INTRODUCTION
Ann Pasternak Slater
1
“The Death of Ivan Ilyich” and “Master and Man” are Tolstoy’s late masterpieces. Written well after War and Peace and Anna Karenina, both stories directly confront the long, uneventful process of dying, some two decades before Tolstoy’s own death at the railway station of Astapovo. Yet both stories also draw on experiences described in his earliest work and resolve some of the questions overwhelming him during his crisis of faith in the 1880s.
The story begins in late January 1854. Tolstoy was twenty-five years old and on his way home from fighting in the Caucasus. It was the worst of the winter. There were no trains. Tolstoy’s diary is laconic:
On the road. Was lost all night at Belogorodtsevskaya, 100 versts from Cherkassk, and the idea occurred to me of writing a story, “The Snowstorm.” . . . Nothing on the road cheered me so much and so reminded me of Russia as a baggage horse which laid back its ears and despite the speed of my sledge tried to overtake it at a gallop.
“The Snowstorm” was written two years later. It is a scrupulously flat account of a night’s sleigh ride across a featureless steppe through an intense blizzard. The narrator distrusts his surly driver who, he suspects, is a novice. They set out at dusk, and soon lose their way. They halt repeatedly. The coachman climbs down and plunges about in the snow trying to find the road. They decide to turn back. Bells jingling tunefully, three troikas carrying the mail drive past. They turn again, follow the troikas, and lose them. They get lost once more. This time, the narrator dismounts and casts about in the snow. In the force field of the blizzard, he loses his bearings.
A moment’s anxiety before he touches the invisible sleigh right next to him.
Once again they decide to turn back—and meet the troikas returning. They follow them. En route, they overtake a long, slow wagon train. Then they lose the road. For a long time they have no sense of direction. They seem to be going in circles—and here is the baggage train they had left behind them, a dark line on the horizon ahead, still moving steadily onward.
It is bitterly cold. His fellow passengers fret about death from exposure, but the narrator insists on continuing their blind journey. He dozes off and remembers with incomparable vividness a hot day on the estate, when a young peasant drowned in the pond. . . .
Many details of this patiently monotonous story contribute to “Master and Man,” another journey through a snowstorm, written forty years later. But the two stories have a radically different atmosphere. In “The Snowstorm,” the characters reach their destination safely as the sun rises. There is a much larger cast of travelers. In company, danger seems more remote, whereas in “Master and Man” there is a strong sense of headstrong, vulnerable isolation. In “The Snowstorm,” death is a hypothesis repeatedly canvassed—and ignored. The actuality of death is raised only obliquely in the episode of the drowned peasant. This casualness seems characteristic not only of the youthful narrator but of Tolstoy himself. When he completed the story in February 1856, he wrote in his diary: “Quarreled with Turgenev, and had a girl at my place. . . . Finished ‘The Snowstorm.’ I’m very pleased with it.” There is an apparent thoughtlessness here that would be unthinkable for the later Tolstoy.
And yet the diary entry is disingenuous. In 1856, his elder brother Dmitri lay dying of tuberculosis. “I’m terribly depressed,” Tolstoy noted baldly. “From tomorrow I want to spend my days in such a way that it will be pleasant to recall them. I’ll put my papers in order . . . do a fair copy of ‘The Snowstorm.’ . . .” Later, Tolstoy wrote in his Reminiscences: Dmitri “did not want to die, did not want to believe he was about to die.” Did Dmitri’s deliberate denial, his blind refusal, become “The Snowstorm’s” insouciance in the face of death? Is that insouciance therefore ironic—carrying its own charge of covert criticism? Should we rather look death directly in the face?
A year later, in Paris in March 1857, the tourist Tolstoy took in the sights and touched on the same bruised spot:
Got up at 7 feeling ill and went to see an execution. A stout, white, strong neck and chest. He kissed the Gospels and then— death. How senseless! The impression it made was a strong one and not wasted on me. Morality and art. I know, I love, and I can.
The last line of that diary entry is significant, and will reverberate through Tolstoy’s later work.
One immediate consequence was a slight story, “Three Deaths,” written in January 1858. It contrasts the deaths of a lady, a peasant, and a tree. Predictably, the lady anticipates death with terrified evasion. She is traveling to Italy in vain hope of a cure, her entourage of bullied lady’s maid, doctor, and weak husband reluctantly in tow. The stuffy carriage smells of eau de cologne and dust. Terminally tubercular, fretful, and self-deceiving, the lady is, as Tolstoy wrote to a friend, “pitiful and bad.” Every failure to help her face death is sentimentally justified: “Oh my God!” her husband says. “Think of me, having to remind her about her will. I can’t tell her that.”
At a coaching inn where they stop for refreshments, a dying peasant coughs on the Dutch oven in the kitchen. Sergei, the coachman’s boy, asks him a favor: “I expect you don’t need your new boots now; won’t you let me have them?” “Need them indeed!” the cook snaps. “What does he want with boots? They won’t bury him in boots.” The euphemistic lies of the gentry contrast sharply with brutal peasant honesty. In mild acquiescence, the dying man gives up his unused new boots. The coachman’s boy agrees to put a stone on his grave in exchange.
That night the peasant dies in his sleep. Next spring, the lady dies in her town house, without ever reaching Italy. Even as she receives the last sacrament her attention is distracted by the priest’s recommendation of a local quack. Later, the deacon reads the Psalms over the dead body—monotonously, through his nose, without understanding the words. But beyond the door of the death chamber, there is renewal—children’s voices and the patter of feet. And what do the words of the Psalms actually say? They, too, speak of renewal. “Thou hidest thy face, they are troubled: thou takest away their breath, they die, and return to their dust. Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created: and thou renewest the face of the earth.”
In the coaching inn, the cook rebukes Sergei, the coachman’s boy, for failing to keep his promise. If he can’t afford a stone, he should at least mark the grave with a wooden cross.
As the dawn mists disperse, Sergei’s axe strokes can be heard, and a tree falls.
Tolstoy’s letter about this parable is explicit. The lady has lied all her life and lies in the face of death. Her understanding of Christianity cannot resolve the questions of life and death. The peasant dies in peaceful accord with the natural laws that governed his years of sowing and harvesting, delivering calves and slaughtering cattle. The tree dies “calmly, honestly, and gracefully.” The adverbs are pointedly anthropomorphic.
The loaded contrast between the gentry’s reluctance to confront death and the equanimity of the peasants, who have known a lifetime’s hardship, recurs in “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” and “Master and Man.” The irrelevance of formal religion is also repeated, and its rituals are satirized. And, like the lady of this story, as Ivan Ilyich receives the last sacrament, he is momentarily tempted by the promise of a curative operation.
A decade after writing “Three Deaths,” in August 1869, soon after finishing War and Peace, Tolstoy heard of land for sale in the distant Penza province. As he wrote later, “I wanted to buy an estate so that the income from it, or the timber on it, should cover the whole purchase price and I should get it for nothing. I looked out for some fool who did not understand business, and thought that I had found such a man.” In high good humor, he set out with one servant and decided to cover the long last lap of the journey without stopping. Dozing through the night, he woke with a sudden sense of horror and futility:
“Why am I going? Where am I going to?” I suddenly asked myself. It was not that I did not like the idea of buying an estate cheaply, but it suddenly occurred to me that there was no need for me to travel all that distance, that I should die here in this strange place, and I was filled with dread.
So they stopped at a small post station, woke up the attendant, and were shown into the only bedroom. The place was called Arzamas.
In his biography of Tolstoy, Henri Troyat makes the experience a melodrama in the style of Poe. The room was white and square, “like a big coffin.” The furniture was soiled. “The doors and woodwork [were] painted dark red, a color of dried blood.” Shaken by his sudden horror of death, “questions fell upon him like a flock of ravens. . . . He was the only person awake on a sinking ship.”
Tolstoy’s own account is drier. It is normality that frightens him. “A sleepy man with a spot on his cheek (which seemed to me terrifying) showed us into a small square room with whitewashed walls. I remember it tormented me that it should be square. It had one window with a red curtain.” He fell asleep, only to awake in renewed terror. Death was in the room with him. It followed him into the corridor in search of his sleeping servant. Everything seemed to be saying the same thing: “There is nothing in life. Death is the only real thing, and death ought not to exist.” In what we would now identify as a panic attack, it seems Tolstoy felt he was dying.
Life and death somehow merged into one another. Something was tearing my soul apart and could not complete the severance. . . . Again I went to look at the sleepers, and again I tried to go to sleep. Always the same horror: red, white and square. Something tearing within that yet could not be torn apart. A painful, painfully dry and spiteful feeling, no atom of kindliness. . . .
Like the Ancient Mariner, Tolstoy tried to pray, surreptitiously glancing over his shoulder in case anyone was watching him. In vain. No prayers would come. He woke his servant and they left in the dark. When they reached their destination, Tolstoy did not buy the land. He was forty-one years old.
Another decade passed. As letters to his wife, Sofya, and the reminiscences of his son Sergei testify, Tolstoy continued to experience terrifying intimations of death. When Anna Karenina was finished in 1877, he began A Confession, a self-critical, clear-sighted, autobiographical account of his deepening spiritual crisis. In form, its first half is comparable to the narrative of “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” Decades are sweepingly surveyed, significant moments seized on and coldly scrutinized. The content, too, is similar. Tolstoy categorically condemns his decade of early maturity from about 1845 to 1855, when he indulged his machismo—womanizing, quarreling, even killing in his army years. At that time, he had believed in a popular concept of “progress” as the justifying principle of life. This is comparable to Ivan Ilyich’s determination to fulfill conventional expectations, to live as others do, to achieve the status and acquire the furnishings other people respect. In his Confession, Tolstoy identifies the Paris execution as crucial. It shattered his faith in convention:
When I saw how the head separated from the body, and each separately rattled into its crate, I understood—not in my mind, but my whole being—that no theory of the good sense of Progress, and What Is, can justify this crime, and that if all the people in the world, on whatever theory, from the beginning of the world, should find it necessary—I still knew that it was not necessary but bad. Therefore the judge of what is good and necessary is not what people do and say, and not Progress, but I in my own heart.
The death of his brother Dmitri, Tolstoy says, delivered the second blow to his crumbling faith. Dmitri died in great pain, “not knowing why he lived and even less why he died. No theories could give any answer to these questions, neither to me nor to him.” After some fifteen years of married life, from 1862 to 1877, Tolstoy’s uncertainties intensified. After the night at Arzamas in 1869, there were further experiences that gathered to a great depression, a fundamental spiritual crisis:
So I lived, but five years ago something very strange started happening to me. I would get moments—at first of blankness, pauses in life, as though I didn’t know how to live, or what I was meant to be doing, and I would get confused and disheartened. But the moments passed, and I would go on as before. Then the blank moments grew more and more frequent and unvaried. And these pauses in life were always expressed in the same words—“For what? And then what?”
At first these just seemed to me to be pointless questions. All this was well known, I thought. If I ever wanted to bother with resolving them, it wouldn’t be worth it. Just at the moment there was no time, but as soon as I had time to pause and think, I’d find the answer. And then the questions posed themselves more and more often till, like spots falling always in the same place, all these questions without answers ran together into one big black stain.
What happened to me was the same as what happens to every terminally ill person. At first there appear trivial signs of inadequacy, which the sick person ignores; then the symptoms repeat themselves more and more often and merge into one continuous suffering. The suffering grows, and the invalid has no time to turn before he recognizes that what he took for slight infirmity is the most important thing in all the world, and that is death.
This passage from A Confession bears a significant relationship to “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” where the metaphor of sickness is literalized, and Ivan Ilyich’s growing sense of spiritual desolation is given a compelling physical cause. Essentially, Ivan Ilyich, in the course of a short mortal illness, recognizes the moral malaise Tolstoy had been fighting for decades.
2
“The Death of Ivan Ilyich” was begun in 1884 and completed in 1886.* Tolstoy’s finest parable, “What Men Live By,” was written in 1881. The unfinished “Memoirs of a Madman” was begun in 1884. The composition of A Confession (1879–1883) overlapped with them all. All four texts throw light on each other.
“Memoirs of a Madman,” though presented as fiction, is essentially autobiographical. It describes Tolstoy’s experience at Arzamas, a similar night of terror in a Moscow hotel, and a comparable experience lost in the snow when out hunting. Each time, the horror lies in his solitary fear of death and his inability to recognize death’s validity: “ ‘Is this death? I won’t have it! Why death? What is it?’ ” The narrator is an ostensible “madman” who is about to be certified. His lunacy lies in his choice of a radical morality that society thinks crazy—the renunciation of worldly goods for a life of selfless charity (hence the story’s first title, “Notes, Not of a Madman”). The ponderous Dostoyevskian irony of the “mad” narrator is unsuited to Tolstoy’s habitual simplicity. Moreover, the genuine, and genuinely disturbed episodes at Arzamas and Moscow do not contribute clearly to the story’s moral conclusion—the practice of love and charity—even though we can see that logically they are Tolstoy’s answer to the horrific futility of life.
Tolstoy illustrates the ideal of love by describing an early episode from the narrator’s childhood. His nanny is about to put him into his cot beside his brother, when he demands to climb in by himself. He has an intense sensation of universal harmony. It might be James Joyce or Stanley Spencer speaking:
I jumped into bed still holding her hand, and then let it go, kicked about under my bedclothes, and wrapped myself up. And I had such a pleasant feeling. I grew quiet and thought: “I love Nurse; Nurse loves me and Mitya; and I love Mitya, and Mitya loves me and Nurse. Nurse loves Taras, and I love Taras, and Mitya loves him. And Taras loves me and Nurse. And Mamma loves me and Nurse, and Nurse loves Mamma and me and Papa—and everybody loves everybody and everybody is happy.”
Then suddenly I heard the housekeeper run in and angrily shout something about a sugar basin and Nurse answering indignantly that she had not taken it. And I felt pained, frightened, and horror, cold horror seized me.
This is his first intimation of madness, as his childish faith in universal love is shattered.
In “What Men Live By” Tolstoy transfers the madman’s visionary clarity to a more authoritative central figure—Michael, a fallen angel. The story was originally written for children. Irony is replaced by directness. God punishes the angel for disobedience by casting him down to earth, naked and destitute. He is to live as a man till he learns the answer to three fundamental questions.
The angel is taken in by a poor cobbler and his wife, and serves them for seven years. In seven years he smiles three times. The first time comes right at the beginning, when the cobbler’s wife is furious with her husband for bringing home this godforsaken down-and-out, the unrecognized angel. She is softened by her husband’s rebuke, fetches the outcast a shirt, and gives him soup. The angel later recalls that when the woman was angry with her husband, “ ‘the spirit of death came from her mouth; I could not speak for the stench of death that spread around her. She wished to drive me out into the cold, and I knew that if she did so she would die.’ ” But when her husband speaks to her of God and she relents, the angel smiles for the first time. “ ‘I saw that death no longer dwelt in her; she had become alive, and in her, too, I saw God.’ ”
In “Memoirs of a Madman” a callous world deems charity insane. In “What Men Live By” Tolstoy goes further—life without love is a living death.
In “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” the laconic parable of “What Men Live By” is replaced by incontrovertible realism. The story opens with the news of Ivan Ilyich’s death. The immediate response of his lawyer colleagues is relief that “he is dead, not I,” and pleasant calculations about the promotions consequent on his vacated place. Tolstoy writes from the point of view of ordinary mankind, whose egotism is natural and immediately recognizable. There is no fallen angel here to tell us this attitude is deathly, no madman to warn us that this response is the world’s folly. “Well, there you go, he’s dead, but I’m not” is a sentiment, as Dr. Johnson would have said, “to which every bosom returns an echo.” And why not? When Ivan Ilyich’s friend Piotr Ivanovich visits the house of mourning, he turns away from the corpse, with its stern reminder for the living. “Such a reminder seemed to Piotr Ivanovich to be out of place here, or at least of no relevance to himself.” Throughout the story’s first section, inevitable death is repeatedly ignored. The faint odor of decaying flesh is dissipated by Gerasim the servant, unobtrusively sprinkling the death chamber with disinfectant. The mourners, formal respects duly paid, hasten away to their evening card tables. And yet the inconvenient fact of death remains—irrepressible as the springs of the ottoman that so discomfit Piotr Ivanovich as he expresses his condolences to Ivan Ilyich’s widow.
In the remaining narrative Tolstoy makes his readers inhabit the death from which Piotr Ivanovich and the other mourners so assiduously avert their eyes. We live it entirely through Ivan Ilyich’s appalled perceptions, as he sickens, suffers, and dies. Tolstoy forces us to confront dying head-on—in the way the lady of “Three Deaths” and his own brother Dmitri writhed against. We watch it with the horrified clarity that has haunted Tolstoy ever since Arzamas.
In the eyes of the world, in the eyes of Ivan Ilyich himself, he has had a successful career—from cheerful child to bright law student; from special assistant to a provincial governor to provincial examining magistrate of the fifth rank to public prosecutor; from the provinces to Petersburg, step after orderly step—till, in the blundering words of Nabokov’s Pnin, he “fell and got in consequence kidney of the cancer.”
And yet, implicitly, indirectly, Tolstoy shows Ivan Ilyich’s smoothly absorbed progress to be a gradual spiritual death. This is subtly, almost imperceptibly charted in his diminishing concern for justice and growing appetite for power. It is evident in his scrupulously professional preference for the efficient administration of general codes over individual factors and personal predicaments—his habitual practice “to exclude all the raw, living matter that inevitably clogs the smooth running of official business.” With deathly consistency he applies the same principles to his own life, methodically denying every aspect of his own individuality in the pursuit of unimpeachable conformity and the public registers of success. Never has a story dwelt so insistently on “decorum,” “high propriety,” the “duty . . . to live a decent life that everyone approved of,” “external dignity,” “that propriety of external forms required by public opinion” that governs every choice made by Ivan Ilyich. His moral desiccation is even more painfully apparent in his growing coldness, his frank distaste for his quarrelsome wife and daughter, and the deeply unsympathetic lovelessness that intensifies as his illness grows worse.
Thus Ivan Ilyich’s shriveled spirit comes to display the aridity Tolstoy experienced at Arzamas, that “painfully dry and spiteful feeling, no atom of kindliness, a dull and steady spitefulness” toward himself and the unfeeling world. The reader coming to “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” with no knowledge of the thoughts and experiences that culminated in its composition may not realize that Ivan Ilyich’s dying began long before his illness struck. Tolstoy, however, recognized at Arzamas that “it seems that death is terrible, but . . . it is one’s dying life that is terrible.” In his successful years Ivan Ilyich is like the angry cobbler’s wife before charity softens her. The smell of death is all around him.
Yet as Ivan Ilyich grows worse physically, his moral degeneration is gradually, barely perceptibly set in reverse. The denial of individuality inherent both in his practice of the law and in his own pursuit of a conventionally decorous life is rudely disturbed by his dawning sense that he is dying, that the dull general rule must also apply to him in all his inestimable singularity. He remembers the syllogism he learned as a boy: “Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal.” It had always seemed to him correct only in relation to Caius, not to himself. “[H]e was not Caius and not man in general. He was always quite, quite different from all other beings. He was little Vanya with Mamma, with Papa. . . .” All his lost quiddity is captured in one piercing, banal, tragic sentence: “Did Caius know the smell of the striped leather ball Vanya loved so much?” On his sickbed, memories of his earliest years return with increasing frequency. His mind moves from the stewed prunes offered to him at lunch that day to the dried French plums of his childhood—their peculiar flavor and the rush of saliva when he sucked their stones. With these sharply particular memories comes the gradual realization that from that time his life has steadily deteriorated, even as he thought he was doing so well:
Marriage . . . so accidental, and then disillusion, and the smell of his wife’s breath, and the sensuality and hypocrisy! And that deathly job, and those anxieties about money, and one year like that, and two, and ten, and twenty. Exactly as though I was steadily walking down a mountain, and thinking I was climbing it. And so I was.
However, as illness robs him of physical dignity, the moral drift downhill is gradually reversed. It is striking that Ivan Ilyich’s first selfless impulse is prompted by the smell of his night soil, which the young servant Gerasim is about to remove from the sickroom. Robbed of the decorum he sought all his life, weakly collapsed half naked on an armchair, his trousers around his ankles, he apologizes to Gerasim for his unpleasant task. It is his first kindling of humanity. Gerasim’s response differs from the politely encouraging lies of Ivan Ilyich’s family, doctors, and friends. Later, he is the only one to state the case frankly. What’s a little trouble when his master’s dying? Such truthfulness comes as a profound relief to Ivan Ilyich, and the informal intimacy between them grows. Gerasim spends many nights patiently sitting with his master, supporting his legs high on his shoulders, which seems to ease the continuous pain.
That literally topsy-turvy scene suggests the inverted relationship evolving between master and servant. In his suffering Ivan Ilyich wants to cry, to be petted and cried over, to be pitied as a sick child is pitied. When his friends come, decorum and old habit force him to suck in his lips and give dry opinions on the latest court judgments. But in Gerasim he can feel the compassion he craves and his unabashed physical dependence is liberating.
Master is subordinated to man, and the judge is condemned to death. When Ivan Ilyich, Public Prosecutor, first consults a celebrated specialist, he is incensed to find the twinkling detachment he himself habitually employed, in passing court judgments on others, turned on himself. Now he is the wretch on trial, and “the doctor made his summing-up just as brilliantly, looking over his spectacles triumphantly and even gaily at the accused.” In the last stages of his illness, struggling to reassess his own life, Ivan Ilyich is still unable to recognize that he, who always lived with such scrupulous decorum, could ever have done anything wrong. However, his memory of the usher’s cry, “The court is in session!” modulates to an inadvertent admission of guilt: “The judge is coming! . . . Here he comes, the judge! ‘But I’m not to blame!’ ” And on his very last day, he struggles against the terrifying sensation that he is being bundled into a black sack by an invisible, irresistible force, “as a man condemned to death struggles in the hands of the executioner.”
Yet the black bag is both fearful and longed for. Ivan Ilyich suffers less from physical pain than from his revulsion from death—and the simultaneous, apparently unrealizable imperative to give way to it. Tolstoy, at Arzamas, felt “always the same horror . . . something tearing within that yet could not be torn apart.” Ivan Ilyich is “both afraid, and wants to fall through” the sack, “he struggles against it, and he tries to help.” Women in labor, I think, sometimes experience something of this difficult yearning to give way to an inevitable physical process, without knowing how to let themselves go, how to set it in motion. In the end, what makes it happen? “He experienced that sensation he sometimes got in a railway carriage, when you think you are moving forward while actually going backward, and suddenly realize your true direction.” Then pity finally liberates Ivan Ilyich.
The dying man was still screaming desperately and throwing his arms about. His hand fell on the boy’s head. The boy caught hold of it, pressed it to his lips, and burst into tears.
It was just at this point that Ivan Ilyich fell through, saw the glimmer of light, and it became clear to him that his life had not been what it should have been, but that it could still be put right. He asked himself, what is it, and fell still, listening. Here he felt someone kissing his hand. He opened his eyes and glanced at his son. He felt sorry for him. His wife came up to him. He glanced at her. She was gazing at him with a look of despair on her face, her mouth open, unwiped tears on her nose and cheeks. He felt sorry for her. . . .
And suddenly it was clear to him that what had been exhausting him and would not leave him was suddenly leaving him, falling away on two sides and ten sides and all sides.
3
Soon after the completion of “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” Tolstoy reflected yet again on his trip to the distant Penza province in search of cheap land, the trip that brought him to unforgettable Arzamas. “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” (1886) is a simple parable in the manner of the fallen-angel narrative of “What Men Live By.” The peasant Pahom, by dint of hard work and good management, succeeds in building up a smallholding. The pursuit of more and better land drives him on, beyond the Volga, and finally to the land of the Bashkirs. They offer him a bizarre bargain—they will sell him as much virgin soil as he can encompass on foot in a day. If he fails to return to his starting point before sunset, he loses his money and the land. Inevitably, acquisitiveness undoes him. The grassland here is so lush. The hollow there is just right for flax. He runs faster and faster to ring his territory. As the sun drops below the horizon, his last, desperate spurt up the hill where he started kills him. Six feet by two is all the land a man needs.
The parable is predictable and weakened by supernatural machinery—Pahom’s folly is diminished because he is the victim of the Evil One. “How Much Land” is less effective than the longer and more complex “What Men Live By”—though the two stories share a moral. After Michael, the fallen angel, has spent six years working for the cobbler, and his beautiful work is widely known, a rich merchant visits the hovel. He is a huge ox of a man. He demands a pair of boots to be made of the fine leather he provides. They must last a year without mending. The cobbler looks anxiously at Michael to see if he can do the job, but Michael is gazing into the corner behind the merchant, smiling. The cobbler agrees, the merchant leaves, and Michael sets to work. The cobbler’s wife is puzzled to see that he is doing the work all wrong. He has cut the leather round, and is sewing with one end of thread, not two. Instead of high welted boots with whole fronts he makes a pair of soft slippers with single soles, and the fine leather is wasted.* There is a knock at the door. The merchant’s servant has returned to change the order. His master died before reaching home; they need slippers for the corpse.
Michael smiled for the second time because he saw his old friend, the angel of death, behind the merchant, and learned the answer to God’s second question: Learn what is not given to man. It is not given to man to know his own needs.
“Master and Man” was written a decade later, from 1894 to 1895. Forty years had passed since Tolstoy was lost in the snowstorm at Belogorodtsevskaya. Over thirty had passed since he drove out to the distant Penza province to snap up an easy bargain from some fool who did not understand his own business. Like Tolstoy, Vassili Andreyich Brekhunov, the master, and his man Nikita—and the horse Mukhorty—are lost in a blizzard. Like Tolstoy and like Pahom in “How Much Land Does a Man Need,” Vassili Andreyich is impelled on his crazy journey by the determination to buy up land on the cheap. “Insensible of mortality, and desperately mortal,”† like Pahom and the rich merchant of “What Men Live By,” Vassili Andreyich does not know his own needs. Finally, Vassili Andreyich discovers that pity dispels the terror of death and, dying himself, saves the life of his servant. Not unlike Ivan Ilyich, who is released into death by pity for his wife and son.
4
“Morality and art,” Tolstoy’s unabashed response to the execution in Paris, creates difficulties for a sophisticated readership. “We hate poetry that has a palpable design on us,” Keats complained about Wordsworth. Nabokov concurs: “I never could admit that a writer’s job was to improve the morals of his country, and point out lofty ideals from the tremendous height of a soapbox.” In his best work Tolstoy does not mount a soapbox, yet many readers resent his moralizing. Michael Beresford, the editor of the standard annotated Russian text of “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” writes as if Tolstoy believed in a punitive God: “The reason why all this pain and suffering have been inflicted on Ivan Ilyich [is] that he should come to see the error of the way he has lived and repent.” Yet the myth of redemptive suffering, Beresford points out sternly, is open to “serious objections” since “suffering afflicts good men as well as bad” and “pain does not necessarily ennoble men.” In his view, Ivan Ilyich “is granted the precious knowledge of love only in extremis, when it is too late for him to put it into practice, except to stutter a few incoherent syllables of forgiveness.”
Beresford is wrong. His reading postulates an avenging deity, an authorial alter ego, bent on the infliction of educative suffering on Ivan Ilyich. Tolstoy, on the contrary, points out from the start that Ivan Ilyich’s life had been “simple, commonplace, and most terrible.” He is not particularly good, nor particularly bad. Ivan Ilyich himself creates the moral deathliness of his life which is finally concretized in his illness. The focus of the story is not on “punishment” but on Ivan Ilyich’s response first to life and then to sickness and death. Moreover, Tolstoy is well aware that suffering is destructive as well as redemptive. Everything irritates Ivan Ilyich.
[H]e could feel his own anger killing him but was unable to restrain himself. You might think he should have realized that his fury against people and circumstances aggravated his illness and consequently he should avoid paying attention to any unpleasantnesses, but his reasoning went the opposite way—he said he needed peace of mind, scrutinized everything that might disrupt his peace of mind, and the slightest disruption infuriated him.
Love is not raised in the story’s last pages. It is his wife and son’s pity that rouses Ivan Ilyich’s reciprocal compassion. His last word, an attempt to say “prosti ” (“forgive me”) is a stumbled apology and not a pardon. Ironically enough, no one understands what he says.
John Bayley, too, dislikes “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” because he finds the story is subordinated to its moral: “Action and outcome are preconceived, and the purpose of the writer is paramount.” He objects to Ivan Ilyich’s dying sensation of being bundled into a black bag, and his final sense of liberation—on the extraordinary grounds that, “as Tolstoy had obviously experienced neither of these states that he wished upon his character, the ending of ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ is the supreme example of his conviction that he now knew best about everything.” Conversely, perversely, Bayley praises “Master and Man” because “there is no moral, or rather the moral is a highly ambiguous one.” Bayley thinks—unaccountably, against the text—that Vassili Andreyich warms his servant in order to warm himself. So “death for the master comes without either terror or meaning.”
Bayley is wrong. Vassili Andreyich does not warm Nikita in order to warm himself. True, his hands and feet begin to freeze, “[but] he wasn’t thinking of his legs, or his hands; he thought only about how he could warm the peasant lying under him.” His death is full of meaning that he understands well:
He understands that this is death, but this doesn’t trouble him either. He remembers that Nikita is lying under him, and that he was warmed and is alive, and it seems to him that he is Nikita and Nikita is he, and that his life is not in himself, but in Nikita. He strains his ears, and hears breathing, and even a light snore, from Nikita. “Nikita is alive, and that means I am living too,” he says to himself triumphantly.
And he remembers his money, his shop, his house, his buying and selling, and the Mironov millions, and it is hard for him to understand why that man, whom people called Vassili Brekhunov, troubled himself with all those things that troubled him. “Oh well, he didn’t know what it was all about,” he thinks, of Vassili Brekhunov. “He didn’t know, as now I know. . . .”
As for Bayley’s indictment of Tolstoy’s arrogance in describing Ivan Ilyich’s unknowable sensations at the moment of death—if writers could only describe what they experienced at firsthand, most literature would remain unwritten. Tolstoy’s tales of sickness, exposure, and death are germinated by his own experiences. But they are transformed by his powerful, detailed, and supremely realistic imagination.
Chekhov wrote to Suvorin,
You are right to require from the artist a conscious attitude, but you mix up two ideas: the solution of a problem and a correct presentation of the problem. Only the latter is obligatory for the artist. In Anna Karenina and Onegin not a single problem is resolved, but they satisfy you completely only because all their problems are correctly presented.
Nothing, though, can stop willful readers from extracting the wrong solution to the problem.
What’s more, Chekhov’s formulation is not universally applicable. Tolstoy’s moral fables—like “What Men Live By” and “How Much Land Does a Man Need”—do set out to pose problems and provide answers. James Joyce thought that “How Much Land Does a Man Need” was “the greatest story that the literature of the world knows.” In “What Men Live By,” the solutions the fallen angel Michael finds to God’s three fundamental questions are extraordinarily satisfying. Like the Ancient Mariner’s wedding guest, we listen like a three years’ child, and our wish for a moral is candidly and profoundly answered.
Many English and American kindergartens have a weekly session called Show and Tell. The children bring their treasures, show them to the class, and talk about them. In his parables, Tolstoy shows and tells. In great stories like “Master and Man” and “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” he shows more and tells less. Detail wins our conviction. Conviction drives us to share the characters’ experiences. And the art is moral when it evokes a moral response. Gradually, reluctantly, we are appalled by Ivan Ilyich’s deathly aridity. We suffer with him in his miserable sickness. And we are hugely relieved when at last he recognizes his son’s pity, and pities him. We watch with increasing horror each time the master Vassili Andreyich rejects the offer of shelter because business calls, and drives out yet again into the storm. We are disgusted when, in a final paroxysm of selfishness, he flings himself belly down across Mukhorty’s back and rides off into the blizzard, leaving Nikita to die. We feel for him and with him when, lying on Nikita, warming him, his jaw trembles, something chokes his throat, and the tears come.
Not all artists want to evoke a moral response. Tolstoy does. But note his curious formulation—“Morality and art. I know, I love, and I can” (his diary entry after the execution in Paris). There is love in Tolstoy’s extraordinary capacity for universal empathy. He is the artistic equivalent of the peasant Nikita, who talks companionably to everyone and everything—the chickens squawking in the rafters, the intelligent horse Mukhorty, even his belt as he draws it tight.
Turgenev describes a happy visit to Tolstoy one summer. After lunch they went out with the children, sat on the seesaw together, and then wandered over to a tethered horse. Tolstoy stroked it, whispering in its cocked ear, and told them what it was thinking. “I could have listened for ever,” Turgenev said. “He had got inside the very soul of the poor beast and taken me with him.” Likewise, Tolstoy’s affection was roused by the baggage horse that laid back its ears and tried to overtake his sledge at Belogorodtsevskaya. And so it is that Mukhorty is as fully realized as the human beings in “Master and Man.”
Early in his career, in the Sevastopol sketches he wrote when fighting in the Crimea, Tolstoy set out an early version of his artistic credo.
Where in this tale is the evil that should be avoided, and where the good that should be imitated? Who is the villain and who the hero of the story? All are good and all are bad . . .
The hero of my tale—whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is, and will be beautiful—is Truth.
The Sevastopol sketches were noticed and admired by Tsar Alexander II. They were also censored. A Confession was banned in Russia. In 1901 Tolstoy was excommunicated by the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church. Perhaps the narrator of “Memoirs of a Madman” was right—and Tolstoy’s beliefs were folly to the world.
ANN PASTERNAK SLATER, Fellow and Tutor in English at St. Anne’s College, Oxford, was brought up bilingually in Russian and English by her mother, the sister of Boris Pasternak. She has written and lectured on Pasternak’s translations of Shakespeare, and is the translator of his brother Alexander Pasternak’s memoirs, A Vanished Present (1984). Her grandfather Leonid Pasternak was Tolstoy’s friend and one of his first illustrators, working with him on War and Peace, Resurrection, and the late short story “What Men Live By.”