Throughout the history of mankind, human emotions have always been a preeminent factor in shaping the society of a nation. Offering the ability to grow on the basis of understanding not only oneself but also coping with and understanding the people in the surroundings of a society. And one of the vital emotions that connect people has been the feeling of caring for others we all know as Love. However, the term love is being used in various and vast amounts of relations amongst people. There is familial love, friendly love, love for beauty or on every aspect of the beautiful world and romantic love. Between all these variations of the aforementioned emotion, love is strongly expressed and defined in romantic love; where, it can become so immense that the toll of it initiates physical ailment. This ailment that takes place because of love is named Lovesickness.

Lovesickness has been a very famous and a natural ailment that has been brought up in various romantic novels, short stories and even on medical researches due to the vast psychological and physiological components it displays and explains a person’s personality.

The mystery of how romantic love emerges within a lover, how unrequited love brings about Lovesickness and the decisions a lovesick character takes to act upon influenced authors to narrate great written works, depicting its symptoms, causes, and treatments. One such famous author named Leo Tolstoy draws the symptoms, causes, and treatments of Lovesickness through the character Pozdnyshev by displaying his catastrophic decisions by using metaphors in the Kreutzer Sonata.

Love has been one of the fascinating emotions where it is capable of taking over the physiology of a person depending on the type of love a lover might be feeling. From the time of Hippocrates, love had started to be defined and explained through various ideas. Hippocratic theory on love was the theory of humor where the body was said to consist of four bodily liquids when they are unbalanced, the person becomes lovesick. Then, throwing off the Hippocratic theory, Plato explains that there are only two types of love, which is a sexual love, only physical desires, and love for beauty, spiritual love. However, Plato’s theory did not last long and was taken over more logical and scientific thoughts of Aristotle, where he said, lovesickness is both physiological and psychological passion and desire for the significant other. In the Kreutzer Sonata, Aristotle’s physiology and psychology of passion are explained through the actions of Pozdnyshev.

The speaker of Kreutzer Sonata displays his lovesick character Pozdnyshev through the lense of jealousy. Often times, the common symptoms a lovesick patient shows are, “sleeplessness, loss of appetite, fixation of the mind on the beloved, flushing and racing pulse.”(C. Kate). However Pozdnyshev’s case is a little different, where he does indeed feel love for his wife and shows fixation on her, but he does it indirectly, without expressing and sharing his thoughts about her wife to his wife. In the text Pozdnyshev’s lovesick shows a significant change in chapter twenty-three where he expresses with both amusement and disgust towards the violinist and his wife that, “Those shining eyes, that severe, significant expression while she played, and her melting languor and feeble, pathetic and blissful smile after they had finished.” (Tolstoy 221). To Pozdnyshev, this scenario reminded him of how far away from his wife is from him emotionally and how he is unable to create similar expressions on his wife’s face. However, in the setting, it was the violinist whose companionship in the music makes his wife feel joyous. Pozdnyshev’s inability to get close to his wife makes him jealous of the violinist as he thinks her weak, feeble and blissful smile might get stolen by the violinist. The finishing of their music then also relayed this message that the wife and the violinist are having a romantic and spiritual conversation through their eyes and gazes and smile only. This to Pozdnyshev in one hand was beautiful when he was looking only to his happy wife, but concurrently disgusting as it was occurring due to another man similar of his age who is connecting with the wife virtually.

Pozdnyshev’s fixation on his wife and the inability to convey his thoughts also show up in chapter twenty-two where he says, “We jump from one subject to another, reproach one another, ‘oh that’s nothing new, it’s always been like that.’ ‘You said…’‘No, I didn’t say so.’‘Then I am telling lies!…’ You feel that at any moment that dreadful quarreling which makes you wish to kill yourself or she will begin.”(Tolstoy 207). In this conversation, where the setting is a fight of ego between who would win over the other in absurd arguments show that there is care for Pozdnyshev toward his wife where he is asking her to understand and accept him and to stop the speech brawl, and it could be understood through him saying that he would want to kill himself. However, his wife was simply not accepting and understanding how Pozdnyshev feels, and for such, he becomes infuriated and drives himself to mania love where he feels to kill his wife. Such absurd arguments, in general, can be stopped and be avoided if the indignation of unrequited love is not shown in such situations. Rather talking and sharing over these feelings with a little bravery would have been the better choice. However, his lovesickness is so strong that he is unable to establish a logical situation and is overrun by his thoughts of his wife moving away from him and towards the violinist. He says in chapter twenty-five that, “at any rate from the moment I sat down in the train I could no longer control my imagination, and with an extraordinary vividness which inflamed my jealousy it painted incessantly… The vividness of which they presented themselves to me seemed to serve as proof that what I imagined was real.”(Tolstoy 225). Supporting the thought that Pozdnyshev is so much lovesick that even his unreal imaginations and thoughts are turning into reality to him. His agitated emotions, jealousy, and lovesickness are confirming that his wife is cheating on him for the violinist.

Pozdnyshev’s abhorrence on his imaginations shows that he was imagining that something sexual had happened between his wife and the violinist, which had stirred up his jealousy more. As a lovesick man, it is more common to imagine such absurd images as men are more vulnerable when he gets the feeling of his partner in a sexual relationship, as “Men report greater distress than do women in response to a partner’s sexual infidelity (for example, having sexual intercourse with someone else).”(Romantic Jealousy in Early Adulthood and Later Life). Men psychologically try to keep their female partner always attracted towards themselves, because they have the fear of losing the power to become the father of a child. And, this feeling of loss creates a mood of jealousy and hatred towards a rival man who seeks partnership from a woman already in a relationship. Now, this context may sound out of place against Pozdnyshev’s situation, however, the instinct of wanting to be the father of a child resonates the sexual aspect of a relationship between a man and a woman. In the story, although there is no context showing anything about having children between the violinist and the wife, it still is showing vividly that the violinist’s behavior can take over Pozdnyshev’s place and his wife, leaving him behind as a cuckold, dethrone him from his title of a genuine husband and dishonor him in the society. This deep connection of love, sex, jealousy, loss of respect and brittle relation with the wife has created all the jargon of emotions in Pozdnyshev, making him lovesick.

The causes of Pozdnyshev to fall into lovesickness were the dispute between the feelings between him and his wife, as well as the noble culture in Russia. Pozdnyshev even calls his wife his “property”(Tolstoy) since he has become her husband through the social norm, and refuses to understand his wife as another liberate human being. Pozdnyshev not accepting his wife as his equal partner, but also wanting to get love and respect from her has had deemed him to be the hostage of lovesickness. Then him imagining furious and absurd sexual scenarios between his wife and the violinist, and his infuriating jealousy was the symptom of his ailment.

However, the Kreutzer Sonata’s portrayal over lovesickness is not the only way to identify whether someone is lovesick or not. The reason being lovesickness consists of unquestionable boundless combinations of causes, symptoms, and treatments. Love does not always cause to all people in the world, neither does everyone get to experience a robust love in their lifetime. The reason why is because love occurs suddenly between two distinct people and it does not occur when there is a boundary such as a marriage set between two counter sexes. True love is unconditional and marriage breaks the first rule of falling into love with one another since marriage becomes a condition for the husband and wife. Which is why, it is seen more that there is a feeling of care between arranged married couples, but the aspect of love is absent. A quote from “The Eye, Heart… Miniature Portraits” says that “Everybody knows that love can have no place between husband and wife. They may be bound to each other by a great and immoderate affection, but their feelings cannot take the place of love.”(Dixon 2010). The reason again is that when someone loves his or her beloved, they try to understand through various lengths of difficulties and through sacrifices of what the significant other feels or likes, how the person is in real. But in a bounded relation, they are forced to know one another because they have been put together into shackles by the society. To support, author Dixon from “The Eye, Heart… Miniature Portraits” says, “Generally speaking, the “love,” experienced by lovers and the “affection” felt by spouses were entirely different passions–one hot and uncontrollable, the other mildly warm and predictable” (Dixon 2010). Lovers love can go to an extent due to the ability to leave one away when the relationship does not go in the right direction because then, society would not put any strain on the persons individually. However, if they are married, they are to represent a good behavior to the society. In this situation, both the husband or the wife might fall into a romantic relationship, causing them both to be strongly lovesick as Pozdnyshev. Because there would get rivalries, there would be unrequited love, there would be narcissism and egoism involved in the relationships, causing an outbreak of lovesickness.

In the nineteenth century Russian society, love had been an unrealistic and an exaggerated topic since, one, the society itself was banning the classes of people to blend, and two, there was the force of the family that had couples engage for marriage without any romantic encounters. The empty feeling of not having to or show love and the urge to experience it is a general human nature since humans have the strongest instinct when it comes to survival. The psychological phenomenon leads to physical relations between a lover and the beloved, causing sex. Since sex is one of the strongest and preeminent ways for humans to stop going to extinct, this emotional connection is needed to connect with one another. “Love creates a dwelling place in space and time, filling it up so that it becomes reachable, moveable.”(Lutz) says Deborah Lutz in her article which defines that it is human nature to connect via some type of system that would help humans feel closer to each other. However, since this love plays like a competition, and it is fully replenished when the love is in a pair- between a couple, an entry of a third person in the pair creates a distortion of feelings, turning it into jealousy. Referencing to Othello, narrated by Shakespeare, Othello’s jealousy and distrust towards his wife Desdemona was so strong that, like Pozdnyshev, he kills Desdemona. Both these characters had love towards their wives, however, the distrust, and lovesickness, of “may be” losing their wives created strong physical want where they kill of their beloved by their own hands.

Love is a force of passion and attraction that connects us, humans, together, however, when this feeling is unrequited and unfound from the desired significant other, it turns into a horrible nightmare where psychological and physiological sickness occurs. Curing it also becomes a tedious work due to the medicine being accepting the love by the beloved that the lover is showing. However, lovesickness paints the insight of the human nature of how disbelief and jealousy act upon the passionate feelings towards the significant other when the love is unrequited.

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