Published 15 years before his own cold death, Master and Man is a quintessential Tolstoyian story. He sets the scene of a good, flawed, man with a self-absorbed, money-grubbing master who is off to make a deal in another town even with a snow storm approaching. The two characters are in amiable contrast with all sympathies building up for the servant and against the master and his senseless, ceaseless pursuit of business and status; often being warmed by his admiration for his accomplishments and his superiority.

Quotes I enjoyed:

After being at last irrevocably lost in the woods and snow, both master and man settle down for the night: the master restlessly, and the man at peace with the prospect of potentially freezing to death. In a final hapless fit, the master hops on his frail horse and leaves the peasant with the proclamation, “Listen to such fools as you! Am I to die like this for nothing?” and the thought, “it’s all the same to him whether he lives or dies. What is his life worth? He won’t grudge his life, but I have something to live for, thank God.”

After riding his horse in a circle and arriving at the apex of fear and hopelessness he finds himself back at his sledge, and in a change of heart and spirit he sees his servant at the door of death from the cold and opens his own warm coat and covers him with his own body in order to save his life. This all comes to the passage below.

“And he remembered his money, his shop, his house, the buying and selling, and Mironov’s millions, and it was hard for him to understand why that man, called Vasili Brekhunov, had troubled himself with all those things with which he had been troubled.

‘Well, it was because he did not know what the real thing was,’ he thought, concerning that Vasili Brekhunov. ‘He did not know, but now I know and know for sure. Now I know!’ And again he heard the voice of the one who had called him before. ‘I’m coming! Coming!’ he responded gladly, and his whole being was filled with joyful emotion. He felt himself free and that nothing could hold him back any longer.

After that Vasili Andreevich neither saw, heard, nor felt anything more in this world.

All around the snow still eddied. The same whirlwinds of snow circled about, covering the dead Vasili Andreevich’s fur coat, the shivering Mukhorty, the sledge, now scarcely to be seen, and Nikita lying at the bottom of it, kept warm beneath his dead master.”

p. 55-56