In the dozen or so years between the late eighties and the late nineties Tolstoy produced three works of fiction. The first, The Kreutzer Sonata, is in many ways odd and perverse, but it is the most revelatory of all the author's works about his attitudes to his own sex life. Like many other novelists, Tolstoy was fond of taking some aspect of himself and exaggerating it in the presentation of a character. Thus Olenin in The Cossacks represented the young Tolstoy's callow self-conceit, and conviction that he understands things and people; Pierre in War and Peace, an exaggeratedly Tolstoyan fumbling and uncertain, though passionate, search for the truth. Pozdnyshev in The Kreutzer Sonata is a kind of malignant and self-hating doll who reveals a hatred of sex and an obsession with it which goes far beyond anything his creator ever expressed in person.

The story is effectively structured. Its narrator meets an odd man in a train and hears his story, and his theories about life and sex, which are striking and absorbing in their very contradictoriness. Pozdnyshev has murdered his wife, out of jealousy as he says, although the ‘ I ’ of the story gradually begins to feel it was really out of hatred and exasperation with the whole idea and world of marriage itself. Jealousy was caused by the wife's infatuation with a musician friend, the pair often playing Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata together. Tolstoy, who thought all music had highly physical effects, felt that the Sonata stirred sex feelings almost as strong as the music of Don Giovanni, which he held should never be played when the two sexes were in close proximity under a roof. This kind of susceptibility drives Pozdnyshev into a state of obsessive fantasy, and he finally stabs his wife with an ornamental dagger which is hanging on the wall. The act of murder itself is a remarkable example of Tolstoyan detailed realism. The wife's corset resists the blow, and in the act of striking the blow the murderer notices that the dagger sheath drops behind a sofa. ‘I must remember that or it will get lost.’ The wife survives, but dies later from the wound she has received.