song without Words

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Song without words (Russian Песня без слов, Pesnja bes slow) is a novel by Sofja Andrejewna Tolstaja . She wrote it after A Question of Guilt in the Years 1897-1900.

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After the death of her mother, the protagonist, Alexandra Alexejewna, known as Sascha, is overwhelmed by grief. After months of bitter dejection, she realizes that her distress lies not only in the loss of her mother, but also in her unhappy marriage. Her husband, Pyotr Afanassievich, a good husband with no artistic interests, is an expressionless official of an insurance company. His greatest passion is his garden. He is blind to the needs of his young, musically gifted wife.

The family rents a secluded house in the country for the summer months. There is only a small, yellow summer house nearby that a musician is moving into. When she “in the soft silence of a May night” unexpectedly heard the sonorous melody from the song without words Op. 62, No. 1 heard from Mendelssohn Bartholdy , Sascha felt "reconciled with life" for the first time after the death of her mother. Every day she goes to the house and waits to hear the unknown musician play. They get to know each other on a walk, and the neighbor, Ivan Ilyich, as he introduces himself, accompanies Sascha home. After tea he plays a Beethoven sonata for the couple . “'So that's music,' thought Sascha, astonished. 'Why didn't I know this before?' "

Back in Moscow, Sascha goes to concerts, places more importance on her appearance than before, and often goes out. She longs for Ivan Ilyich. When he unexpectedly appears at her place one evening, she almost passes out from excitement. He plays the piano and Sascha feels "that she is lost". Mendelssohn Bartholdy's piece, which she had not heard “since that evening in May”, sounds under Ivan Ilyich's hands more expressively than ever before.

Sascha wants to overcome her affection for Ivan Ilyich and avoids him. On a walk she suddenly finds herself on a bridge. She brushes aside the thought of throwing herself into the water and rushes to a friend. Sascha goes mad. "The song of her love for Ivan Ilyich was sung to the end without words, and this destroyed her life."

Autobiographical background

It was a stroke of fate that gave rise to Tolstaja's second novel. “My dear Wanchka died yesterday at 11 o'clock in the evening, my God, and I am alive,” wrote Sofja Tolstaya on February 23, 1895. “Everything, everything has gone from me. ... Suddenly life is over, ”she said about the death of her youngest son, who died unexpectedly at the age of less than seven. Tolstaya's distress after Vanichka's death was an expression of all her grief over the unresolved contradictions of their marriage in recent years, during which increasingly differences of opinion about the right way of life poisoned the atmosphere in the Tolstoy house. “I was in such a terrible desperation”, it says in her memoirs, “as one endures it only once in a lifetime. But, unexpectedly and by chance, music liberated me from this state. ”
The“ door to understanding music ”was opened by Tolstaya Sergei Ivanovich Taneyev . In the weeks after Wanetschka's death Taneyev was a frequent guest in the Tolstoy's Moscow house and played for Sofja Andreevna. With Taneyev Tolstaya found that comfort and that calm that her husband was unable to give her.
In Song Without Words Tolstaya processed her affection for music and her platonic affection for Taneyev.

Edition history

Like the novel A Question of Guilt , the novel was not published during Sofja Tolstaja's lifetime. Almost a century after Sofja Tolstaja's death, Song Without Words was first published in German in 2010. The novel has not yet been published in Russia.

expenditure

therein: Afterword by Natalja Sharandak, pp. 227–246
therein: Editorial note from Vitaly Remisow, Director of the State Tolstoy Museum, Moscow, pp. 247–252

Reviews

Der Spiegel took song without words in its series "The most important books of the week". Sibylle Mulot reminded the main character a little of Effi Briest in her strong moments : “The narrative mastery of Tolstaja is stupendous in both novels. They can stand for themselves, you would read them without a biographical proposition. ” In the Frankfurter Rundschau , Olga Martynova was amazed at how openly Tolstoja came to dialogue with the Kreutzer sonata in this novella too . However, in contrast to A Question of Guilt, it is not a polemic, but a “poetic monument” of a passion.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The Most Important Books of the Week, May 12, 2010 . In: Der Spiegel, May 12, 2010.
  2. ↑ Olga Martynova: Sofja Tolstoja's "Song without Words" - The Restless . in: Frankfurter Rundschau , June 4, 2010.