Leo Tolstoy - The Kreutzer Sonata, 1st Edition, 1st Printing! Bibliographic Office in Berlin - 1890

The Kreutzer Sonata

by Leo Tolstoy


Published by Bibliographic Office in Berlin, in 1890


First Edition

Original Hard binding


118 + 2 pages

19 cm x 12,5 cm


Overall a good and clean copy, please refer to the images

Extremely rare and very scarce first edition and first printing.

According to our knowledge this is the only copy for sale online worldwide!




Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Николаевич Толстой, 1828 – 1910), usually referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most influential authors of all time. He received nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature every year from 1902 to 1906 and for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1901, 1902, and 1909. Tolstoy never having won a Nobel Prize was a major Nobel Prize controversy, and remains one.


About the book: The Kreutzer Sonata (Russian: Крейцерова соната, Kreitzerova Sonata) is named after Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata. The novella explores themes of jealousy, marriage, and morality, centering on a man's confession of his wife's murder, driven by obsessive suspicion and societal hypocrisy. Tolstoy finished the novella in late 1889 and the story was recited for public in a friend's publishing house, but it was obvious that the Russian censorship would not allow the story to be published. Only a few hundreds of clandestine mimeograph (hectograph) copies of the handwritten text were circulated in Russia. In 1890 the German publishing house the “Bibliographic Office in Berlin” (B. Berg) published the story first in four languages (Russian, German, French and English) simultaneously. This is the First English Edition