SOURCE: "Tolstoj's Kreutzer Sonata and Dostoevskij's Notes from the Underground," in American Contributions to the Eighth international Congress of Slavists, Slavica Publishers, Inc., 1978, pp. 280-91.

Below, Jackson identifies the affinities of The Kreutzer Sonata and Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, focusing on structure, narrative form, and use of the "irrational hero" to express each author's views of social problems.

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At the end of the third chapter of The Kreutzer Sonata (1891) the nervous, exasperated and shrill Pozdnyšev—"landowner, university graduate and Marshal of the Nobility"—begins his account of a "critical episode" in his life, namely, the murder of his wife, with a definition of depravity. Addressing the elusive narrator, Pozdnyšev remarks:

"Depravity really doesn't lie in anything physical, indeed, no physical outrage can be called depravity. Depravity, real depravity, consists precisely in freeing oneself from moral relations with a woman with whom you enter into physical...