The Kreutzer Sonata - Leo Tolstoy
"that only happens in novels"
The opening line of Anna Karenina is one of the most famous in literature. It is often brought out to illustrate the difficulty of writing about happiness, as if it could only occur within a framework of cliched mundanity. "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
However the main character in The Kreutzer Sonata, Pózdnyshev, posits an opposing view, that all families (marriages at least) are unhappy, and that the differences are slight. Love, he says, is an illusion. "The husband and the wife merely deceive people by pretending to be monogamists, while living polygamously. That is bad, but still bearable. But when, as most frequently happens, the husband and wife have undertaken the external duty of living together all their lives and begin to hate each other after a month, and wish to part but still continue to stay together, it leads to that terrible hell which makes people take to drink, shoot themselves, and kill or poison themselves or one another..."
