The Complete Works of Count Tolstoy/Volume 18/The Kreutzer Sonata/Chapter 10
X.
"Well, I was caught in this manner. I was what we call in love. I not only imagined her to be the acme of perfection, but during all the time of my engagement to her I considered myself to be the acme of perfection. There is no rascal so great that, upon instituting a search, he could not find some rascals who in some respects stand lower than he himself, and could not, therefore, find a cause for being proud and satisfied with himself. Even thus it was with me: I did not marry for money,—calculation was absent in my case, whereas the majority of my acquaintances married for money or connections,—I was rich, she poor. This was one thing. The other thing of which I was proud was that, while others married with the intention of continuing to live in the same state of polygamy as before their marriage, I had the firm intention of remaining monogamous after marriage, and there was no limit to my pride on that score. Yes, I was a terrible swine, and I imagined that I was an angel.
"The time of my engagement did not last long. I cannot think of this time without shame. What an abomination! Love is supposed to be spiritual and not sensual. Well, if love is of a spiritual nature and consists in spiritual communion, then this spiritual communion ought to find its expression in words and conversation. There was nothing of the kind. It was very hard for us to speak together when we were left alone. It was the labour of a Sisyphus. No sooner had I thought of something and said it than I had to become silent and think of the next thing to say. There was nothing to talk about. Everything that could be said about the life which was in store for us, about arrangements and plans, had been said,—and what next? If we had been animals we would have known that there is no need of talking; here, on the contrary, we had to talk, but there was nothing to talk about, because we were not interested in that which could be gleaned from our conversations. Then there was that ugly habit of eating candy, that coarse gormandizing on sweets, and all those abominable preparations for the wedding: the talks about the apartments, the sleeping-room, the beds, the capotes, the morning-gowns, the linen, the toilets— You must consider that if people marry according to the injunctions of the Domostroy, as the old man remarked, then the feather beds, the dowry, the beds,—all these are only details corresponding to the mystery. But with us, where of every ten people thinking of matrimony nine certainly do not believe in any mystery, and do not believe even that that which they do puts them under any obligations, when there is hardly one out of a hundred men who has not been married before, and of fifty hardly one who does not prepare himself in advance to be false to his wife on any convenient occasion, when the majority look upon the church ceremony as only a special condition for getting possession of a certain woman,—think what terrible meaning all these details have under these conditions. It turns out that the whole question lies only in this: it turns out to be a kind of sale. An innocent girl is sold to a libertine, and this sale is surrounded with certain formalities.