52 pages • 1 hour read
Leo TolstoyHow Much Land Does a Man Need
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1886A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
The Sun
As Pahóm starts out on his ill-fated attempt to acquire some of the Bashkir lands, the sun plays a large role. It symbolizes the course of a man’s life, the urgency of Pahóm’s desire, and his ultimate descent into darkness, death, and hell. As dawn approaches, “the morning red [is] beginning to kindle” (221), which suggests the stirring fire of Pahóm’s desire. The color is a little ominous since red is the color of blood and will reappear in that context at the end of the story. Pahóm sets off with confidence, like an energetic young man, walking toward the rising sun. By noon, it has become very hot and Pahóm is feeling increasingly uncomfortable, but he is determined to continue; the intensity of the sun’s burning heat symbolizes the strength of his desire. However, as the sun reaches the halfway point of its descent to the horizon—symbolizing the decline of life and vigor over the course of a man’s life—he gets increasingly weak. By the time the sun is at the rim of the horizon, Pahóm is desperate and breaks into a run, even though this causes him immense physical distress. He fears he may die. The sun now is “red as blood” (225), which foreshadows the imminent outcome. As the sun sinks below the horizon, Pahóm dies with blood flowing from his mouth.
The Dream
Dreams are often seen as symbolic, in life as well as literature. Pahóm’s dream takes place the night before he is to stake out his claim to Bashkir land and is more complex than it might at first appear. Pahóm’s subconscious mind presents him with a series of images of men whom he has encountered over the previous few years. The dream sequence goes backward in time. First, Pahóm sees the Bashkir Chief; that image then turns into the dealer who first told Pahóm about the Bashkir lands. That image disappears, and the peasant who told Pahóm about the settlement beyond the Volga emerges. After that image vanishes, Pahóm sees the Devil, with hoofs and horns, chuckling. At the feet of the Devil lies the body of a man, and Pahóm realizes that the man is himself. The dream shows him perfectly the true cause of the story’s events: The men he encountered were all, unwittingly, part of the Devil’s plan. The Devil is the originator and puppet-master of the last few years of Pahóm’s life. The dream is thus a symbol of the past, as well as a prophecy of the future. Unfortunately for him, Pahóm is unable to interpret it. The dream horrifies him, but he seems unaware of its symbolic significance.
Measuring and Counting
Precise measurements of land and their costs run like a motif through the story, suggesting the world in which Pahóm lives—in particular, its obsession with monetary value. One might expect a folktale to be more generalized about numbers and figures, but in his retelling of the story Tolstoy inserts all the exact measurements. In Part 2, Pahóm, his acquisitive desire just awakening, says he must have at least 20 acres; in his first venture he buys 40. Tolstoy describes exactly how he pays for it, using 100 rubles in savings and various other means. In the commune Pahóm moves to, each man is allocated 25 acres. Anyone who has money can buy some land at two shillings an acre. Later, a peasant agrees to sell Pahóm 1,300 acres for 1,500 rubles, but then a traveler from the Bashkir lands tells him he has just bought 13,000 acres for 1,000 rubles. Everything has an exact value. The Bashkirs, however, live quite differently. They do not even have the means to measure their land, so they sell it by the day, according to how much land a man can walk round. It is true that they put a price on it, but the price is not related to the exact dimensions of the land, and it may be that they ask a price simply because it is what Pahóm (and no doubt other travelers before him) expects.
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