Happily Ever After- 4/5
The Death of Ivan Ilyich- 5/5
The Cossacks- 3.5/5

A short opinion about each short story in this quite short collection:

"Family Happiness" - Wow, so much of this could have been avoided by just opening your mouth and communicating.

"The Death of Ivan Ilych" - Beautifully tragic as we all realize each of us is in fact Caius.

"The Kruetzer Sonata" - Really feel sorry for the narrator stuck listening to this incel manifesto rant full of $5 SAT words.

"Hadji Murad" - Also beautifully tragic because it seemed inevitable.

It's always a bit hard to rate short story collections because some resonate more than others.  Still, it was pretty good - maybe I'll get around to reading War and Peace sometime. 4 stars.

Only read The Death of II.

I thoroughly enjoyed Family Happiness and Master and Man, but was not as crazy about the Kreutzer Sonata—I found it very slow. Overall, this was a great find by Tolstoy and I enjoyed it!

Absolutely brilliant. It seems a lot of the reviews are for only the Death of Ivan Ilyich (Silly vintage books, name your things better!) but I honestly mainly loved the Forged Coupon. In my opinion the Devil is a better Kreutzer Sonata haha

I was gifted this book several years ago, immediately after reading and absolutely falling in love with Anna Karenina. Anna Karenina will always be my favorite, but I did really enjoy these stories as well, which captured much of the philosophical spirit and smooth, easy writing that I associate with Tolstoy.

The thing that is always the most intriguing to me about Tolstoy is how artfully he describes characters' feelings, perspectives and understandings of the world. To this end, "The Death of Ivan Ilych" was a chilling masterpiece, digging into the psychological state of a tragic character in a fascinating and terrifying way. I also particularly enjoyed "The Kreutzer Sonata," which followed an even more unlikable character. I may not agree with Tolstoy's views about romantic relationships, but I certainly enjoy reading about these twisted, horrible ones.

It's not just the characters, it's that I always find moments in Tolstoy's work where he captures so perfectly and eloquently an emotional state that I've experienced before, but had trouble putting into words or even identifying. Two such moments stood out to me especially in "The Kreutzer Sonata":
in one, a character describes the almost disturbing power of music to bend our emotions to its will, in the other, he explains the "ecstasy" of a fit of anger and despair. I'll leave them here.

"Music makes me forget myself, my real position; it transports me to some other position not my own. Under the influence of music, it seems to me that I feel what I do not really feel, that I understand what I do not understand, that I can do what I cannot do. I explain it by the fact that music acts like yawning, like laughter: I am not sleepy, but I yawn when I see someone yawning; there is nothing for me to laugh at, but I laugh when I hear people laughing."

"An old conversation I had had with Trukhachevski's brother came to my mind, and in a kind of ecstasy I rent my heart with that conversation, making it refer to Trukhachevski and my wife."