Master and Man
An allegorical reading of Leo Tolstoy's short story masterpiece.
Bibliography
Tolstoy, Leo. Master and Man. Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude. Maryland, Arc Manor: 2008. Borrow at archive. The same translation is also available here (with a very different interpretation, and here.
Allen, Richard Hinckley. Star Names Their Lore and Meaning. New York, Dover Publications. Borrow at archive.
Frazer, Sir James George. The Golden Bough. Edited and introduction by Robert Fraser. New York, Oxford University Press: 2009.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. New Jersey, Princeton University Press: 1971. Borrow at archive.
Grimal, Pierre, editor. Larousse World Mythology. London, The Hamlyn Publishing Group Limited: 1965. Borrow at archive.
Heschel, Abraham J. The Prophets. New York, Harper and Rowe: 1962. See a fragment here.
Lewis, C. S. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. New York, Cambridge University Press: 2013. Borrow an older edition at archive.
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Fall of the House of Usher and other stories. London, Marshall Cavendish Ltd.: 1986. Borrow at archive.
Rowe, William. Leo Tolstoy. Boston, G. K. Hall & Co.: 1986. Borrow at archive.
Seuss, Dr. How the Grinch Stole Christmas. New York, Random House Inc.: 1985. Borrow at archive.
I. Who was Leo Tolstoy?
Count Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy was born on August 28, 1828 at the estate of Yasnaya Polyana in Russia. He died on November 7, 1910. The Tolstoy family had been wealthy, but Leo's grandfather squandered the family estate. Leo's father, Nikolai, married a plain, but wealthy woman named Marya Volkonskaya. If you've read War and Peace, you might recognize her.
Both of Tolstoy's parents died by the time he was eight. He was raised by his grandmother until she too died. Then he was raised by two aunts.
Tolstoy served in the Russian army in his youth, including at Sevastopol and in Georgia. He left the army in 1856. His older brothers had died before him; so he inherited the family estate.
As early as 1847, he seems to have been interested in the welfare of the serfs (peasants) on the estate. He founded a school for the serfs in 1857. The peasants throughout Russia were emancipated in 1861.
Tolstoy married in 1862. He and his wife had 13 children, only eight of whom lived to adulthood. He began writing while he was still in the army. His best known works in the West are War and Peace, published in 1869; and Anna Karenina, published in 1877. Master and Man was published in 1895.
Around the time when Anna Karenina was published, Tolstoy had a religious crisis. He investigated the Bible, writing a book about the Gospels. The Russian Bible itself underwent a metamorphosis during Tolstoy's lifetime. In the earliest Bible used by the Russian Orthodox Church, the Old Testament had been translated into Church Slavonic from the Greek Septuagint.
Church Slavonic was roughly equivalent to Latin during the Middle Ages in Western Europe. The Latin (Vulgate) Bible, rather than a vernacular translation, was used by all Western European countries until around the time of Martin Luther. The Church Slavonic Bible was used by Orthodox Slavic countries rather than a local vernacular translation. In Russia, as late as 1751, the official Bible translation was still Church Slavonic from the Septuagint.
Beginning around 1813, The Old Testament was being translated into Russian from the Masoretic (Hebrew) text. This translation was published in 1876. Tolstoy's religious crisis began soon after that. We'll be talking about the two versions (Masoretic and Septuagint) of the Old Testament book of Amos later.
II. What is Allegory?
Even academic critics have a hard time defining allegory. When reading an allegory, C. S. Lewis (p148) says: “it is emphatically necessary that [readers] should surrender themselves to the sense of some dim significance in the background--that they should feel themselves to be moving in regions ‘where more is meant than meets the ear.’” Put another way, everything in the work stands for something else.
What has been said above applies to “symbolism” as well as “allegory.” The distinction between the two is not abundantly clear. Northrop Frye says (p90) “the term allegory is very loosely applied for a great variety of literary phenomena.” Frye goes on to say “A writer is being allegorical whenever it is clear that he is saying ‘by this I also mean that.’ If the writer does this continuously, the work itself is an allegory.” I think we'll see that Tolstoy is doing just that in this story.
III. Master and Man
A. The Time and Place of the Story
1. Time: The story takes place on the day after St. Nicholas Day. In the Russian Orthodox calendar, St. Nicholas Day is December 19. It is the second most important feast in the year and is celebrated for more than one day. Easter is the most important feast. One element of the Saint Nicholas celebration is that people leave their shoes out for the saint to fill with gifts, much like we leave stockings for Santa Claus to fill at Christmas.
In the West, where we use the Gregorian calendar, December 6 is St. Nicholas Day. The Russian Orthodox Church uses the Julian calendar. So, their fixed festival dates are 13 days later than ours.
2. Place: The main characters of the story live in a village called The Crosses (p15) or Kresty (p30). Twice while they are lost in the snow, they come to a village called Grishkino. For an English speaker, unfamiliar with the Russian alphabet, it's difficult to locate this story on a map. However, Wikipedia has an entry for a Grishkino in the Perm Krai Region of Russia. The chief city of the region is Perm, which can be found on a map. The story might be set in this region.
B. The Characters
1. Vasili Andreevich Brekhunov: We are introduced to Vasili on page 5. He is an innkeeper, a merchant and a church elder. This is the second day of the St. Nicholas Festival; Vasili had to go to church, and had to entertain friends and relatives at home. But he can hardly wait for those ceremonies to be over so that he can travel to negotiate the purchase of a grove of timber belonging to a neighboring landowner. Of course, Vasili does not want to pay what the property is worth.
Vasili is surely modeled on a passage from the Biblical Book of Amos (8:4-6). A translation of this passage from the Septuagint is here:
Hear now this, ye that oppress the poor in the morning, and drive the needy ones by tyranny from the earth, saying, When will the month pass away, and we shall sell, and the sabbath, and we shall open the treasure, to make the measure small, and to enlarge the weight, and make the balance unfair? That we may buy the poor for silver, and the needy for shoes; and we will trade in every kind of fruit.
It's a little ponderous and vague. But the Masoretic text is much clearer and livelier, and it had recently become available to Tolstoy. Here is Abraham Joshua Heschel's translation of this passage (p4):
Hear this, you who trample upon the needy,
And bring the poor of the land to an end,
Saying When will the new moon be over
That we may sell grain?
And the Sabbath,
That we may offer wheat for sale,
That we may make the ephah small and the shekel great,
And deal deceitfully with false balances,
That we may buy the poor for silver,
And the needy for a pair of sandals,
And sell the refuse of the wheat?
Heschel translates Amos 2:6 “. . .because they sold the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes.” Keep the shoes in mind.
Heschel comments on Amos 8:4-6: "Man is waiting for the day of sanctity to come to an end so that cheating and exploitation can be resumed." This describes Vasili exactly. In the KJV translation of Amos 8:8, the Lord asks: “shall not the land tremble for this. . ?” The outlook for Vasili isn’t very good at this point.
We also learn on page 6 that Vasili “took seven hundred rubles from his strongbox” for the purchase of the timberland he wants, and “added to them two thousand three hundred rubles of church money he had in his keeping. . .” This is a likely allusion to the story of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5:1-10. This couple sold a "possession" and, apparently the proceeds of the sale were earmarked for the church. When the couple gave the proceeds to Peter, they held back a portion. Peter confronted them with their deception and each of them fell dead on the spot. Things are looking even worse for Vasili.
2. Nikita and his shoes: On page 6, we meet Nikita, a laborer employed by Vasili. Nikita has his faults: he has regular drinking bouts during which he sells even his clothes to buy drink; and he became “turbulent and quarrelsome” when he drank. But he has many redeeming characteristics: he is hard-working, kind to animals, honest, and good-tempered when he's sober.
In the story, he has not had a drink “since the last day before the fast.” That would be the Saturday before the first Sunday of Advent--around the middle of December in the Russian calendar. So, Nikita has been sober for between five and twelve days. At his last drinking bout, he sold his leather boots.
We're not surprised to find out that Vasili cheats him all the time. Vasili pays him only half of what he's worth, and pays mostly in “goods from his own shop and at high prices.” And on page 17, we hear that Vasili wants to swindle Nikita over a horse. Nikita is stoical about all this cheating.
On page 13, there is a discussion of Nikita's boots, which are very bad. While on the journey, he will get out of the sledge several times when they have lost the road in the snowstorm. His feet get wet and frozen, and ultimately, he loses three toes to frostbite. I think the shoes have a connection to selling the needy for a pair of shoes, as in Amos 2:6.
We don't find out about Nikita's religious inclinations until page 61. “his life was continuous toil of which he was beginning to feel weary.” Throughout his life, he felt dependent on the Chief Master and he feels that Master will take care of him in death.
On page 60, trapped in the storm, Vasili tries to get away on the unharnessed horse, abandoning Nikita to freeze alone. Nikita is weary from a life of unceasing toil (p62). Death did not seem particularly unpleasant or dreadful to him. Together, Vasili and Nikita exemplify the Gospel verse (Luke 9:24): “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it.” We can see Vasili as wanting to save his life; Nikita is willing to lose his life because of his trust in the Chief Master.
We can also apply the whole verse to Vasili alone. In losing his life, Vasili forgets his greed and does something to benefit his fellow man. Like the Grinch, his small heart grows three sizes. According to an end-time story in Matthew, “And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” So, by saving Nikita’s life, Vasili ultimately saves his own eternal life.
3. Mukhorty: The horse, Mukhorty is introduced on page 8. He's a bay horse, which is a reddish color. He has his own personality: he is good-tempered, intelligent, and playful. “Making play with his hind leg [he] pretended he meant to kick Nikita. . .” He also pretends to bite Nikita as Nikita is harnessing him.
In many cultures, horses are associated with the sun. They pull the chariot of the sun through the sky. They are usually white like the sun at midday. But, at sunrise and sunset, the sun can be red. A number of websites explain this on the basis of dust in the air at the horizon and/or the distance the sun rays have to travel at the horizon. So a red horse could represent the sun at those times.
Olga Stanton writes that V. Propp reports Russian folktales in which a red horse is compared to fire. Propp relates this to the Hindu god Agni. World Mythology (p231) says this about Agni: “In the sky he is the sun, in the air he is lightning and on earth fire.”
Mukhorty is young (p8). But when the journey has just started (p19), he starts to sweat. On page 20, he is "heaving heavily." The city of Perm, mentioned above as the possible setting of the story, is at latitude 58 degrees north. On December 20 and 21, the time between sunrise and sunset is only six and a half hours. This is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. Mukhorty might represent the sun dying on the shortest day.
Frazer, in The Golden Bough (p361), says that the Mithraic religion regarded the solstice as the Nativity of the sun. Mukhorty's decline and death in the story might refer to the annual death and rebirth of the sun at the winter solstice.
World Mythology (p424) tells a more apocalyptic story about the disappearance or non-appearance of the sun, which comes from a group of people who lived in the Ural Mountains (shown on the map). In this story, the sun, moon and stars have all been consumed by a monster. In Tolstoy's story, the snow could be the monster, Mukhorty could be the sun, and the wormwood (discussed below) could represent the stars. Of course, they are rescued by a hero, and this could be the dawn of a new creation.
One more tale could be applied to Mukhorty: the tale of Balaam and his ass from Numbers 22:21-23. In the Biblical tale, you might say the angel of the Lord repels the ass; the angel makes her stop at every encounter. In Master and Man, Mukhorty keeps coming back to the wormwood and to Grishkino. There seems to be an attractive force at work in Tolstoy’s story.
IV. Other Allegorical Elements
1. The house: On page 9, we learn that Vasili's house has an iron foundation and an iron roof. In the next sentence, Nikita puts a brass-studded belly-band on Mukhorty. Two paragraphs later, we hear that the reins were fastened together by a brass ring. The house and an iron-roofed barn are mentioned again on pages 54 and 67.
While Vasili and Nikita are at the house of Taras on their second arrival in Grishkino (p38), a discussion goes on about the harmfulness of a household dividing up.
In Edgar Allan Poe's story “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Madeline Usher is buried in a vault within the family mansion. “A portion of [the vault's] floor, and the whole interior of a long archway through which we reached it, were carefully sheathed with copper.” The massive iron door was also sheathed with copper. On the night of an electrical storm, Madeline Usher comes back to life briefly. Then she and her brother both die, and the house divides in two and disappears into a mountain lake.
Is it just coincidence that Tolstoy mentions iron, brass (a copper alloy), and a house dividing, just as Poe did? Or is there some special significance related to electrical phenomena in both stories?
2. The wormwood: While Vasili and Nikita are lost in the snowstorm (p21), at times they pass a fallow field on which there are stalks of wormwood. On page 64, Vasili sees stalks of wormwood “tormented by the pitiless wind.” On the same page, he goes around in a circle and comes back to the same patch of wormwood.
Wormwood occurs in the book of Amos (5:7-8): “Ye who turn judgment to wormwood, and leave off righteousness in the earth, seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion. . .” It’s fairly accurate to say that in this story, Vasili comes to the wormwood for judgment. After his encounter with the wormwood, he has a change of heart and decides to warm Nikita with his own body.
Wormwood is also mentioned in Revelation 8:10-11: “And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp . . . And the name of the star is called Wormwood.”
V. Is This an Astronomical Allegory?
I talked about Mukhorty as an element in an astronomical allegory above.
Astronomically, it could be important that Vasili acts as a furnace when he uses his own body to warm Nikita and save his life. The constellation Fornax (the Furnace) can never be seen as far north as Perm. But its influence might be felt everywhere, whether visible or not. According to Richard Hinckley Allen (p221), the star a Fornacis (a possible binary) “comes to the meridian on the 19th of December”—the feast of St. Nicholas.
Iron roofs are mentioned three times in the story, as noted above. Wormwood is mentioned many times and, wormwood has an apocalyptic connection with a star.
The juxtaposition of iron and wormwood in the story, reminds me of another tale involving Peter in Acts 12:5-10. Peter was in prison asleep when an angel aroused him. The angel took Peter out of the prison, and through a gate which opened of its own accord. The Greek phrase used here is ‘pulēn sidēran.’ The Greek word ‘sidēros’ means iron. The phrase is always translated as ‘iron gate.’ But I always think of it as a star gate because the Latin word sidereus is an adjective meaning ‘of the stars’ or ‘starry.’ The two words have the same root and look like a bilingual pun to me.
Earlier, I mentioned that Vasili and Nikita come from a village called The Crosses. Its Russian name is Kresty. By another strange coincidence, there is a prison in St. Petersburg called Kresty. The prison complex contains two cross-shaped buildings, which give the prison its name. The roofs of the buildings look as though they are made of iron. The prison was built in 1893-- not long before this story was published.
Maybe Tolstoy had this prison on his mind when he wrote the story. It must contain at least one iron gate, which might be a star gate. The prison complex itself could be an astronomical allegory.
A Final Word from Amos
But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
Here’s a sample of Russian music from Tolstoy’s time–composed in 1888.