Family Happiness (1859) distills courtship, marriage, and the sobering education of desire. In Masha's first-person retrospect, a young heiress weds the older Sergey Mikhaylych; rapture in the countryside yields to Petersburg salons and estrangement, before a chastened peace. Tolstoy's psychological realism, spare, observant, quietly ironic, tracks how seasons and social milieus erode passion yet ripen companionship. Written amid the rise of Russian realism and published in The Russian Messenger, it foreshadows Anna Karenina and The Kreutzer Sonata. An aristocrat tempered by the Caucasus and Crimean wars, Tolstoy distrusted salon glitter and revered peasant steadiness at Yasnaya Polyana. His 1850s diaries record fierce self-examination, swings between indulgence and ascetic resolve, and experiments in education, sources for Sergey's sober ideals and Masha's schooling in disillusion. On the eve of his own marriage, he anatomized how ardor is transformed into duty. Readers seeking a lucid, unsentimental anatomy of domestic life will find this novella indispensable. Compact yet resonant, it rewards attention to tonal shifts, gesture, and social detail, ideal for courses on nineteenth-century realism and for admirers of Turgenev or Austen. It clarifies what love becomes when enchantment yields to conscience.
Quickie Classics summarizes timeless works with precision, preserving the author's voice and keeping the prose clear, fast, and readable-distilled, never diluted. Enriched Edition extras: Introduction · Synopsis · Historical Context · Author Biography · Brief Analysis · 4 Reflection Q&As · Editorial Footnotes.
