Family Happiness by Leo Tolstoy

First published:Semeynoye schastye, 1859 (English translation, 1888)

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: The 1850’s

Locale: A country estate, St. Petersburg, and a spa in Baden-Baden

Principal Characters:

• Marya “Masha” Alexandrovna, the narrator, a young Russian gentlewoman
• Sergei Mikhailych, her guardian and later her husband

The Novel

Family Happiness is divided into two parts. In the first, Masha, a girl of seventeen whose mother has just died, relates the story of her romance with her guardian, Sergei Mikhailych, a man of thirty-six and a former friend of her father (who has died some years earlier). The romance culminates in their engagement and marriage. The second part concerns Masha’s married life. The couple’s relationship temporarily deteriorates, as Masha is corrupted by the false values of high society in St. Petersburg but is eventually restored on a new, “realistic” plane of serenity (or perhaps merely resignation and habit).

The first part of the novel is lyrical and evocative, as it proceeds with acute psychological subtlety to depict the growth of an intense man-woman relationship. There are formidable obstacles to be overcome, since the problem here, unlike that in the conventional boy-girl encounter, is not the formation of an entirely new relationship but the transformation of an old one. Masha must cease to think of Sergei Mikhailych as a surrogate father and must substitute him for the youthful, melancholy, romantic hero of her fantasies; and Sergei correspondingly must learn to regard Masha as his equal and no longer as a child. Sergei must also abandon his mocking and suspicious attitude toward “romance” itself and take Masha seriously as a woman, at the same time as he learns to view himself as an acceptable suitor for her de-spite the gap in their ages. These adjustments take considerable time. The underlying sexual attraction is impeded, mainly by Sergei’s strong sense of moral responsibility and by his belief that he is too old for Masha, but she too has to outgrow negative feelings, those engendered by her rebellion against his paternalism. There are many stops, starts, hesitations, and misunderstandings, all handled by Leo Tolstoy with great delicacy in a poetic, summer atmosphere learned from Ivan Turgenev, complete with gardens, nightingales, and music. Even after their mutual love has been acknowledged, Sergei continues to play the role of Masha’s mentor, while she finds herself more and more his “creature,” thinking his thoughts and sharing his emotions. At last, Masha, now thoroughly in love, breaks down Sergei’s scruples; they become engaged and soon afterward are married. Their relationship is strongly marked by male dominance, but Masha seems to like marriage that way. “I felt,” she says after the wedding, “that I was completely his, and that I was happy in his power over me.”

The marriage is at first idyllically happy, though Masha feels some twinges of guilt that their happiness is too self-absorbed, too lacking in social usefulness. Since they are living in his mother’s house, Masha has in fact no responsibilities and very little to do. She begins to grow bored, especially since Sergei refuses to allow her any share in his business affairs. They quarrel, and eventually he agrees to take her to St. Petersburg as a diversion. In the city, she displays a talent for social life and becomes caught up in it, enjoying the excitement and the attention she receives. Sergei is now bored in turn, but their return to the country is repeatedly postponed. Quarrels occur more and more frequently, and they sense a gulf opening between them.

Three years pass and a baby son is born. At first, Masha is absorbed by maternal feelings, but after she begins to go into society again, she loses all feeling for her child. Sergei and Masha go abroad to take the waters in Germany, where Masha flirts with a sexy Italian marquis but pulls back, frightened, from the brink of adultery. The couple return to their estate in the country (Sergei’s mother has died), another child is born, and slowly they settle into a tranquil, contented life. This new serenity lacks the intense happiness of the honeymoon period but is seemingly destined to last.

The Characters

For a male author to write a first-person narrative from the woman’s point of view was something of a tour de force for Tolstoy, as it was a feat never attempted by his rival and model, Turgenev (nor, indeed, ever again by Tolstoy). The consensus is that he succeeds remarkably well, especially in the first part. The complex and often contradictory emotions experienced by a girl on the verge of womanhood; her lost and helpless feeling as the senior surviving member of her family, to some extent responsible for her younger sister yet at the same time filled with the exuberance of youth and the desire to have a fulfilled life of her own—all this Tolstoy renders with acute psychological insight. To be sure, the form presents some difficulties. Like most reminiscential narrators, Masha, recalling these events in later years, is credited with a mnemonic capacity that far exceeds the limits of plausibility. More important, her understanding is necessarily limited; the reader has only her inferences about the inner life of Sergei Mikhailych, rather than the full revelations Tolstoy was able to provide when he used the perspective of the omniscient author (as he did in his great novels).

Masha’s development in the second part of the novel is, for the most part, handled convincingly. It is a process of maturation, as she outlives the romantic ecstasy of the honeymoon period, passes through what amounts to a “wild oats” phase, and finally settles down into a more realistic version of “happily ever after” (the title given the story in one English translation).

The chief weakness of Family Happiness is Tolstoy’s rendition of the effect on Masha of motherhood. Here Tolstoy’s intuition failed him. He had not yet had any experience of paternity, and his description of Masha’s babies, and her feelings about them, remains quite unreal and seemingly introduced, at least in part, only to make Tolstoy’s polemical point about the corrupting effects of high society even on such a basic biological response as maternal love.

On the other hand, the characterization of Sergei Mikhailych has vitality. He is a vigorous, well-balanced, good-natured man with a strong sense of moral responsibility. He is both scrupulous and intelligent: He will not allow himself to take advantage of his privileged position as Masha’s guardian, and he also wonders, for both their sakes, whether it is wise for two persons so far apart in age and experience to marry. In the second part of the novel, Sergei is perhaps a bit improbably passive. Stating his view that people have to learn such things for themselves, he abandons entirely the mentor role he had earlier played and simply bides his time while Masha painfully discovers for herself the ultimate emptiness of high society and the danger of toying with sexuality. Not without reason, she reproaches him bitterly for thus casting her adrift.

Critical Context

Family Happiness is the last work in the series that might be called early Tolstoy, extending from Detstvo (1852; Childhood, 1862), his first published work, through Otrochestvo (1854; Boyhood, 1886) and Yunost (1857; Youth, 1886), and several short stories. He had dealt with a wide range of themes: the subjugation of the Caucasus, the Crimean War, agriculture, art and the artist, death. In Family Happiness, he took up the classic literary subject he had not yet treated, love. Of necessity, this change of subject put him in competition with Turgenev, whose specialty was “first love.” Tolstoy, however, had no sympathy with Turgenev’s minor-key poetry of lost loves, being skeptical in general of romantic exaggerations and idealizations and having a strong sense of biological imperatives. Nature cares nothing for lost loves,he insisted; nature wants fertilization, babies. He would therefore write a Turgenevesque idyllic love story, but unlike Turgenev, he would carry it past the altar into married life, shown with both its warts and its nightingales. Even in the courtship phase, despite the book’s genuine lyricism, Tolstoy debunked some romantic cliches.

The aftermath of Family Happiness marked a crisis in Tolstoy’s career. The enormous success of Childhood and the Sevastopol sketches had not been sustained, and his later stories attracted little attention. Tolstoy was becoming disgusted with the literary life in St. Petersburg, with its factions, it politics, and its vanities. Family Happiness itself was hardly noticed by the critics, who at that time were interested primarily in muckraking exposes of social evils. Tolstoy himself lost confidence in his capacities as a writer and in the validity of the literary profession. “Family Happiness,” he wrote in his diary, “is a shameful abomination,” and in a letter to a friend he stated, “I am buried as a writer and as a human being.... There is not a live word in the whole thing. The ugliness of language, which derives from the ugliness of thought, is inexpressible.” He retreated to his estate at Yasnaya Polyana, resolving to have nothing more to do with literature, and for four years he did not publish another line of fiction.

Bibliography

Bayley, John. Tolstoy and the Novel, 1966.

Christian, R.F. Tolstoy: A Critical Introduction, 1969.

Gustafson, Richard F. Leo Tolstoy, Resident and Stranger: A Study in Fiction and Theology, 1986.

Kisseleff, Natalia. “Idyll and Ideal: Aspects of Sentimentalism in Tolstoy’s Family Happiness,” in Canadian Slavonic Papers. XXI (1979), pp. 336-346.

Poggioli, Renato. “Tolstoy’s Domestic Happiness: Beyond Pastoral Love,” in The Oaten Flute, 1975.