A Lifetime in a Few Pages: Tolstoy's Alyosha the Pot

Another very short Tolstoy story, Alyosha the Pot - again very powerful, making me wish he'd written more at minuscule length, condensing all of his capacious observations abut people and their relationships and sorrows into just a few pages. Alyosha is a sweet, put-upon young man, the butt of jokes ("the Pot" is a nasty nickname, but he just smiles at it), becomes a servant, works harder than anyone else, always cheerful, gives all his wages to his terrible father, never thinks about himself - then, the cook in the household, a sweet and shy orphan, falls in love with him, Alyosha has never before felt wanted by anyone, can't even understand what love is, shyly he agrees to marry the cook, when his father hears of it he comes to visit and says Alyosha must call it off, Alyosha in his walked-upon nature complies, has no sense of the sorrow this brings to the cook - why he can't stand up for himself is a mystery - imagine what Dostoyevsky would have him do! - and then Alyosha falls off a rooftop and three days later dies - apparently happy, he tells the cook, see, it was a good thing we didn't get married. Very sad - and yet, his simplicity, his complete acceptance of fate, is sweet in a way, and makes us think he's some kind of holy man, that a salvation is waiting for him as he greats death with a look of surprise. This story is a lifetime in a few pages; another Tolstoy story in "The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories," The Forged Coupon, is a novel condensed to about 50 pages - not a great story, but impressive how much plot Tolstoy can simply sketch out, as we follow two boys who strike a counterfeit bill and pass it, and the effects this action has over many characters and many years.