It is a cruel fact, but unhappy marriages, unless they are your own, are always comic. Hence the popularity of Boccaccio’s Decameron. Hence the universal applicability of the Victorian joke about the Carlyle marriage: that it showed the kindness of God — making two people unhappy instead of four.
The marriage of Tolstoy and Sofia Behrs, neither of whom had an ounce of humour in their bodies, certainly partakes of this grand old slapstick tradition.
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