Customer Reviews

Family Happiness: Stories (Harper Perennial Classic Stories)

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I'd never read Tolstoy because I was always intimidated by the size of his major works; thus, a collection of his short stories was an appealing first step.

"Family Happiness" is the primary work in this book. In it, Tolstoy opines on what makes a successful marriage. I was amazed by how prescient to today was his 19th century relationship advice. Because he grasps universal and eternal elements of the human soul, his advice will be just as relevant 100 years from now.

The other stories display Tolstoy's thoughts on work, faith, temptation, high-society, and ambition - among other topics - and are equally as enlightening.

Tolstoy clearly did not sacrifice brevity for depth as these five short stories were all outstanding reads. A great introduction to one of history's deepest writers. Highly recommend.

Critics, such as John Bayley, tell us that Tolstoy disliked Family Happiness as soon as he completed it: "the main (reason) seems to have been because the story was made up." Tolstoy lacked experience with the events he was narrating. Tolstoy seems to be right. The story is well-written, but it does not fully explain the reaction of the husband in the tale.

The first half of the story details the developing love of a seventeen year old girl, who grew up secluded in the country, to a 36 year old business man, a friend of her father, a man more than twice her age, who had traveled much. The second half tells about her life after her marriage; both she and her husband are very much in love.

However, she discovers that she is bored with life and persuades her husband to live some months in the large city. She attends many social events there and experiences a life she only heard about, a life that her older husband had long ago experienced and no longer needed or desired. Her new life creates a rift between the couple. The husband clearly loves his wife and gives her all she desires, but the love changes. It dissolves into a love that many middle age couples experience.

She realizes her mistake and tries to reignite the former deeper happier love, but her husband, who insists that he loves her, tells her that there is no possibility to return to the first love. It is this decision by the husband or his insight that is not sufficiently explored.

Family Happiness was first published in 1859, and it marks one of the first of Tolstoy's fictional explorations of the theme of family happiness. It is autobiographical to a large extent and was written after his engagement to his ward was broken off. It explores what might have happened had the marriage taken place.

Tolstoy searched for family happiness his entire life. He did not know it in its complete form as a child as his mother died when he was about 18 months old and his father when he was nine. After his father's death, little Leo and his three brothers and sister were shifted around among other relatives. First his paternal grandmother had guardianship of the children, but she too died 11 months after his father's death. Guardianship then passed to a paternal aunt, who also died. There was then a custody battle between another paternal aunt and a paternal cousin (the model for Sonya in War and Peace) with the paternal aunt winning.

None of the five children ever found family happiness in their adult lives.

Tolstoy was obsessed with trying to understand what family happiness consists of and how to achieve it. This obsession is evident in the fictional marriages he portrayed in War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Kreutzer Sonata, and The Devil. Some believe that Tolstoy did achieve family happiness in the early years of his marriage, but I would argue that the relationship between husband and wife was volatile from the beginning, disintegrating over the years until his celebrated flight from home ending in his death from pneumonia in 1910.

This book is a great place to start with Tolstoy if you are a bit intimidated by "war and peace" or "Anna Karenia" being so huge. This volume has several of Tolstoy's quality short stories including my personal favourite "family happiness" but also "the devil" which i think is a good introduction to Tostoy's religious and spiritual writings. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in Tolstoy or russian litrature in general but who is not sure where to start.

"Family Happiness" is one of Leo Tolstoy's most powerful short stories. It's quite heartbreaking, from the older husband telling his much younger wife to stop playing the piano, to the humiliated wife saying in the conclusion "you showed much calculation and very little love." Tolstoy wrote this story because his younger female ward had ended their engagement- she found him too controlling. So, in this story, he tried to conjure his familial ideal... and There Are No Happy Endings. The younger wife is completely subservient to the husband, and while she is completely open&vulnerable to him... there are aspects of him that are shut off to her. The intimacy isn't mutual. The husband treats his wife like a disobedient&petulant child... he never takes her seriously as a moral adult. It's more of a father/daughter relationship than that of spouses, equals. When the wife goes off on her own, the husband emotionally abandons her heartlessly. He doesn't provide guidance as the older partner. Instead, he lectures her. The only female character that Tolstoy makes a fully moral, intellectual adult is Anna Karenina (Penguin Classics)... and she ends up dead.

"Family Happiness" is an ironic title. It doesn't end happily. When Tolstoy wrote it, he wasn't married and hadn't had a family yet. Love and Hatred: The Tormented Marriage of Leo and Sonya Tolstoy shows how Leo's unrealistic idealization had disastrous real-life consequences. One could argue he married Sofia Behrs because she admired his writing. She had memorized his Childhood, Boyhood, Youth (Oneworld Classics).

"Family Happiness" is almost Jungian in its exploration of the husband&wife's relationship. The husband is old enough to be his wife's father, and he acts as a father as well. It's the Electra complex. With its unhappy ending, Mourning Becomes Electra The young woman loses her mother-in order to marry her father-like husband. This foreshadows "Anna Karenina" in which both Anna Karenina&Princess Kitty are married to men old enough to have fathered them. "Family Happiness" is a perfect piece of Russian literature and psychology.

Tolstoy's Family Happiness is passe' and boring. I read many books each year, and this is not one I would recommend. I would highly recommend "Into the wild", "The woman who walked to Russia", "Garden Spell", "Desert Queen", I could go on, with many other subjects, but that will have to wait. S.L.Munch