L'istituzione del matrimonio in Tolstoj

The Institution of Marriage in Tolstoy Family Happiness, Anna Karenina, The Kreutzer Sonata Maria Zalambani Tolstoy’s works are not just literary masterpieces. They are also mirrors of the cultural, historical and social transformations that were taking place in Czarist Russia. This study examines three of his novels from this perspective, as reflecting the evolution of the marriage institution in Russia during the second half of the nineteenth century. Family Happiness anticipates the transition from the marriage of convenience, intrinsic to the economic and social structure deriving from large landed property, to the bourgeois marriage, mirroring the social changes which were taking place after the Great Reforms. Anna Karenina is the novel which best illustrates the nature of the marriage of convenience, depicting its definitive crisis in Anna’s attempts to flaunt and justify her adultery. In this she challenges her contemporaries, and decrees the end of the marriage of convenience, which tolerated adultery provided it was committed privately. Anna’s fearless decision to make her relationship public leads to her death. But her choice also illustrates a new alternative for women who, towards the end of the century, were acquiring greater awareness of the “woman problem”. If Family happiness shows the first cracks in the institution of aristocratic marriage by questioning a mechanism which, being a mere contract of alliance between families, does not contemplate personal feelings and allows no expectation of happiness for the spouses (in particular for women), Anna Karenina shows an institution in deep crisis. An attempt at solution can be glimpsed in the complex sequences of events in The Kreutzer Sonata. Beyond Pozdnyšev’s murderous insanity, we can see a transition to a new type of marriage based on sentiments. Between the lines of his confession, we can see the birth of a bourgeois marriage relationship, with a nuclear family based on love and the education of children (previously delegated to nurses and tutors). The time of the Great Reforms, with the birth of a new social class and the demise of the aristocracy, requires a family structure to match these changed conditions. The bourgeois family is now the focus for feelings, for love, as well as for sexuality, for which it is the only focus permitted by state and church. Nonetheless, the family remains a place in which relations of power on the axes of husband-wife and parents-children continue to exist, albeit with new modalities. The transition to a modern model does not mean the end of the family as a microcosm with disciplinary powers among its members, but its affirmation in different terms and manners. Considering these issues also raises the question of the relationship between society and literature. As well as mirroring social and cultural change, literature contributes to produce such change. This study aims to read historical reality from between the lines of literature and at the same time to show how, in a literature-centred society like Russia’s, Tolstoy’s works may have helped generate new models for life. Thus Anna’s suicide is a shout of denunciation which appears to have penetrated the unconscious of Tolstoy’s readers, influencing their mentalities and their behaviour.