In Tolstoy’s time debates about sexuality and female emancipation (the “Woman Question”) were inseparable from fundamental decisions regarding how Russian society was to be organized. Were women to be maternal or not, educated or not, autonomous or not? Such questions were tied to thorny economic, religious, legal, and political issues. Tolstoy’s oeuvre reveals his intense engagement with contemporary debates, as well as his increasingly radical ideas about how such problems should be resolved. Anna Karenina is arguably among Tolstoy’s less extreme statements on sex and gender, yet it can be read to imply that a woman cannot sever the bonds of marriage and stay alive. The Kreutzer Sonata goes so far as to suggest that only radical chastity, even if it leads to humanity’s extinction, can free people from the degradation, commodification, and violence that are inevitable consequences of sexual relations. In What is Art? Tolstoy establishes a symbolic link between the sexual marketplace, the art marketplace, and finally all marketplaces – and thus, it seems, all of modern civilization.

While Tolstoy is best known as a novelist, many become acquainted with his works through musical adaptations. These multinational adaptations span different genres and vary in their degrees of fame, sophistication, and resemblance to the original. This chapter adopts the analogy of a theme and variations to consider the symbiotic relationship between source texts and adaptations. The characteristics unique to literature vis-à-vis music are also discussed to illustrate the advantages and challenges of setting literature, in particular prose, to music. The chapter examines works in each genre with musical analyses and offers genre-specific commentary. In addition to instrumental music, ballet, and opera, musicals are included because they bridge high art and more popular genres and have been instrumental in revitalizing many classics of Russian literature. The chapter concludes with a discussion of operatic adaptations, using Prokofiev’s War and Peace as an example. The opera illustrates many challenges typical of setting sprawling prose texts to music of various genres, such as reducing the number of scenes and characters as well as reimagining the text. The appendix includes a list of adaptations; as many works on the list are not well known, they may be further examined by scholars.