The end of "Family Happiness"

"Family Happiness" ends by making the reason its title is what it is abundantly clear.

Having finished the book, I feel like I'm justified in writing that Tolstoy wasn't just trying to write from the perspective of a woman. On the whole, "Family Happiness" is instead about the ways in which happiness changes as people age. Or, specifically in the case of this story, gain experience.

On the whole, I quite enjoyed it, and if this single Tolstoy short story is anything to go by I'll enjoy the rest of this collection. Perhaps Russian literature will hold more interest for me than the Victorian canon ever has, even.

However, I found the thematic and emotional climax of "Family Happiness," a little stilted.

Maybe it's Aylmer Maude and J.D. Duff's translation, maybe it's just the way that Russians of the time expressed emotion, but it comes out in blocks rather than English Victorian writers' rivulets.

On the level of the page, what I mean is that each emotion that Masha expresses and feels as she pours out her heart to Sergei appears to be trapped in its paragraph. The emotions in what I've read by Jane Austen and Ellen Wood instead flows from paragraph to paragraph, contained only within the character experiencing them.

Perhaps such blocky emotional expression is just the mark of a man attempting to write as a woman. I doubt that the same was done in "The Death of Ivan Ilych," but we'll soon see how a decades older Tolstoy handles writing women (and in general).