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MASTER AND MAN AND OTHER STORIES

COUNT LEO TOLSTOY was born in 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana in central Russia, and educated privately. He studied Oriental languages and law (unsuccessfully) at the University of Kazan, then led a life of dissipation until 1851, when he joined an artillery regiment in the Caucasus. He took part in the Crimean War, and on the basis of this experience wrote Stories of Sevastopol (1855–6), which confirmed his tenuous reputation as a writer. After a period in St Petersburg and abroad, where he studied educational methods for use in his school for peasant children at Yasnaya Polyana, he married Sofya (Sonya) Behrs in 1862. The next fifteen years was a period of great happiness. The couple had thirteen children; Tolstoy managed his estates, one in the Volga steppe-land, continued his educational projects, cared for his peasants and wrote War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877). A Confession (1879–81) marked a spiritual crisis in his life; he became an extreme moralist and in a series of pamphlets after 1880 expressed his rejection of state and church, indictment of the weaknesses of the flesh and denunciation of private property. His last novel, Resurrection (1899), was written to earn money for the pacifist Dukhobor sect. His teaching earned him many followers at home and abroad, but also much opposition, and in 1901 he was excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church. He died in 1910, in the course of a dramatic flight from home, at the small railway station of Astapovo.

RONALD WILKS studied Russian language and literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, after training as a Naval interpreter, and later Russian literature at London University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1972. Among his translations for Penguin Classics are My Childhood, My Apprenticeship and My Universities by Gorky, Diary of a Madman by Gogol, filmed for Irish Television, The Golovlyov Family by Saltykov-Shchedrin, How Much Land Does a Man Need? by Tolstoy, Tales of Belkin and Other Prose Writings by Pushkin, and seven volumes of stories by Chekhov: The Party and Other Stories, The Kiss and Other Stories, The Fiancée and Other Stories, The Duel and Other Stories, The Steppe and Other Stories and Ward No. 6 and Other Stories. He has also translated The Little Demon by Sologub for Penguin.

PAUL FOOTE was, until his retirement, a University Lecturer in Russian and Fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford. His publications include translations of Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time (Penguin Classics) and Saltykov-Shchedrin's The History of a Town and The Golovlevs.

HUGH MCLEAN is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Nikolai Leskov: The Man and His Art (Harvard University Press, 1977) and editor of In the Shade of the Giant: Essays on Tolstoy (University of California Press, 1989). He has also contributed an essay, ‘The Countryside’, to The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel and one on Tolstoy's Resurrection to The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy.

LEO TOLSTOY

Master and Man
and Other Stories

Translated with Notes by RONALD WILKS and PAUL FOOTE
With an Introduction by HUGH MCLEAN

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN CLASSICS

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

www.penguin.com

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All rights reserved

The moral right of the translators and editors has been asserted

Contents

Chronology

Introduction

Further Reading

Master and Man
and Other Stories

TWO HUSSARS

STRIDER

GOD SEES THE TRUTH BUT WAITS

A PRISONER OF THE CAUCASUS

WHAT MEN LIVE BY

NEGLECT A SPARK AND THE HOUSE BURNS DOWN

THE TWO OLD MEN

THE THREE HERMITS

HOW MUCH LAND DOES A MAN NEED?

MASTER AND MAN

Publishing History and Notes

Chronology

1724 Pyotr Tolstoy (great-great-great grandfather) given hereditary title of Count by Tsar Peter the Great

1821 Death of Prince Nikolay Volkonsky, Tolstoy's grandfather, at Yasnaya Polyana, Tula Province, 130 miles southwest of Moscow

1822 Marriage of Count Nikolay Tolstoy and Princess Marya Volkonskaya

1828 28 August (Old Style). Birth of fourth son, Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, at Yasnaya Polyana

1830 Death of mother

1832 The eldest, Nikolay, informs his brothers that the secret of earthly happiness is inscribed on a green stick, buried at Yasnaya Polyana (Tolstoy later buried there)

1836 Nikolay Gogol's The Government Inspector

1837 Death of Alexandr Pushkin in duel
Death of father

1840 Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time

1841 Death of Lermontov in duel Death of first guardian Alexandra Osten-Saken, an aunt. The Tolstoy children move to Kazan to live with another aunt, Pelageya Yushkova

1842 Gogol's Dead Souls

1844 Enters Kazan University, reads Oriental languages

1845 Transfers to Law after failing examinations. Dissolute life-style: drinking, visits to prostitutes

1846 Fyodor Dostoyevsky's ‘Poor Folk’

1847 Inherits estate of Yasnaya Polyana. Recovering from gonorrhoea, draws up scheme for self-perfection. Leaves university without completing studies ‘on grounds of ill health and domestic circumstances’

1848–50 In Moscow and St Petersburg, debauchery and gambling, large debts. Studies music

1850 Ivan Turgenev's A Month in the Country

1851 Travels to the Caucasus with Nikolay, who is serving in the army there. Reads Laurence Sterne: starts translating his Sentimental Journey (not completed). Writes ‘A History of Yesterday’ (unfinished, first evidence of his powers of psychological analysis). Begins writing Childhood

1852 Death of Gogol. Turgenev's Sketches from a Hunter's Album Enters the army as a cadet (Junker); based mainly in the Cossack station of Starogladkovskaya. Sees action against the Chechens, and narrowly escapes capture Childhood

1853 Turkey declares war on Russia ‘The Raid’

1854 France and England declare war on Russia. Crimean War starts Commissioned, serves on Danube front. November: transferred at own request to Sevastopol, then under siege by allied forces Boyhood

1855 Death of Nicholas I; accession of Alexander II In action until the fall of Sevastopol in August. Gains celebrity with ‘Sevastopol in December’ and further sketches, ‘Sevastopol in May’, ‘Sevastopol in August 1855’ (1856), ‘Memoirs of a Billiard Marker’, ‘The Woodfelling’

1856 Peace signed between Russia, Turkey, France and England Turgenev's Rudin In St Petersburg, moves in literary circles; associates with Turgenev, Ivan Goncharov, Nikolay Nekrasov, Afanasy Fet and others. Leaves the army. Death of brother Dmitry ‘The Snowstorm’, ‘Two Hussars’, ‘A Landowner's Morning’

1857 February–August. First trip abroad, to Paris (lasting impression of witnessing an execution by guillotine), Geneva and Baden-Baden Youth, ‘Lucerne’

1858 Long-term relationship with peasant woman on estate, Aksinya Bazykina, begins ‘Albert’

1859 Goncharov's Oblomov; Turgenev's The Home of the Gentry Founds primary school at Yasnaya Polyana ‘Three Deaths’, Family Happiness

1860 Death of his brother Nikolay from tuberculosis Dostoyevsky's Notes from the House of the Dead (1860–61). Turgenev's On the Eve

1860–61 Emancipation of serfs (1861). Other reforms follow: Elective District Councils (zemstvos) set up (1864); judicial reform (1865). Formation of revolutionary Land and Liberty movement. Commencement of intensive industrialization; spread of railways Serves as Arbiter of the Peace, dealing with post-Emancipation land settlements. Quarrels with Turgenev and challenges him (no duel). Travels in France, Germany, Italy and England. Loses great deal of money through gambling. Meets Proudhon in Brussels

1862 Turgenev's Fathers and Sons Starts a magazine at Yasnaya Polyana on education for the peasants; abandoned after less than a year. Police raid on Yasnaya Polyana. Considers emigrating to England and writes protest to the Tsar. Marries Sofya Andreyevna Behrs (b. 1844)

1863 Polish rebellion Birth of first child, Sergey (Tolstoy and his wife were to have thirteen children – nine boys and four girls – of which five die in childhood). Begins work on a novel ‘The Decembrists’, which was later abandoned, but developed into War and Peace ‘Polikushka’, The Cossacks

1865 Nikolay Leskov's ‘Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk’ First part of War and Peace (titled 1805)

1866 Attempted assassination of Tsar Alexander II Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment

1867 Turgenev's Smoke Visits Borodino in search of material for battle scene in War and Peace

1868 Dostoyevsky's The Idiot

1869 Publication of War and Peace completed

1870–71 Franco-Prussian War. Municipal Government reform Dostoyevsky's Devils Studies ancient Greek. Illness; convalesces in Samara (Bashkiriya). Begins work on primer for children. First mention of Anna Karenina. Reads Arthur Schopenhauer and other philosophers. Starts work on novel about Peter the Great (later abandoned)

1872 ‘God Sees the Truth But Waits’, ‘A Prisoner of the Caucasus’

1873 Begins Anna Karenina. Raises funds during famine in Bashkiriya, where he has bought an estate. Growing obsession with problems of death and religion; temptation to commit suicide

1874 Much occupied with educational theory

1875 Beginning of active revolutionary movement 1875–7 Instalments of Anna Karenina published

1877 Turgenev's Virgin Soil Journal publication of Anna Karenina completed (published in book form in 1878)

1877–8 Russo-Turkish War

1878 Reconciliation with Turgenev, who visits him at Yasnaya Polyana. Works on ‘The Decembrists’ and again abandons it. Works on Confession (completed 1882, but banned by the religious censor and published in Geneva in 1884)

1879 Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov

1880 Works on A Critique of Dogmatic Theology

1881 Assassination of Tsar Alexander II. With accession of Alexander III, the government returns to reactionary policies Death of Dostoyevsky Writes to Tsar Alexander III asking him to pardon his father's assassins

1882 Student riots in St Petersburg and Kazan Universities. Jewish pogroms and repressive measures against minorities Religious works, including new translation of the Gospels. Begins ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ and What Then Must We Do?. Studies Hebrew

1883 Deathbed letter from Turgenev urging Tolstoy not to abandon his art

1884 Family relations strained, first attempt to leave home. ‘What I Believe’ banned. Collected works published by his wife

1885 Tension with his wife over new beliefs. Works closely with Vladimir Chertkov, with whom (and others) he founds a publishing house, The Intermediary, to produce edifying literature for the common folk. Many popular stories written 1885–6, including ‘What Men Live By’, ‘Where Love Is, God Is’, ‘Strider’

1886 Walks from Moscow to Yasnaya Polyana in five days. Works on land during the summer. Denounced as a heretic by Archbishop of Kherson ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’, ‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’, What Then Must We Do?

1887 Meets Leskov ‘On Life’

1888 Chekhov's The Steppe Renounces meat, alcohol and tobacco. Growing friction between his wife and Chertkov. The Power of Darkness, banned in 1886, performed in Paris

1889 Finishes ‘Kreutzer Sonata’. Begins Resurrection (works on it for ten years)

1890 ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ banned, though on appeal by his wife to the Tsar publication was permitted in Collected Works

1891 Convinced that personal profits from writing are immoral, renounces copyright on all works published after 1881 and all future works. His family thus suffers financially, though his wife retains copyright in all the earlier works. Helps to organize famine relief in Ryazan Province. Attacks smoking and alcohol in ‘Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?’

1892 Organizes famine relief. The Fruits of Enlightenment (published 1891) produced in Maly Theatre, Moscow

1893 Finishes ‘The Kingdom of God Is Within You’

1894 Accession of Tsar Nicholas II. Strikes in St Petersburg Writes preface to Maupassant collection of stories. Criticizes Crime and Punishment

1895 Meets Chekhov. The Power of Darkness produced in Maly Theatre, Moscow ‘Master and Man’

1896 Chekhov's The Seagull Sees production of Hamlet and King Lear at Hermitage Theatre, severely critical of Shakespeare

1897 Appeals to authorities on behalf of Dukhobors, a pacifist religious sect, to whom permission is granted to emigrate to Canada What is Art?

1898 Formation of Social Democratic Party. Dreyfus Affair in France Works for famine relief

1899 Widespread student riots Serial publication of Resurrection (in book form in 1900)

1900 Meets Maxim Gorky, whom he calls a ‘real man of the people’

1901 Foundation of Socialist Revolutionary Party Excommunicated from Orthodox Church for writing works ‘repugnant to Christ and the Church’. Seriously ill, convalesces in Crimea; visitors include Chekhov and Gorky

1902 Finishes ‘What is Religion?’. Writes to Tsar Nicholas II on evils of autocracy and ownership of property

1903 Protests against Jewish pogroms in Kishinev ‘After the Ball’

1904 Russo-Japanese War. Russian fleet destroyed in Tsushima Straits. Assassination of V. K. Plehve, Minister of the Interior Death of Chekhov Death of second-eldest brother Sergey. Pamphlet on Russo-Japanese war published in England ‘Shakespeare and the Drama’

1905 Attempted revolution in Russia (attacks all sides involved). Potemkin mutiny. S. Y. Witte becomes Prime Minister Anarchical publicist pamphlets Introduction to Chekhov's ‘Darling’

1908 Tolstoy's secretary N. N. Gusev exiled ‘I Cannot Be Silent’, a protest against capital punishment

1909 Increased animosity between his wife and Chertkov, she threatens suicide

1910 Corresponds with Mahatma Gandhi concerning the doctrine of non-violent resistance to evil. His wife threatens suicide; demands all Tolstoy's diaries for past ten years, but Tolstoy puts them in bank vault. Final breakdown of relationship with her. 28 October: leaves home. 7 November: dies at Astapovo railway station. Buried at Yasnaya Polyana

1911 ‘The Devil, ‘Father Sergius’, Hadji Murat, ‘The Forged Coupon’

Introduction

Most readers think of Tolstoy primarily as the author of oversize novels, especially War and Peace and Anna Karenina, which established and to this day have sustained their author's reputation as one of the world's supreme masters of prose fiction. However, Tolstoy also excelled at the shorter forms of narrative art, ten examples of which are presented in this volume in fine translations by Ronald Wilks and Paul Foote. These stories provide excellent illustrations of the development over five decades of an astounding natural talent, not so much of its improvement – for the artistic quality of Tolstoy's output was exceptionally high from the very beginning – but of the author's increasing insistence that his art must serve an active moral purpose. He aimed to make people better.

Tolstoy's career as a writer of fiction dates from the 1850s. The segments of his quasi-autobiographical trilogy, Childhood (1852), Boyhood (1854) and Youth (1857), were interspersed with stories and sketches derived from his military experiences, first in the Caucasus, fighting to impose Russian rule over indigenous Muslim peoples there, and later in the Crimea, against Britain and France. When the war ended in 1855 and Tolstoy appeared in St Petersburg in his officer's uniform, he was feted both as a military hero and as a budding literary talent.

The late 1850s were an exciting time, both for Tolstoy and for the country. The Russian defeat in the war and the accession of Alexander II (1855–81) marked the beginning of the era of ‘great reforms’, the greatest of which was the commitment of the new tsar, finally carried out in 1861, to emancipate the millions of peasant serfs who until then had been the property of such gentlemen as Count Tolstoy. The world of literature was beginning to diversify, dividing between a largely plebeian ‘left’ that sought to use literature as a vehicle of social criticism, and a largely aristocratic ‘right’ that revered art as a manifestation of mankind's eternal striving for the sublime. Tolstoy sided with his fellow aristocrats, but with a difference. Tolstoy was never an aesthete; for him literature was never ‘pure art’. It always had a moral dimension and the writer a moral responsibility to teach as well as to entertain.

The first story, ‘Two Hussars’, belongs to this youthful, upbeat period in Tolstoy's career. As the title suggests, it presents a contrast of two male characters, seemingly very similar – not only the same military status and social standing but genetically linked as father and son. Yet they turn out to be psychologically at opposite poles.

The father is an extreme, outré version of an ultra-aristocratic type, a dashing daredevil, grandly indifferent to money, charming, a superb dancer and an immensely successful ladies' man. He is believed to be modelled on a distant relative of the author's, known as ‘Tolstoy the American’ because while on a round-the-world expedition he was for misconduct put ashore in the Aleutian Islands. In his boyhood Leo Tolstoy had seen this flamboyant, if somewhat disreputable namesake, who had visited his father. Later he concluded, doubtless through introspection, that they shared a common ‘Tolstoy’ trait, a wild, unbridled nature. Leo Tolstoy had certainly exhibited such a nature in his youth, with much reckless gambling, fighting, and promiscuity, but in his later years he did succeed, with much effort, in keeping his under better control.

In the story the narrator observes that Turbin père, like his prototype, belonged to a species from the last century which displayed ‘wild, passionate, and, frankly speaking, dissipated urges’. But in spite of this mild disclaimer, it is clear that the author is all on the side of this character, exulting in his exuberance, generosity and inexhaustible vitality. A titled aristocrat, Turbin is accustomed to compelling the world to gratify his every impulse. Resistance is not tolerated, met in the case of inferiors with blows and of equals with insults or challenges to duels. Money is treated as capriciously as people, large sums being won or lost at cards or thrown to gypsies. With one tremendous blow he retrieves from a cardsharp the government money a youthful comrade had recklessly lost. A final grand gesture is his impulsive return to town to plant a farewell kiss on the lips of the overwhelmed ‘little widow’, whom the evening before he had added to what must be a long list of his conquests.

The son, on the other hand, represents all that Tolstoy disliked about his own time, with its increasing embourgeoisement of Russian society. Even the titled aristocrat has developed characteristically ugly, middle-class traits: pettiness, niggling selfishness, avarice, smallness of soul. Turbin fils does not respect the poetic beauty of Liza, an early version of the classic Tolstoy heroine, ideally feminine, a provincial maiden uncontaminated by the vanities of St Petersburg. We are given a lyric nocturnal view of Liza gazing from her window at the beauties of nature, yet Turbin fils sees only an opportunity for a vulgar seduction. Succulent ‘little widows’ are one thing, but pure maidens are quite another, and we are pleased that this ignoble nocturnal adventure comes to nothing.

Clearly this generational contrast was a major theme for Tolstoy. Seven years later he would begin a great historical novel set back in the time of Turbin père, a time when the Russian gentry, not yet contaminated by demeaning bourgeois tendencies, were still firmly in the saddle and led the country to a glorious victory over the French invaders. By contrast, the era of the 1850s, when ‘Two Hussars’ was written, is condemned wholesale in the story's extraordinary first paragraph (all one sentence!) as a time of such absurdities as ‘disenchanted young men with monocles or liberal-minded women philosophers’. Tolstoy was far from comfortable in the era of the great reforms.

Though it was not published until much later, the second story, ‘Strider’, belongs in its genesis to the same pre-War and Peace period as ‘Two Hussars’. Basically written between 1861 and 1863, it lay unfinished until 1885, when Tolstoy's wife persuaded him to put the finishing touches to it. He did so, adding some moralizing ingredients that better fit his latter-day imperatives.

‘Strider’ exhibits vividly what became a favourite, almost patented device of Tolstoy's art, aptly labelled ‘defamiliariz-ation’ (ostraneniye) by the Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky. Perhaps following in the hoofsteps of Swift's Houyhnhnms, Tolstoy presents his tale – or at least most of it – from the perspective of a horse, which compels the reader to see human beings and their behaviour in new ways. In relation to people the horse is the victim par excellence, its feelings rarely taken into account by its human masters. As a result, the horse's narrative is one of successive disappointments and calamities. His first misfortune was to be born piebald, a coloration that in prejudiced human eyes rendered him unfit to be a racer. The second man-inflicted catastrophe was the cruel operation that turned a stallion into a gelding and put an end forever to Strider's love life.

The poignancy of Strider's life story is enhanced by the fact that it is related retrospectively in old age, a state, the gelding observes, especially bleak for horses. Yet apart from ageing, the decline in Strider's fortunes is caused mainly by his being repeatedly sold by one owner to another, a decline especially ironic because the horse cannot understand the meaning of the word ‘property’, a concept he is amazed to find that people even apply to one another (the action takes place in the age of serfdom).

The fate of the horse, however, is not in itself the main focus of the story; it is rather the ironic contrast between equine and human life. The horse's perspective enables us to see vividly the decline, parallel to Strider's own, of his favourite owner, Prince Nikita Serpukhovskoy, a figure who embodies some of the traits of Turbin père, though in a far less attractive form. Here again is the born blueblood, for whom all roads seem paved with gold. Years later the now decrepit gelding recognizes his erstwhile master in an equally decrepit ‘flabby old man’. Strider even neighs in greeting, but gets no response.

At this point, to complete the story of Prince Serpukhovskoy Tolstoy is obliged to abandon the equine perspective and take us inside the house, where Strider's new and old masters converse. We learn that the prince has come far down in the world. He has squandered his vast wealth. He drinks and smokes (always a bad sign in Tolstoy). Clearly his future is dark.

In the final chapter the equation between man and beast is made complete: both face the awful inevitability of death. The final chapter of ‘Strider’ was added in 1885, reflecting Tolstoy's increased obsession with mortality. Again the horse proves superior to the man. For Strider death is good, a welcome release from pain and weariness: ‘the whole burden of his life was lightened’. His remains will be rendered into useful products. The prince, however, burdens the world for another twenty years. When he finally dies, unlike the horse's, ‘neither his skin, flesh or bones were of use to anyone’. Nevertheless, his stinking corpse is taken to Moscow, dressed in a fine uniform, and then ‘that rotting, worm-ridden body’ is at last committed to the earth. The Tolstoy of 1885 obviously took satisfaction in not sparing his readers such images of what awaits us all.

Our collection now jumps past War and Peace to the early 1870s. Before launching the major project of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy passed through a period of alienation, renouncing big novels addressed to an educated elite. War and Peace, he now declared, was ‘verbose rubbish’. Instead, he devoted himself for several years to compiling a comprehensive primer for children, with texts for reading designed to arouse their interest and also instruct them about life. Most of these readings were very short, one or two pages only, but a few were substantial enough to be worth publishing also in adult media. Such was the case with ‘God Sees the Truth But Waits’.

The story is an expanded version of a fable related in the closing pages of War and Peace by the peasant philosopher Platon (‘Plato’) Karatayev. In the Karatayev version the fable is stripped to its basic moral nucleus. Condemned unjustly for a murder he did not commit, a nameless old man years later encounters by chance in Siberia the man who did commit the crime. The culprit is overcome with remorse, begs the old man's forgiveness and confesses his guilt to the authorities. However, by the time the confession has made its way through the bureaucracy to effect the old man's release, death has already claimed him.

In the expanded, 1872 version the narrator is not the peasant Karatayev, but the author Tolstoy, and he follows the usual conventions of realistic nineteenth-century fiction, not those of a folk fable. The narrative is enriched with ‘realistic’ details about the early life of the hero, now named Aksyonov, his character, his wife. The encounter in Siberia is also greatly extended. Aksyonov forgives the murderer, Semyonov, only after a prolonged inner struggle. A whole new episode is added: Semyonov's attempt, observed by Aksyonov, to escape by digging a tunnel.

Unfortunately, despite this welcome fleshing out, the expansion of the Aksyonov story is not accomplished without some serious narrative flaws, surprising from Tolstoy's practised hand. Though Aksyonov is understandably shaken to discover that his wife would even consider the possibility that he might have done the evil deed, it hardly seems plausible that she would never have written to him at all during his twenty-six years of incarceration. But Tolstoy needs to subject his hero to stark isolation, showing Aksyonov alone with his God, as ultimately we all must be. Similarly, Tolstoy also needs the scene where Aksyonov must make an absolute moral choice. When the prison Governor questions him about the tunnel, Aksyonov has a perfect opportunity to take revenge on Semyonov by denouncing him. Instead, he denies any knowledge of the matter. This act of forgiveness has such a powerful effect on Semyonov that he confesses to the murder for which Aksyonov had been convicted. All very moving, but it remains unclear why the soldiers who caught Semyonov scattering earth on the ground had not already reported him to their superiors.

Despite such inconsistencies, the story makes a powerful if bleak impression, perhaps not so much of the potency of Christian forgiveness as of the utter futility of seeking justice here on earth, especially from the corrupt human institutions mendaciously called ‘ministries of justice’. God doubtless sees the truth, but clearly He waits to right the moral balance until another life than this one.

Almost at the same time as ‘God Sees the Truth But Waits’, Tolstoy composed another story for the children's reader, ‘A Prisoner of the Caucasus’, a work especially interesting from a literary point of view. In this tale Tolstoy undertook systematically to strip his style of all superfluous artifice, to write in a consciously ‘unliterary’ mode, using language that would be familiar and accessible to undereducated readers and children. He even claimed that he planned in the future to write in this way for grown-ups as well, since it was a language in which one simply could not write ‘inflated rubbish’. Yet in Tolstoy's hands this ‘inartistic’ story turned out to be a superb example of narrative art.

The title of this ‘unliterary’ story was in fact literary in the extreme: a replay of the title of a narrative poem by Pushkin, familiar from childhood to every literate Russian. Pushkin's poem (1821) had been the poet's first, not entirely serious, experiment with Byronic Romanticism, where the Caucasus replaces Byron's Near East as the locale where an overcivilized European confronts unspoiled native exoticism. Pushkin gives the confrontation added lustre by sexualizing it, a captive Russian officer being loved by a Circassian girl, who commits suicide when the Russian escapes from captivity and abandons her. In a conclusion latter-day anti-imperialists have found jarring, Pushkin celebrates the Russian conquest of the Caucasus as bringing peace and civilization to that lawless and violent land.

In a story written for children Tolstoy does not raise the political issue or ask why Russians are fighting in the Caucasus. The war is simply a fact of life. He also strips the romantic Pushkin plot of its sexual core: the captive Zhilin's relation to the ‘Tatar’1 girl remains paternal or fraternal. Tolstoy has also introduced a second Russian captive, Kostylin, making possible an invidious comparison between the two Russians, one incompetent and cowardly, the other stalwart and resourceful, capable of superhuman feats of strength and endurance.

‘A Prisoner of the Caucasus’ is pure narrative art, freed of all superfluities. Normally at least affecting indifference to criticism, Tolstoy was genuinely pleased when an anonymous reviewer praised the work's amazing restraint, the absence in it of even ‘one unnecessary word’, averring that no Western writer could match this feat.

In the throes of the major spiritual crisis he passed through after completing Anna Karenina, when he for some years fundamentally renounced the writing of fiction, Tolstoy did allow himself occasional brief displays of his immense narrative talent, provided the results could be loaded with a vital moral message. The next story, ‘What Men Live By’, is the product of one such creative diversion.

The story is based on a folkloric version Tolstoy had transcribed in 1879 from a recitation by the peasant storyteller Vasily Shchegolyonok, but he also knew other versions published in collections of Russian folk tales. The basic plot, however, and the problem posed are not of purely folk origin, but have a long literary tradition, dating back to biblical times. Indeed the question raised is one that philosophers and theologians have puzzled over since antiquity: how can a just, merciful and omnipotent God permit the existence in the world of so much evil and suffering? It is the question Job asked: ‘Wherefore do the wicked live, become old, yea, are mighty in power?’ And the story's answer is the same as Job's: don't ask! ‘Touching the Almighty we cannot find him out.’ In short, God's ways are often inscrutable, but we must believe in the ultimate beneficence of His purposes. However, it may be comforting to learn from the story that even an angel may on occasion have Job-like doubts and be impelled to rectify what appears to be an example of divine injustice. Assigned to extract the soul of a woman who has just given birth to twin girls, the angel takes pity, balks and returns soulless to heaven. God sternly sends the rebel back to do his job and then as a punishment to remain on earth long enough to learn the answers to three existential questions. It takes the angel several years of living a human life as an apprentice cobbler to find the answers, and his three smiles mark the three successive degrees of his education. The last question is the title of the story: What Men Live By. The answer is not by care for themselves, but by ‘love’. Tolstoy of course means not instinctual or ‘natural’ love for spouse, children, etc, which is too easy, but what Christ meant by ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’.

The story ‘Neglect a Spark and the House Burns Down’ was something of a tour de force on Tolstoy's part: a tale not only immersed in peasant life, but told in peasant language. Here Tolstoy made great efforts to filter out all traces of upper-class diction and to write about peasants as peasants would write. This language did not come to Tolstoy easily. He was proud of his ability to converse unconstrainedly with peasants, and during such conversations he kept his ears open for characteristic turns of phrase, pithy expressions, unusual words not in standard Russian. He kept notebooks of such items. For a translator such language presents almost insuperable problems. How can these effects be reproduced without giving the text too local a flavour? One cannot have Russian peasants speaking broad Yorkshire or a Texas drawl. So the translator must do the best he can with ‘neutral’ English. Ronald Wilks is to be commended for his success in grappling with this difficult problem.

The story plunges us into the thick of peasant life. And of course there is a moral, one not fully indicated by the proverbial title as it stands. In Tolstoy's manuscript the title was given an additional half, in eighteenth-century style: ‘Or How a Peasant out of Ill Will toward His Neighbour Burnt Down His Own House and How He Came to His Senses’. People living in societies must make constant mutual accommodations and adjustments, usually accomplished easily with a modicum of goodwill. But in addition most societies also make rules – laws – defining individual rights and obligations in relation to others and procedures for enforcing them through such institutions as police, law courts and prisons. Here the newly ‘Tolstoyan’ Tolstoy strongly objects. Tolstoy was essentially an anarchist. His repudiation of violence was absolute. Police, law courts and prisons are all instruments of violence and are therefore evil. When Christ said ‘Resist not evil’ (by violence), He really meant it. The story provides a Tolstoyan illustration of the evil consequences of violence, whether the violence is direct – fighting and arson – or indirect – legal action. Yet surprisingly for Tolstoy, an actual magistrate is permitted to pronounce his final anti-legal judgement: ‘The law all of us must obey is God's law… [He] has commanded us to forgive our neighbour.’

The story ‘The Two Old Men’ was inspired by an oral tale Tolstoy heard from the peasant storyteller Shchegolyonok. He also drew on a written version published some years before, concerning the pilgrimage to Palestine of two Ukrainian peasants. The basic theme, however, is a familiar one, found as early as the twelfth century in the travel account by the Russian Abbot Daniil, who visited the Holy Land in 1106–8. Though a pilgrim himself, Daniil conceded that in itself to visit Palestine is no virtue, that to do good works at home is to go in spirit and may be even more pleasing in the eyes of God.

About the eyes of Tolstoy there could be no doubt. For him pilgrimages were in the same class as other ecclesiastical distortions of the true Christian message, including all the Church's so-called ‘sacraments’. What we need is not change of place, but change of heart. Yet Tolstoy knew that the idea of pilgrimages to holy places had a strong hold on the Russian peasant mentality: the country swarmed with mendicants wandering from one holy site to another. So he softens the anti-pilgrim moral somewhat. Even the ‘good’ member of the pair, Yelisey, had intended to make the journey; his turn to good works was essentially an accident. When looking for water he encountered a destitute family and decided to stay long enough to help them. It turned out to be a major project, completely consuming the money and time he had meant to spend on the pilgrimage. Yefim's visions of Yelisey in Jerusalem are hallucinations designed to reaffirm Tolstoy's message. In this world God has commanded each of us, until death, to do our job: to perform good works with love.

Tolstoy also gleaned ‘The Three Hermits’ from Shchegolyonok. It likewise fitted well with the anti-clerical spirit of his later years, illustrating his belief that recitation of memorized prayers, like all rituals, is of little or no spiritual value. What matters are prayers of the heart, the spirit that infuses a person's acts of devotion. The zest of the folkloric version, however, came precisely from a supernatural element which Tolstoy probably disliked, the image of the three hermits miraculously zooming over the water like modern-day hydrofoils. Some critics therefore believe that the whole account of what happened after ‘something dazzled’ the bishop (the phrase in the original could be rendered more strongly ‘caused spots before his eyes’) should be interpreted as a hallucination, an illustrated message from his conscience telling him that the hermits’ rude but heartfelt piety was dearer to God than any recited prayer, even the Lord's. In any case, whether the vision was hallucination or reality, he got the message.

For the theme of the story ‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’ Tolstoy reached back in history, further even than ‘The Two Old Men’. During his intense studies of ancient Greek in the early 1870s he had become enraptured with Herodotus. He had evidently retained in his memory the account Herodotus gives of a curious practice of the Scythians. If a man assigned to guard the king's sacred gold fell asleep during the night, he was destined not to live out the year. In the meantime he was allowed to acquire as much land as he could encircle in a day. Formulas like this are attested to in the folklore of several peoples, and Tolstoy found similar arrangements among the semi-nomadic Bashkir people near Samara, where he had bought land. For him the Bashkirs were perfect equivalents of Herodotus's Scythians.

The confrontation of human greed with the inexorable reality of death was a favourite of Tolstoy's, to be echoed again, even more poignantly, in ‘Master and Man’. Death, as Tolstoy never tired of repeating, is the great existential fact that renders ephemeral and meaningless most human endeavour, particularly the acquisition of earthly property.

In the early 1890s Tolstoy was inspired to compose a new parable on the ever-present question of death. The result was ‘Master and Man’ (1895), translated here by Paul Foote. As it had in the celebrated ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ (1886), the imminence of death forces the protagonist to reassess his life. This time the ‘hero’, Vasily Andreich Brekhunov, is of the middle class, a merchant. His ambition is to become a millionaire, and his whole life has been focused on money, on property. His wife is little more than an appendage and his son is not so much a live child as ‘the heir’. Brekhunov's wealth has been acquired by unscrupulous deals; he has overlooked no opportunity for gain. His immediate aim is to buy a coppice for much less than it is worth from a commercially naïve neighbouring gentleman, and he is anxious to complete the deal before he is undercut by other merchants. Hence his haste, his insistence on travelling despite a threatening blizzard.

Brekhunov's companion on his ill-starred journey, Nikita, is one of Tolstoy's classic good-hearted peasants, though Tolstoy avoids excessive idealization. Like most peasants, Nikita has led a hard, poverty-stricken life. In relation to ‘masters’ like Brekhunov his attitude is one of passive, you're-the-boss compliance. Vodka has been his weakness, but he has recently vowed to abstain and does so successfully in the story. In relation to death he has a peasant's (or a horse's!) indifference: the next world, he assumes, is likely to be better than this one, and his death will liberate space for others. So despite warnings the two set off on a menacing winter afternoon into heavy snow and howling wind. Even after getting lost and by luck finding shelter, Brekhunov insists on starting out again.

The great strength of the story is its concreteness, the extraordinary vividness with which Tolstoy evokes the experience – the horse (even the horse has a distinct personality), the harness, the sleigh, each man's clothing, each man's thoughts. Tolstoy had powerfully worked the blizzard theme years before, in ‘The Snowstorm’ (1856), but in a very different, youthful spirit – more social, with a happy ending, no deaths and few thoughts about it. But here isolation, terrible cold and a bleak, white landscape devoid of any sign of human habitation become not only agents of death but its very image.

Brekhunov clings to his own self-focused life almost to the end, even abandoning Nikita to his fate by riding off on the horse. But when this act proves futile, something happens within him. He returns to Nikita and saves Nikita's life at the expense of his own, by lying down on top of him.

Before performing this act of self-sacrifice, Brekhunov has passed through three psychological stages. The initial bravado and self-congratulation are interspersed with fear. The fear becomes more and more dominant until the third stage, the transformation. Tolstoy avoids giving us an insider's view of what Brekhunov thinks and feels as the third stage begins. We see only that he lies down on Nikita and that tears fill his eyes. Only then are we at last given his thoughts. For the first time he thinks not of ‘me’, but of ‘you’ and ‘us’. The emotion he now feels is joy. Various cloudy fantasies pass through his mind, but he continues to feel the presence of Him, the One who called him and commanded him to lie on Nikita. He remembers what once filled his life, all the buying and selling, and wonders how he could ever have cared about such things. ‘Now I know,’ he says.

It has been argued that Brekhunov's act of self-sacrifice was not motivated by Tolstoyan Christian principles at all, nor by the desire to save another's life, but simply by the wish to escape the terrible fear through closeness to another human being. If there is nothing beyond death, then on earth we have only each other. This essentially atheistic reading may in some sense be true of Tolstoy the author, who to the end was troubled by deep doubts about his God. But it is not true of the story, which reassuringly offers us a ‘He’ who calls Brekhunov to perform his salvific act and renders death easy and joyful.

NOTES

1. By nineteenth-century Russians ‘Tatar’ was used as a generic designation for Muslim peoples in the southern marches, people who nowadays would more specifically be identified as Chechen, Ingush, Ossetian, etc.

Further Reading

Bayley, John, Tolstoy and the Novel (New York: The Viking Press, 1966).

Benson, Ruth Crego, Women in Tolstoy: The Ideal and the Erotic (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1973).

Berlin, Isaiah, The Hedgehog and the Fox (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1953).

Bloom, Harold, ed., Leo Tolstoy: Modern Critical Views (New York: Chelsea House, 1986).

Christian, Reginald F., Tolstoy: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).

Eikhenbaum, Boris, The Young Tolstoy (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis, 1972).

—, Tolstoy in the Sixties (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis, 1982).

—, Tolstoy in the Seventies (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis, 1982).

Gifford, Henry, ed., Leo Tolstoy: A Critical Anthology (Har-mondsworth: Penguin, 1971).

Gustafson, Richard F., Leo Tolstoy, Resident and Stranger: A Study in Fiction and Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).

Jones, Malcolm, ed., New Essays on Tolstoy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).

Knowles, A.V., Tolstoy: The Critical Heritage (London: Rout-ledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).

Matlaw, Ralph E., ed., Tolstoy: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967).

McLean, Hugh, ed., In the Shade of the Giant: Essays on Tolstoy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

Metzele, Josef, The Presentation of Death in Tolstoy's Prose (Frankfurt and New York: Peter Lang, 1996).

Orwin, Donna Tussing, Tolstoy's Art and Thought, 1847 – 1880 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

—, ed., A Tolstoy Companion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Shklovsky, Viktor, Leo Tolstoy (Moscow: Progress, 1978).

Silbajoris, Rimvydas, Tolstoy's Aesthetics and His Art (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica Publishers, 1991).

Sorokin, Boris, Tolstoy in Pre-Revolutionary Russian Criticism (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1979).

Wasiolek, Edward, Tolstoy's Major Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

—, ed. Critical Essays on Tolstoy (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986).

Wilson, A. N., Tolstoy (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988).

TWO HUSSARS

A Tale Dedicated to Countess M. N. Tolstoy

… for ever Jomini, Jomini,1
But never a mention of vodka…

– Denis Davydov2

In the early nineteenth century, when there were no railways or metalled roads, no gaslight or stearin3 candles, no low, spring-cushioned couches or unvarnished furniture, no disenchanted young men with monocles or liberal-minded women philosophers, no sweet dames aux camélias who have become so plentiful of late – in those naïve times, when anyone making the journey from Moscow to St Petersburg by carriage or coach would take a whole kitchenful of home-cooked provisions and travel for eight days and nights along soft, dusty or muddy roads and put his trust in fried cutlets, hard rolls and sleigh-bells; when, during long autumn evenings, tallow candles that provided light for family groups of twenty or thirty burned low and had to be snuffed; when ballrooms were lit by candelabra with fine wax or spermaceti candles; when furniture was arranged symmetrically; when our fathers were still young and proved it not only by the absence of grey hairs or wrinkles but by the duels they fought over ladies and the speed with which they rushed from one end of a room to the other to pick up a tiny handkerchief dropped accidentally or on purpose; when our mothers wore short-waisted gowns with enormous sleeves and decided all family disputes by drawing lots; when charming dames aux camélias shunned the light of day – in those naïve times of masonic lodges,4 Martinists,5 the Tugendbund,6 Miloradovich,7 Davydov and Pushkin, a group of landowners gathered in the provincial town of K — and the election of representatives of the nobility was almost completed.

I

‘All right, the public lounge will do,’ said a young officer in fur coat and hussar cap who had just stepped out of a post-sledge and entered the best hotel the town of K— had to offer.

‘It's a large gathering this year, Your Excellency,’ said the hotel boots who had already managed to find out from the batman that it was Count Turbin, which was why he called him ‘Your Excellency’. ‘The lady who owns the Afremovo estate has promised to leave with her daughters this evening, so I can let you have number eleven as soon as it's free, sir,’ he added, walking softly down the corridor in front of the count and continually glancing back.

In the lounge, around a small table beneath a time-blackened, full-length portrait of Alexander I, several men – most probably local gentry – were sitting drinking champagne; on the other side of the room were some travelling merchants in their dark blue, fur-lined coats.

After entering the lounge and summoning Blücher, the huge grey mastiff he had brought with him, the count threw off his coat (the collar of which was still white with hoar frost), ordered vodka, sat down at the table in his blue satin tunic and got into conversation with the gentlemen. They were instantly impressed by his handsome, open face and offered him a glass of champagne. The count first downed his vodka and then ordered another bottle of champagne for his new acquaintances. At this point in came the sleigh-driver for his tip.