The Complete Works of Count Tolstoy/Volume 18/The Kreutzer Sonata/Chapter 7
VII.
"Well, it was these jerseys, and locks, and bustles that caught me.
"It was easy to catch me because I had been brought up under those conditions which, as cucumbers are forced in a hothouse, force young men to fall in love. Our stimulating, superabundant food, united with complete physical inactivity, is nothing but a systematic incitement to lust. You may marvel at it, or not, but it is a fact. I myself did not notice it until very recently. But now I know it. And it is precisely this which vexes me: nobody knows it, but they all continue talking such nonsense as that which that lady has been talking.
"Yes, one spring, peasants had been working on a railroad embankment near my farm. The usual food of a peasant lad consists of bread, kvas, and onions, and with this he is alive, happy, and healthy; he performs light field labour. He comes to work on the railroad, and he receives his food allotment of porridge and a pound of meat, but he works off this meat on sixteen hours of work back of a wheelbarrow weighing more than a thousand pounds,—and this agrees with him. But we devour two pounds of meat, and venison, and fish, and all kinds of highly exciting eatables and drinks,—where does it all go to? To create sensual excesses. If it goes that way, and the safety-valve is open, all is well; but close up the valve, as I used to close it temporarily, and you at once get incitement, which, passing through the prism of our artificial life, will find its expression in an infatuation of the clearest water, sometimes even in platonic love. And thus I fell in love, like the rest.
Everything was in evidence: the transports, the tender moods, and the poetry. In reality this love of mine was the result, on the one hand, of the activity of her mamma and of the tailors, and, on the other, of a surplus of food swallowed by me, combined with an inactive life. If, on the one hand, there had been no rowing and no tailors with their finely made waists, etc., and my wife had worn an unsightly capote and remained at home, and if I, on the other, had been under normal conditions, a man devouring no more food than was necessary to do work, and my safety-valve had been open,—for the time being it happened to be closed,—I should not have fallen in love, and nothing would have happened.