and should be required for married couples to read together. It should make for some fascinating conversation.Tolstoy adopts a scorched-earth policy in this novel which deflates the "sanctity" of marriage. The protagonist is a man on the edge, and it seems Tolstoy was there with him in the writing of this incandescent novella.Chris McCandless, the ill-fated Alaskan voyager who died in a hunting shelter while trying to escape the ties of civilization, was reading this novel very close to his death. See the nonfiction "Into the Wild" for information on this...I'm sure most of you have read the other two selections in this anthology, so I'll limit my comments to Kreutzer. This novel made my pulse race, a physical reaction I haven't had to a novel in quite a long time.