Master and Man

“Master and Man” is a story of conversion and death, topics that preoccupied Tolstoy throughout his life. In contrast to the gradual pace of change that defines coming-of-age tales, conversion happens in an instance; it may be foreshadowed in small and unconscious ways, but rushes in on the person all at once. This is what happens to the central figure of “Master and Man,” the eponymous master, the merchant Vasily Andreevich Brekhunov. Brekhunov’s sudden resolve at the story’s conclusion to save his hired worker, Nikita, from freezing to death is completely discontinuous from who he is up to that point: a self-interested businessman. While “Master and Man” appears to operate on the coincidences of fate—a device often connected to tales of stormy travel—its conclusion is far from inevitable. As many times as Brekhunov fails the test of selflessness, none of his actions in the past matter in the end, when he reverses everything and saves the man against whom he had defined himself.

While Brekhunov is a master insofar as he has workers, another meaning of Master—“the Chief Master,” God (490)—is operative in the story from the beginning. Brekhunov’s status-conscious role as a church elder characterizes religion as Tolstoy often criticized it—namely, as an externally imposed duty rather than an inner spiritual feeling which people possess in their uncorrupted state. Brekhunov finally experiences this during the storm, feeling a type of hardship which he never previously faced owing to the workers who toiled for him. As Nikita already knows from hardship, life at its most demanding has little to do with the material aspects of churchgoing. 

For all the brevity that a short story demands, the omniscient narrator never rushes through details. The narrator describes the exact costs Brekhunov speculates, offering insight into his precise train of thoughts and his characteristic preoccupation with profit. Brekhunov’s profiteering is expressed in part through a relationship to time that contravenes the pace of the story; if the narrator focuses on individual moments with descriptive precision, Brekhunov is the engine of a goal-driven, linear plot. It is through the perspective of Nikita that the narrator devotes lines to the finest details, including the hairs on his strong wet lips from which drops of water fall. Not unlike Brekhunov, the narrator seems unable to converse with nature without Nikita. As if to emphasize the non-linear nature of Nikita’s effect on the story, his pigeon- (or goose-, in the original Russian) toed feet are repeatedly described. They turn to the side rather than point straight to the future, as Brekhunov generally tends.

Just as Nikita’s perspective gives insight into the immediate world, his speech is by and large a narration of his own labor, as when he describes his preparations of the sledge: “There like that, it will be comfortable sitting” (456). That Nikita speaks to inanimate objects is a further extension of his essence as a worker, as he directly interacts with the material world through his labor and his speech. So extensive is the impact of work on Nikita’s character that whenever “there is nothing to do,” he falls asleep, “making up for much sleepless time” (467). By contrast, Brekhunov’s perspective turns back toward himself, so that objects are reduced to his mark of ownership upon them and his inner thoughts extend into the future. So totalizing is Brekhunov’s image of himself as independent—as the center toward which all things tend—that he begrudges his wife’s suggestion that he needs assistance: “don’t I know the road … ?” (457).

With a name that shares its first syllable with that of the oft-mentioned Saint Nikolai, Nikita is associated with the saint known for his gentleness and for protecting livestock. Nikita’s gentleness is hard-won through temperance. Like Brekhunov at the story’s end, Nikita has transformed himself at its beginning, from a “habitual drunkard” to the “only one of Vasily Andreevich’s laborers who was not drunk that day” (453). For Nikita, vodka functions as a temptation brought about by the holiday, much like the money that passes through Brekhunov’s hands as a church elder. Nikita is not perfect, but he endures the trials of temptation with the help of prayer, as in the scene at Grishkino when he prays to icons for strength to deny the vodka offered to him.

Although Nikita’s hardships are economic in nature, they are shown to be equally, if not primarily, his responsibility: Nikita has no warm clothes both because he is poor and because he had sold them for drink. Although social-economic conditionality is invoked in Tolstoy’s story, the conclusion pivots on spiritual resources which are to a certain extent independent of circumstance. Nikita is by nature selfless because his conditions as a worker demand him to be, and yet the word “worker” in the Russian title—which is often translated into English as “man”—reflects Tolstoy’s equation with service, on the one hand, and man in his natural state before God, on the other. Work is the natural condition of the human being, one who “works” for God. This is a lesson Brekhunov discovers despite being someone who does not work. He attains this knowledge—at once natural to everyone and specific to the social role of a subordinate—by means of a scenario that offers him a glimpse of Nikita’s lifelong hardship. It is not Nikita who must rise to the position of Brekhunov as one who wears warm coats, but Brekhunov who must rise to the spiritually higher, but socially lower, position of Nikita, who knows the “truth” of his subordination as a sinner before God.

Added to the religious meaning of “worker” as a servant of God through constant temptation is historically pertinent social-economic meaning. In the 1870s when the story is set, serfdom had been abolished and forms of wage labor introduced. As a wage laborer, Nikita is transient—a social status which Tolstoy often feared would corrupt an “innocent” peasantry. This theme is explored in the conversation at Grishkino, where sons are departing the peasant family home.

Those farthest from conversion are those awash in self-deception, which is where Brekhunov begins the story: He is “honestly convinced that he was Nikita’s benefactor” (455). A central feature of Brekhunov’s problem as a master is that he has surrounded himself with subordinates, so that no one can disabuse him of his fantasies. Nikita considers himself too dependent to challenge Brekhunov and thus resigns himself to unfair payment, just as he resigns himself to death; there is nothing to be done, and so he goes about his tasks “cheerfully and willingly” (455).

Nikita’s good-natured if clear-eyed submission to Brekhunov brings him close to the domesticated animals whom he protects, the horse Mukhorty chief among them. Nikita prepares Mukhorty’s bridle and bit as items which signal servitude, saddling the horse into the reins which Brekhunov will hold. Mukhorty’s playful kicks toward Nikita are illuminating as an aspect of master-servant relations more generally, demonstrating that the horse could resist Nikita but chooses not to. Such is the position of subordinates who are able to overtake their masters in theory but are restrained by circumstances, including various incentives to submit. Nikita offers an example of a God’s benevolent mastery as the story conceives it, contrasting with Brekhunov’s misuse.

Nikita’s relationship to Mukhorty echoes Brekhunov’s relationship to Nikita in another way—namely, in the thrice passed handling of the reins, in times of trouble, from Brekhunov to Nikita and ultimately to the horse. The least powerful thus becomes the most reliable and decisive guide when real danger sets in.

When the journey begins, folkloric motifs of traveling emerge and are challenged. The image is one of exposure. Although Brekhunov does not recognize it, the storm poses a particular danger to him, as someone who is accustomed to relate to the world for his own traces in it, for their tracks are immediately erased. The wind, too, carries away his words, which he falsely assumes are pleasing to Nikita. In Russian folk belief, forest spirits curse travelers who do not acknowledge them by leading them in circles, a fact which lends the story’s circular journeys an aura of an affront to the spiritual world. The inclusion of folkloric parables in the speech of the character Petrushka contributes to the style Tolstoy, keen to open his writing to a peasant population, had been experimenting with. (Paperno, Irina. “Who, What Am I?”: Tolstoy Struggles to Narrate the Self. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2014.) However, as much as simple and direct language is valued by Tolstoy and reflected in his prose style in “Master and Man,” quoting parables as Petrushka does for the pleasure of their sound suggests a critique of literary formalism in which Tolstoy often engaged. Thus, Brekhunov draws on proverbial sayings, such as the rhymed (in Russian) couplet justifying his business pursuit: “Lose an hour and you can’t catch it up in a year” (473). The circulation of empty language, especially when used to justify what a person already desires, is less a signal of integrity than Nikita’s mutterings to inanimate objects. It is a constant tension in Tolstoy’s work that words can clarify as much as they delude, exemplified by how “Master and Man” renders an epiphany in which its subject, Brekhunov, finally falls silent.

Each man’s relationship to hardship is apparent the first time they lose the road; Nikita announces that they are lost “as if it were a pleasant thing” (462) because his happiness does not depend, as it does for Brekhunov, on the achievement of an expected goal. Brekhunov drives forward and Nikita acknowledges obstacles (though he does not see them this way), just as the former pushes along the plot and the latter notices the finer details of his surroundings—potato vines showing up under the snow; dirt strewn from oat fields over the snow (462). More than giving Brekhunov his connection to the reality of the situation, including the very ground beneath them, Nikita also gives directions at the most decisive moments. Although Brekhunov drives, it is Nikita who touches the ground to find the road and readies the horse, mediating Brekhunov’s contact with the tools he uses.

The travelers’ inability to discern the road within the storm reflects their inability to master the situation cognitively. This is nowhere more apparent than in the fact that their final stop in the night, where they had been surrounded by ravines and were seemingly as far from civilization as they had ever been, turns out to be not half a mile from a village. Being lost is cleared up by the light of day or the quieting of the storm, just as Brekhunov’s pursuit of profit is cleared up by his epiphany that “his life was not in himself but in Nikita” (498). Only when Brekhunov ceases his relentless journey for his own gain does the actual storm relent. The travelers’ exposure, if not the storm itself, is caused by Brekhunov’s delusional optimism, which is buoyed by repeated comments about the simplicity of the route (“Where can you go astray?” (465); “A little child could find the way to Molchanovka from here” (472)).

A shift in tone marks the final chapters, when the travelers at last succumb to what their circular paths and disorientation had portended all along: cessation. Except for the respite in Grishkino, and the initial preparations for the journey at home, the story isolates the two characters on a road that leads between points of civilization but is distinct from it. This journey is theirs alone, with no one else experiencing the snowy wilderness as they do. As a result, two identities—master and worker—are distilled from the myriad fabric of human life, whose densely populated and intersecting complexity Tolstoy had depicted in his famous novels. Inverting traditional road symbolism, the story emphasizes how Brekhunov’s trial, in particular, begins once movement comes to an end. Only at this moment does Brekhunov confront a sense of powerlessness that, compounded by the threat of death, shows itself as more than a passing condition and fundamental to human existence.

Brekhunov’s challenge begins with sleep, understood as a relinquishment of consciousness on par with death. In opposition to this, Brekhunov lays down to think: He calculates his money and wonders about the time. These numbers are abstract entities invented to understand the world but, in Brekhunov’s case, they are used to overtake it. His conversion is nevertheless seeded when, amidst these calculating thoughts, a different kind of accounting presents itself: sin and atonement. Pushing out this new accounting before finally embracing it, Brekhunov seeks to recover his delusional sense of power by abandoning Nikita and, in the process, excusing himself of blame: “He won’t grudge his life” (489). This turns out to be true, since Nikita faces the prospect of his death as a welcome reprieve, yet Brekhunov comes to feel the same resignation. Mimicking Nikita when he considers his sins in face of death, Brekhunov eventually calls back the inkling of responsibility he glimpsed. By the time he takes a different course of action to save Nikita, it is as if he makes no conscious decision, for this might have spiraled into self-satisfaction; he simply cinches his belt and acts without thought, much as Nikita always had.

Brekhunov’s repentance takes the form of a new kind of knowledge, one which requires no precise articulation and is marked by a quieting of the mind: “I know about myself what I know” (496). Brekhunov takes no account of time and falls easily asleep before finally bridging the distance between himself and his worker. This happens when he reverses Nikita’s refrain that his non-laboring life is “not for the likes of us [peasants]” with a phrase which he repeats as he works to warm Nikita, “that’s our way!” (495). The “us” of the peasants become the “our” of peasant and master alike as servants under the same God.