Pozdnyshev's wife

A landowner's daughter who marries Pozdnyshev young, bears his children, and takes up the piano again.

What they want

The story does not let her say, beyond her music and her children.

The book

The Kreutzer Sonata

Leo Tolstoy

The Kreutzer SonataLeo Tolstoy, 1890

On a night train, a man tells a stranger how jealousy, a violinist and a Beethoven sonata led him to kill his wife.

Spoiler-free

She is never named and is seen only through her husband's jealousy. What she thinks, the story barely lets her say until she is dying.

Appearance, manner, and tone — as the book sketches them, in our words.

The pianoIn Chapter XIX, after the doctors tell her to have no more children, she takes up the piano that had stood forgotten in a corner.
The performanceIn Chapter XXIII she plays the Kreutzer Sonata with Trukhachevsky, and her husband has never seen her as she is that night.
The letterIn Chapter XXIV she writes to her husband at the assembly, mentioning that the violinist has brought some music.
The deathbedIn Chapter XXVIII she tells him he has done what he wanted and killed her, and says her sister will take the children.

Lines spoken by or about Pozdnyshev's wife, each verified verbatim against the text and located in the book.

You have accomplished what you desired. You have killed me.

— Pozdnyshev's wife, dying · Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata, Chapter XXVIII, translated by Benjamin R. Tucker (1890)

Their ending, and the commentary — spoilers aheadHow the book leaves them, what happened after, and what the record says. Open when you're ready.

She dies of the stab wound toward noon the next day, delirious, no longer recognising the children.

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