Domestic happiness | Lev Tolstoy
Domestic happiness is a short novel by LN Tolstoy written in 1859. The Russian author, known for having given life to one of the most famous literary colossi of all time, War and Peace , has managed to describe a true phenomenology of love in little more than 100 pages, through a story that fully embodies its features.
When one thinks of Love there is always a great confusion in the head. It is a feeling so free and elusive that trapping it in words, or questioning it in the first person, is a mission too difficult. So if the risk is to simplify it, reducing its contagious force, you can try to describe it in other ways, perhaps passing under a magnifying glass a love story called to deal with the costumes of the era, the second mid-1800s, the pressing of time, the innocence of a young girl and the sincere affection of a man.
Love never speaks of itself
Mashechka , affectionately called throughout the novel with the nickname Masa , suffered the serious loss of her mother, a mourning that has awakened in her the pain of the already happened death of his father. Although the house is now empty, Masa spends his days dedicating himself to the piano, reading and art of the noble conversation, especially reasoning, in moments of idleness, around the universal concepts of happiness and love, emblems of that serenity that it would seem to have been torn from an unjust destiny.
Without anticipating it, with the passing of the days he rediscovers a renewed feeling for Sergei , a thirty-six-year-old family friend. A strict and strict man who with his always controlled attitude attracts the curiosity of the young girl, advising her to reappropriate her life through the same activities that she carried out before her mother's death. Slowly the frequent visits of him take on a special meaning, and they become the favorite moment of Masa, impatient to see him and to get lost with Sergej in long reasonings on the big questions of life.
This is how love breaks out , amid an uninterrupted flow of words, evasive discourses, universal ramblings, conversations carried forward while sitting in front of a piano. Love is born without speaking of love , it is in the redness for a look a bit 'more prolonged than usual, in the hands that carelessly intertwine to play together, waiting for the daily appointment in which all this, finally, is repeated . Sergey falls in love, Masa happily becomes his bride.
The seventeen-year-old dreamily regains happiness, Sergey discovers he is not too old to still feel " the best music in the world ".
The happy couple thus begins a new life . The first months are the most beautiful: both cultivate their present with transport, build the habits of what will soon become a family in all respects ...
"It seemed to me that the two of us together would be so infinitely and quietly happy. And I did not imagine trips abroad, worldly life, glitz, but a completely different life, a quiet family life in the countryside, made of unchanging altruism, of immutable mutual love and of the unchanging awareness of a mild and providential destiny ".
The challenge of time
Over the years, however, that age difference combined with the need for different stimuli lead Masa and Sergej to the awareness of being in love, yes, but not entirely willing to sacrifice themselves in the name of that old feeling. The overwhelming but hasty love had made them perhaps a little blind, inexperienced sailors of an adventure that would last a lifetime.
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Jealousies and trivial misunderstandings take over; Masa proves an attraction for some men she meets in the transfer from the countryside to St. Petersburg, she lets herself be tempted by a worldly life full of parties and receptions; Sergej assents her and accepts, bitterly, to witness almost as a spectator the slow decline of a love that he had believed to be unshakable. Only in this way does Masa understand that he has confused his own happiness with that of others, of Sergei himself, perhaps exchanging a feeling of mutual affection and deep esteem for something far more complex, far more mature, and certainly precocious for a seventeen year old girl. The love.
"I would no longer understand what had once seemed clear and right: the happiness of living for others. "
Now that Masa and Sergej have children, the awareness of being stuck in an 'institutional' relationship, in the silence of a disappointment that struggles to accept, undermines their balance. Can we abandon ourselves to the monotonous rhythm of everyday life, forgetting what really keeps alive? Can one always love in the same way and with the same passion? Impossible, of course, but is it really so that you measure love? Because Tolstoy, with an almost cinematic description of two lives stranded in their rediscovered dissatisfaction, does not want to convince the failure of a feeling, does not celebrate the defeat of a love turned into mere compassion. Quite the contrary.
Tolstoy speaks of transformation, of a feeling that inevitably follows the shadow of human change by adapting to these , moderates the passion that is called to confront maturity. It would be unthinkable to talk about love, always imagining a single face: this is why Masa and Sergej together reach a just conclusion that does not have the aftertaste of bitterness, does not speak of pity; it is an end that hides, after a tumultuous crisis, a soothing tranquility, and the certainty of being able to continue to look at the horizon together.
"But he foolishly invokes storms, as if in storms it was peace."
A little novel with a great casket of teachings.
