As a novelist Tolstoy is not all of a piece, and as a man he is full of contradictions, none more evident than those revealed in THE KREUTZER SONATA. This macabre story concerns the murder of a wife by her husband. Chained to the crime by his conscience, the narrator is filled with an intense self-loathing not so much for the murder as for his inability to explain away its consequences.In FAMILY HAPPINESS, Tolstoy reveals an understanding of the paths of marital communication, which similarly form such a superb conclusion in WAR AND PEACE.
