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patnatalie 's review for:
Семейное счастие
by Leo Tolstoy
The enthralling pain that this book brought me will have me sorrowfully ponder on it for days, I'm sure.
Usually I stray away from short stories, since it never feels like they can live up to the complexity and emotional investment of a novel of 350+ pages. A ridiculous claim, to be sure, which I now understand was folly.
Thankfully this is the work that made me question my baseless assumption.
I didn't know how I will react to Tolstoy, having it been 2 years since I read half of Anna Karenina, and waiting for it to once again arrive in the mail so that I can reread it, I decided to delve into another short Tolstoy.
I didn't have much hope that books or authors I loved as a youth will still remain close to my heart, since most of the times it's a disappointing reencounter.
Oh, how wrong I was and how I cherish the fact that this was but an illusion. The feelings I had reading Anna Karenina were brought back tenfold with this short novel, as if I had been living through this turbulous, beautiful book myself.
This book is a beautiful example of life that your soul can relate to.
A heartwrenching story that permits you to be angry and sad, but that at the same time gives you an ending that no matter how much you're angry at it, it's not a fully unhappy one. In fact, melancholically, I can't decide what exactly the end is.
The thing that I understood from this book is the thing that I kept denying for years, and that I thought wasn't so.
The thing that everyone tells you:
"You'll understand when you're older".
Your naive face and eyes looking at the lips of the face that sounded those words, your initial response being the immediate "No, I want to understand now".
Whilst you understand nothing, and with time and age and growing up, you learn that you do actually, inevitably, understand when you're older. It's just that as a child you can't comprehend the state of change as well as you can when you're an adult. You think your mind will stay the same, as your interests, as your friends, which clearly isn't true.
This was exactly the problem of Masha, and the problem of Sergey, for knowing that the case is so with this young girl, and giving in to the silly thing called love, infatuation.
Family Happiness is a book about a difference in age, about growing up, about change and about the stunning differences between men and women. With these differences being so fudamentally different between the two genders, adding an age difference of more than 20 years makes this story a sad but true reflection of the obstacles that these two faced, and makes itself relatable by presenting the relationship of a woman and a man.
Men and women are different, and have different needs and ideas of right and wrong. Just as a person of any age, and even personality, has different needs than the next one, with varying moral ideas.
This makes the mix of two people a tricky thing, a thing that needs to be examined, evaluated and nurtured, without silence and refraining from confrontation being the dominating factor.
This book is a lesson that needs to be learned and applied so that the endings of our own stories won't end up bitter, melancholic and sad.
Usually I stray away from short stories, since it never feels like they can live up to the complexity and emotional investment of a novel of 350+ pages. A ridiculous claim, to be sure, which I now understand was folly.
Thankfully this is the work that made me question my baseless assumption.
I didn't know how I will react to Tolstoy, having it been 2 years since I read half of Anna Karenina, and waiting for it to once again arrive in the mail so that I can reread it, I decided to delve into another short Tolstoy.
I didn't have much hope that books or authors I loved as a youth will still remain close to my heart, since most of the times it's a disappointing reencounter.
Oh, how wrong I was and how I cherish the fact that this was but an illusion. The feelings I had reading Anna Karenina were brought back tenfold with this short novel, as if I had been living through this turbulous, beautiful book myself.
This book is a beautiful example of life that your soul can relate to.
A heartwrenching story that permits you to be angry and sad, but that at the same time gives you an ending that no matter how much you're angry at it, it's not a fully unhappy one. In fact, melancholically, I can't decide what exactly the end is.
The thing that I understood from this book is the thing that I kept denying for years, and that I thought wasn't so.
The thing that everyone tells you:
"You'll understand when you're older".
Your naive face and eyes looking at the lips of the face that sounded those words, your initial response being the immediate "No, I want to understand now".
Whilst you understand nothing, and with time and age and growing up, you learn that you do actually, inevitably, understand when you're older. It's just that as a child you can't comprehend the state of change as well as you can when you're an adult. You think your mind will stay the same, as your interests, as your friends, which clearly isn't true.
This was exactly the problem of Masha, and the problem of Sergey, for knowing that the case is so with this young girl, and giving in to the silly thing called love, infatuation.
Family Happiness is a book about a difference in age, about growing up, about change and about the stunning differences between men and women. With these differences being so fudamentally different between the two genders, adding an age difference of more than 20 years makes this story a sad but true reflection of the obstacles that these two faced, and makes itself relatable by presenting the relationship of a woman and a man.
Men and women are different, and have different needs and ideas of right and wrong. Just as a person of any age, and even personality, has different needs than the next one, with varying moral ideas.
This makes the mix of two people a tricky thing, a thing that needs to be examined, evaluated and nurtured, without silence and refraining from confrontation being the dominating factor.
This book is a lesson that needs to be learned and applied so that the endings of our own stories won't end up bitter, melancholic and sad.