Tolstoy’s ability to capture the humanity of his characters is displayed in this collection of novellas as it is in all of his work. Tolstoy’s characters practically are human, tortured with guilt and doubt, selfish, full alternatively of naïve delight and jaded disgust, aspiring to be something more. This feeling of reality is prominent in three of the novellas: Family Happiness, The Cossacks, and Hadji Murat. The Kreutzer Sonata, on the other hand, is full of Tolstoy’s religious convictions and is basically a warning against the dangers of carnal love, even between a man and his wife. I have always loved Tolstoy’s novels, and it is always a little jarring for me to run into the deep Christianity that characterizes some of his work. Although I am not a Christian myself, I can appreciate that Tolstoy’s religious feeling is very pure and very biblically based, a completely different being from the ritual based displays of the church. This set of novellas is interesting then, it that it shows that Tolstoy was just as complicated and contradictory as his characters so often are. ( )