The longest journey (with the most tedious passenger): The Kreutzer Sonata Tolstoy's

My usually infallible (!) memory was wrong, and there's no surprise twist at the end of Tolstoy's story The Kreutzer Sonata (not sure what story I was remembering, in which an on-train confession leads to an arrest upon arrival at the station), it just ends with the protagonist, Portryzbyn (?), finishing his narrative of how (and why) he killed his wife in a fit of jealousy. If there's any redeeming qualities in this demented story it's that the killer seems to feel a bit of remorse at the end, as he has just a glimpse of an understanding that there's a sacredness to human life and that it was horrendous to kill someone over a fit of jealousy. As it happens, he may well have been correct - his wife may have been having an affair with the music master - Tolstoy deftly leaves that aspect of the story ambiguous. One way or another, it's a long journey and a long night in a railroad compartment with this disturbed man and, by the end, I have to say: What for? Skip this story, and read some of the other great Tolstoy works. In the Pevear-Volokhonsky translations I'm reading, "The Death of Ivan Ilyich and other stories," the nex piece is a story called The Devil (for Tolstoy, a short story seems to clock in with at least 50 pages), which tells of a young many taking over an inherited estate that his father had driven into debt and trying to make it prosperous - while also trying to live a moral life in the provinces. He will remind readers of Levin, from AK, and maybe a bit of Pierre from W&P - though in this story Tolstoy treats his sexual drives more directly than he does in his longer fiction - initial part of the story is about his need to have sexual relations in this remote village, where privacy is impossible, and later about his marriage - and will inevitably draw these elements together for some kind of moral anguish.