The Kreutzer Sonata

The carriage is dark, the train is somewhere between stations, and the passenger who has been listening to strangers argue about marriage finally speaks up to say that he killed his wife. He says it early, without drama, and then spends the rest of the night explaining, and the explanation is the horror: not a crime of madness but the ordinary logic of jealousy followed all the way down, step by reasonable step, by a man who believes he is being clear-headed. Tolstoy put his own worst convictions in that carriage and let them talk. Russia banned it, the American postmaster seized it from the mails, and his wife answered it with a novel of her own. Beethoven supplies the title and the most dangerous moment in the book, a presto played in a drawing room full of people that undoes him completely. It takes ninety minutes and you will want to argue with someone afterwards.