzer Sonatawas censored by the state because itopposedintercourse, especially in marriage.
    The story begins with a heated argument on a train between a young woman, a feminist type, mannishly dressed, outspoken, rudely caricatured by the author as having faddish, silly opinions on love and marriage; and an old man who represents the Old Russia of peasant-wisdom that Tolstoy venerated.
    The woman argues for love as the basis of marriage; and for love in marriage as the essence of women’s emancipation: "'It’s only animals, you know, that can be paired off as their master likes; but human beings have their own inclination and attachments... ”’ 24 She wants feeling, love, a self-chosen passion, to be the basis for equality in a relationship, also the basis for the woman’s humanity in