Family Happiness

Family Happiness is an 1859 novella written by Leo Tolstoy, first published in The Russian Messenger. The story concerns the love and marriage of a young girl, Mashechka (17 years old), and the much older Sergey Mikhaylych (36), an old family friend. This maybe echoes Tolstoy's own marriage to a woman of 18 when he was 34. After a somewhat awkward courtship, the two are married and move to Mikhaylych's home. Over the course of the 100-page story, Mashechka finds that married life and her feelings for Mikhaylych are much more complex than she had thought and have little to do with her previous, slightly naive, notions of marriage, hence the ironic overtones of the title, "Family Happiness".