The question of the relationship between love and sexuality remains one of the central issues and provokes heated debates in philosophy, religion and art. Plato believed that only sublime love, based not on sensuality, but on ideas of beauty and moral perfection, is genuine. Obviously, Tolstoy agreed with this. From Plutarch’s point of view, only sensual love that leads to the birth of children can be considered the most valuable and worthy. At the time when Tolstoy was tormented by the conflict between the spiritual and the physical, i.e. at the end of the 19th century, Freud formulated his first ideas on psychoanalysis and put forward the idea that the basis of many diseases, hysteria and neuroses lies in the sexual aspect.
Freud writes: “…People get sick not because they are trying to perform tasks that are simple for a civilized brain, but because they neglect their sexual life at the moment.” Or this: “…Our civilization must learn to live in harmony with the demands of human sexuality.” Tolstoy would have condemned him.
Unlike Jung or Otto Gross, who believed that sexual fidelity to one partner leads to neurosis and exhaustion of love, Tolstoy, towards the end of his life, comes to the conclusion that a man should marry the woman “with whom he first fell in love.” Because, in fact, sexual relations with every woman are equal for him, and the less a man “classifies” women, the less temptation.
And here’s something even more interesting. In his work On the Commonest Degradation of Love Life, Freud writes that some people divide their love life into two directions: sexual love and spiritual love. When they love, they do not covet, and when they covet, they cannot love. For such people, sex is unconsciously associated with sin, so they can only love those who are not associated with sexuality in their heads.
This is exactly our Lev Nikolaevich, who lost his mother early and could only love an unattainable ideal. As soon as a girl became a person of flesh and blood, she lost her sacred status. And only once with the woman with whom he sought simple satisfaction (the peasant Aksinya), young Lev Nikolaevich seemed to feel something special. And he was so frightened by the fact that it turns out that you can desire and love at the same time, that he immediately decided: she is the devil. And he wrote a story about this, “The Devil”. Very frank and truthful, to the point that he hid it from his wife for another 20 years.
