Planned release date: 25 October 2023.
This book narrates about love, the principal source of inspiration to live and reason of being for many of us. Some of the finest writers have written about love at first sight and first love; then gradually, as one grows older, another perspective on life develops. Under the surface of romanticized love tales play out the real-life dramas that inevitably occur in everyone’s life. These dramas evolve due to commitments in relationships that can, in real-life, never or rarely stay fresh, vibrant, or perfectly happy. Instead, the partners are tormented in their relationship by feelings of regret about love long lost, while languishing in the existing relationship.
Outlines
The relationship between Sonya Tolstaya and her husband Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian writer, is particularly telling. The spouses drive each other to despair, even insanity at times, escalating in frequent suicide thoughts and attempts. Their tormented mental state is described in their diaries and reflected in their respective novels. In The Kreutzer Sonata, based on the acrimony prevailing in his own marriage, Tolstoy assassinates the wife of his protagonist. Tolstoy’s mysogynic views would be on full display once again in his posthumously published novella The Devil. Obsessed with Aksinya, a share-cropper on his estate, who bore him a son out of wedlock, Tolstoy kills her character in The Devil.
Separately, Sonya Tolstaya responds by baring her incredible mental suffering in two phenomenal novellas of her own (Whose Fault? and Song without Words); both of her works remained unpublished for over a hundred years. In each of her stories, the protagonist is killed by her jealous husband, although the spouse never committed adultery on him. In effect, Whose Fault? and Song without Words were written by Sonya to defend herself against the literary assassination of her character by Tolstoy in his novels.
Tolstoy was especially jealous of her platonic rapport with Prince Urisov (who is the role model for the Prince in Whose Fault?), and with the composer Taneyev (who is the consoling character portrayed in Song without Words). But Sonya was never unfaithful in the sexual sense, and she tries to clarify this through the stories in her novellas. And just as nearly happened in real-life, the jealous husband portrayed in her stories (Tolstoy’s alter ego) drives her to insanity and kills her.