Tolstoy as precursor to the Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll

The conclusion of Tolstoy's story The Devil (in the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation, in "The Death of Ivan Ilyich and other stories") is further evidence of his uneasy, even incompetent, Tolstoy was with the short story form. He effectively establishes a character (Evgeny) with high moral standards and the best of intentions, a man who tries to maintain a working estate and be faithful to his wife, but who is tormented by his sexual drive and the almost bewitching attraction of one of the serfs who works on his estate - but instead of developing this conflict and its personal and moral repercussions over hundreds, even thousands of pages, as Tolstoy does in the grandest and most subtle and moving fashion in his novels, e.g., with Prince Andrei, Pierre, Levin, et al., faced with the extreme pace (for him) of the short story he has to bring this matter to a diabolical and tragic conclusion: bring out the firearms! Even Tolstoy didn't know what to do - and so this story has two endings, in one of which Evgeny absurdly shoots himself, leaving no explanation to anyone (but the readers) and in the other in which he hideously shoots the serf in the back and is sentenced to nine months in prison (a precursor to the Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll?). As with Kreutzer sonata, Tolstoy seems to be trying to channel Dostoyevsky, writing at a high, fevered pitch, drawn to drama and extreme behavior, but this mode does not suit his temperament at all and these stories read almost like parodies.