Kreutzer Sonata

There are few works in world literature as famous as Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata. When it was published in 1890, it caused a sensation unprecedented in cultural history. If someone did not know it, then it was - according to the reports of the time - perhaps only an illiterate or someone who was not interested in literature and in the relationships between men and women, or someone who lived in a particularly remote part of the world.

The wonderfully bold and impressive revelation of marital discord, which this story undoubtedly is, left no one indifferent. There was no place where it was not hotly contested. The Old Believers in Russia were outraged to the point of insanity. In other countries, this work has been persecuted in court, including the Czech Republic. The fight over the Kreutzer Sonata lasted nearly twenty years before the court's decree was overturned.

Tolstoy's "sexual" novel, as we might call it today, is a tale of cruel jealousy, that's breaking up marriages, a tale of a deep rift between two people, who once loved each other deeply. In its questions, which are presented here in shocking nakedness - after the relationship between purity and strong physical passion, after the relationship between man and woman - it will probably never cease to be topical. Read by Ladislav Mrkvička