52 pages • 1 hour read
Leo TolstoyMaster and Man
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1895A 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.
Literary Devices
Psychological Narration
It is a mark of Tolstoy’s significant ambition that he sought to represent the unrepresentable, including a person’s thoughts at the moment of death: “He felt himself free and that nothing could hold him back any longer. After that Vasily Andreevich neither saw, heard, nor felt anything more in this world” (498). In these sentences, the third-person subject (“he,” “Vasily Andreevich”) slips from a living person experiencing the passage into death to a corpse, viewed from the outside by a narrator. The slow departure of consciousness described in the first sentence leaves readers wondering whether it is still Vasily Andreevich who feels himself “feeling nothing at all.”
For many readers, Tolstoy succeeded in his ambitions to depict inner life in its most complex moments, including the passage from waking consciousness to dreaming. From the cold sledge that is symbolic of Brekhunov’s dead body in Nikita’s dream, to the box of candles that is Brekhunov’s sense of waiting for death, the story’s dreams symbolize Brekhunov’s demands turned into gifts, of his passivity turned into salvation. They are also a new way of depicting the levels of human consciousness and its relation to external surroundings.
By describing the gradual loss of consciousness and the multiple considerations that pass quickly through characters’ minds, Tolstoy draws readers so deeply into living consciousness that it often ceases be tied to the individual character. Certain habits of mind—be they Brekhunov’s, the peasant-elder’s, or Petrushka’s—are often related to broader human experiences, as in Tolstoy’s commonly used phrase “like all those who…” (489). This appeal to universality creates a realist effect, as when Brekhunov thinks to himself that Nikita “must feel flattered to be talking with so clever and important a person as himself” (460). Readers may judge the character, but to read Tolstoy is also to consider Brekhunov’s universality.
Realist Description
The snowstorm in “Master and Man” exemplifies Tolstoy’s ability to immerse his readers in a scene with carefully chosen—and never incidental—details. The experience of being lost—on which Tolstoy drew from his own countless experiences, which he documented in his diaries—as well as the disorientation of a storm and the psychological torment of resigning oneself to a situation are given precise and immersive rendering. Such details—as being cheered by the appearance of others on the road, of seeming to see the outlines of one’s destination that turns out to be a mere clump of bushes, and of checking the time in the hopes that the end of waiting is near—are drawn from Tolstoy’s own rigorous practice of self-reflection. In addition to psychological details, natural details are delineated with careful precision in order to organize experience with exhaustive understanding. More than reflecting what life feels like, Tolstoy’s realist description gives ordinary experience new depth, drawing out details often unnoticed and half-conscious thoughts often unrecognized.
Estrangement
Known for the literary device often called “estrangement” or “defamiliarization,” Tolstoy draws on less typical perspectives to render strange what is often taken for granted. Thus, in his first published work Childhood, Tolstoy shows social habits through the perspective of a child who does not understand them, and in the short story “Khlostemer” the events are depicted through the perspective of a horse. Much as they appear in “Master and Man,” children and animals are innocent of the corruptions of human ambition and thus reveal the arbitrary or, in the terms of the story, delusional nature of much that is taken for truth in social life. The most profound moment of “making strange” comes in the form of conversion. Brekhunov is able to acquire a new vision of himself, so distant from the one he previously had, that he feels himself entirely different: “[…] it was hard for him to understand why that man, called Vasily Andreevich Brekhunov, had troubled himself with all those things with which he had been troubled” (498).
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