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Lovers are just like two Leyden jars. Both are highly charged; the electricity is discharged by kisses and when it has been completely discharged- goodbye, love; cooling follows.
Ivan Goncharov, An Ordinary Story (1847)
Months pass, or a year, or two at most, and usually the passion has already burnt out...Love, however, did not disappear: from the frequent repetition of the reflex, where the representation of the beloved with some or all of her qualities constitutes the psychical content, her image is joined, so to speak, with all the movements of the lover's soul, and she has really become his other half. This is love by habit-friendship."
Ivan Sechenov, Reflexes of the Brain (1863)
No, I'm talking about the same thing, the preference for one man or woman over others, but I'm just asking-preference for how long?
For how long? For a long time, sometimes for the entire lifetime.
But this only happens in novels, and never in life.
Lev Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata (1889)
Petr Aduev's "scientific" joke in Goncharov's novel An Ordinary Story, the physiologist Ivan Sechenov's theory of "passions," and Pozdnyshev's insistence in Tolstoy's novella on the exact definition of love and its duration address essentially the same question: What happens to our concept of love if we accept the inevitable fading of passion over time? That these different works, separated by decades, raise this problem reflects, I would argue, not so much the natural human need to account for change in one's feelings as an anxiety produced by a particular cultural situation. The nature of love and its permanence had already become problematicized in the early post-Romantic era in Russia when the increasingly rational and materialist perspective (embodied in Goncharov's novel precisely in the uncle Aduev figure) compromised traditional Romantic values, above all the cult of passion and everlasting love. This problem assumed more specific social and practical significance in the 1860s and 70s with the growth of the movement for women's emancipation. 1 When, in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1875-77), Kitty's mother complains that it is no longer clear how one is to marry off one's daughter (18: 49),2 this ostensibly superficial concern echoes a deep social crisis, resulting from the collapse of traditional gender...