The story concerns the love and marriage of a young girl, Mashechka (17 years old), and the much older Sergey Mikhaylych (36), an old family friend.

After a courtship that has the trappings of a mere family friendship, Masha's love grows and expands until she can no longer contain it.

Masha soon feels impatient with the quiet order of life on the estate, notwithstanding the powerful understanding and love that remains between the two.

Out of respect for her, Sergey Mikhaylych will scrupulously allow his young wife to discover the truth about the emptiness and ugliness of "society" on her own.

1 and 9) Apollon Grigoriev made an attempt to "rehabilitate" the Family Happiness and called it Tolstoy's "best piece of work to date."

Sovremennik (1865, No.4) retaliated by warning the "critics of the aesthetic school" against praising the backward-looking novel that was idealizing the ruling class's way of life.

According to the Soviet scholar Vladimir Lakshin, "Grigoriev was right in crediting Tolstoy as a shrewd psychologist, who'd succeeded in portraying so vividly in this novella 'the way romantic passion gradually deteriorates into something completely different.

'"[1] As referenced in the non-fiction book Into the Wild (as well as its film adaptation), a copy of Family Happiness was found among Chris McCandless' remains, with several passages highlighted.

[3] The Mountain Goats song "Family Happiness" takes its name from the novella and includes the line "Started quoting Tolstoy into the machine/I had no idea what you meant".

The 2012 film of Julia Strachey's 1932 novel Cheerful Weather For the Wedding shows Dolly, the uncertain bride-to-be reading a copy of Family Happiness.