The Snowstorm, 1856, Lucerne, 1857, A Landlord’s Morning, 1857, Three Deaths, 1859, Family Happiness, 1859, Polikushka, 1963

Most of these short stories and novellas are written after Tolstoy returns from the war and before he marries. The Snowstorm is a series of principally childhood recollections that occur to the narrator as he travels by coach. It also draws on the night that Tolstoy thought he might freeze to death after being caught in a blizzard. Lucerne is a stinging attack on the insensitivity and arrogance of the wealthy while Three Deaths reflects some of his early religions views by contrasting a worldly lady who fears death despite her faith, a peasant who dies contentedly because his religion is nature, and a tree that dies nobly with no regrets. In the autobiographical A Landowner’s Morning the 19-year-old hero decides to devote his life to the well-being of his serfs. “Refusing to believe their poverty is unavoidable, he abolishes corporal punishment, provides schooling and medical aid, and visits them in their wretched hovels in an effort to teach them how to mend their ways and engage in more remunerative work. But all his attempts fail, for the peasants are stubbornly suspicious of his offers of assistance which they regard as tricks of the master to get more labour out of them” (p27, Tolstoy, Simmons). The story is originally intended to be part of a novel. Family Happiness is Tolstoy’s first fictional attempt at exploring the theme of love and captures some of the humiliation, alienation and embarrassment he experiences during and after his courtship with Valerya Arsenyev. In part, it imagines how the marriage would have turned out if it had gone ahead. Tolstoy starts the short novel Polikushka while in Brussels in 1861 and finishes it during the first year of his marriage. It is about a serf who is asked by his mistress to collect a sum of money, and is so mortified when he loses it and fails to live up to the trust she shows in him, that he commits suicide.