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Tolstoy's Master and Man and the Snowstorm Michael Lydon

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Tolstoy's Master and Man and the Snowstorm Michael Lydon Tolstoy’s Master and Man and The Snowstorm Michael Lydon excerpted from Time and the Writer, https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/wc/time-and-the-writer/ Last summer, I bought a Modern Library edition of Tolstoy's early short stories, one of which, The Snow Storm, he had written in 1856. That story I read first, and stopped flabbergasted: this was [almost] the same as Master and Man! Well, the same setting: a man carried in a troika this way and that through a snowy Russian night, getting lost, turning back, then setting out again, nearly freezing to death but brought safe to his destination by the skill of the peasant driver and gallant courage of the horses. Tolstoy made just such a wintry trip through the Caucasus in 1854. Comparing the two stories gives me a chance to see how a writer treats the same theme when young and when old. First impression: The Snow Storm contains far more detailed reporting of the exterior scene: I was struck for a moment by what seemed to be a bright light falling on the white plains; the horizon had widened considerably, the lowering black sky had suddenly vanished, and on all sides slanting white streaks of falling snow could be seen….. The head of the shaft horse with its flying mane stooped and rose rhythmically as it alternately drew the reins tight and loosened them. But all this was covered with snow even more than before. The show whirled about in front, at the side it covered the horses' legs knee-deep... In sharp contrast, Tolstoy paints the Man and Master storm with brief touches - The snow was falling from above and whirling about below. Sometimes it seemed that they were driving uphill then down, sometimes that they were standing still and the snow-landscape was flying past them. —that punctuate longer passages of Vassili's interior monologues: "I'm not like the rest, idle fools! I don't sleep at night. Storm or no storm, I drive out, I do my business. Some people think they can make money by fooling. Nay! Work hard and tire yourself! They think that it is a question of luck! Look at the Mironoffs with millions now; and why? They have worked and God has given. If only God gives me health!" Yet Master and Man's snow and ice feels colder and its night looms blacker than those in The Snow Storm because the brevity of Tolstoy's mature descriptions cuts more quickly to our hearts. Four decades of writing War and Peace and Anna Karenina condensed and sharpened Tolstoy's prose. The narrator of Master and Man has a quiet, patient wisdom; The Snow Storm's "I" is a callow youth who revels in adventure: "the desire that something extraordinary, something even tragic, should happen to us was stronger in me than fear"; he thinks that "it would not be so bad if some of us"— surely not himself!—"were to perish in the cold." When he falls asleep, he dreams not of brotherhood but of a lovely summer day: A bee buzzes not far from me in the blazing sunlight; yellow-winged butterflies fly from one blade of grass to another....In a rose bush sparrows bustle about. One hops to the ground, pecks at the ground, flies back into the bush, rustling the twigs, chirping merrily. The summer-dream/winter-reality contrast strengthens The Snow Storm's structure, but the antithesis seems pat. I hear the young writer thinking, "If I have the guy hallucinating summer, that'll make the winter more dramatic." Vassili's lurching states of mind have no such symmetry, but I find them more believable: He lay and thought, always of the same subject, the only aim, object, pleasure and pride of his life: how much money he had amassed, and how much more he could hope for.... A prey to his emotions, he felt he was beginning to shiver, not knowing whether from cold or from fear. He tried to cover himself and lie as before, but he could not keep still. He felt a longing to be up, to be doing something to stifle the terror within him, against which he was powerless. Every good writer has core themes he or she returns to throughout their careers—Balzac and business, Dickens and poverty, Raymond Chandler and murder. Try reading books by your favorite writers in the order they were written, and you'll find the effects of time on each writer's spirit, just as you would find slow changes in their faces, eyes, and bodies if you slowly turned over photographs of them—or of yourself!—snapped in youth, adulthood, and old age. .
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