52 pages • 1 hour read
Master and Man
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Themes
Self-Deception and Religious Feeling as Inner Qualities
Linking the motif of the snowstorm with Brekhunov’s moral corruption, self-deception is rendered in both natural and psychological terms. The recurrent motif of ill-defined shapes (“something black”) appearing to the travelers suggests the limits of perspective, but these limits are also a matter of internal, ethical- religious self-understanding. Brekhunov is so guided by his concern for outward appearance that his understanding of himself is reduced to an image: “Who is talked of in the whole district now? Brekhunov! And why? Because I stick to business” (484). Many of his gestures, regardless of the situation, stem from this image of himself as a merchant: “uttering every word […] as he usually did when speaking to buyers and sellers” (457). In the end, Brekhunov reverses this claim, understanding himself as no different from Nikita: “[Brekhunov] was Nikita and Nikita was he” (498). Prior to this moment, Brekhunov deceives himself by justifying his exploitation of Nikita as benefaction.
Who Brekhunov is—the “man” of the title which he must become—is not the merchant he has fashioned himself as, nor the past accounts of where he was going and where he had come from: “In my father’s time what was our house like? Just a rich peasant’s house” (484). Placing his genealogy along the axis of material gain, Brekhunov replaces abstraction—numbers and wealth—with reality as the text conceives it. Oddly, though, this abstraction neatly accords with a merely material approach to religion. Thus, the opening scene of church begins with the money that passes through Brekhunov’s hands, and his later recollection of religion reaches no further than candle donations and the gilded inlay of icons.
This distorted world is crowded with floating calculations of the sort that preoccupy Brekhunov when he first attempts to sleep. Material objects are traded for gain and reduced to the numbers that stand for them. The feeling of Brekhunov’s humanity—his becoming the “man” and thus the servant of the title—is abstract in a different way, as a subject that possesses nothing. Rather than moving outward to learn something he does not yet know, Brekhunov’s emergence from self-deception comes as a reconnection to a more primal, less narrativized or imagistic version of himself. This is brought about, in turn, by a version of religion that is not dependent on churchgoing but is equally primal, found within oneself without company (Nikita is present but unresponsive) rather than among others through communal organization.
Property Ownership and Forms of Labor in Economic and Religious Terms
More than domination, property-ownership is the quality of false mastery that “Master and Man” criticizes. Viewing his father’s meager status in these terms—“just an oatmill and an inn, that was the whole property” (484)—Brekhunov is bent on acquisition. To own something is thus to master it—that is, to see it as nothing other than an object to one’s own subjecthood. So it is that Brekhunov’s son (whom he sees as an heir), his horse, his workers, and his spheres of duty (including church) are not entities unto themselves but traces of himself. These owned objects are central to his identity; they bolster him.
Whereas Brekhunov’s property ownership is rendered problematic, the instability of transient living is also thrown into suspicion during the conversation about the break-up of the peasants’ extended family home. Nikita is implicated in this break-up, and his drinking is associated with that transience. Brekhunov’s advice to the peasant-elder is telling in this regard, linking his own problematic mastery to the desirable stability the elder seeks: “You [acquired] everything and you’re the master” (475). This is an unresolved tension of the story’s implicit values, that one “owner,” be he peasant elder or second-guild merchant, consolidates the stability of what he owns.
Given the essential juxtaposition of the title, it would seem that mastery and labor are mutually exclusive, and yet Brekhunov’s dealing is nevertheless a form of labor, in a sense. The problem is that the way he works—namely, by managing and owning—is essentially capitalist, an economic position and system heavily critiqued by Tolstoy and many other Russian intellectuals at the end of the 19th-century. By owning mills, groves, and the like, Brekhunov is able to employ and subject his workers to the mercy of his unfair and capricious payments, while his workers are able only to work. In this way, Brekhunov is not a worker in the same way that those who have no other option but to work are. He makes his money by owning those venues in which others work for him. Against this historically relevant economic meaning of labor there is also the religious meaning of service. Property ownership, in addition to being exploitative and harmful toward others, is equally harmful to the owner himself. So it was that Tolstoy criticized property ownership during this phase of his life, renouncing the rights to his literature and attempting to sell his land to his peasants on more than one occasion. (Paperno, Irina. “Who, What Am I?”: Tolstoy Struggles to Narrate the Self. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2014.) The solution suggested in “Master and Man” is an internal, religious one: by renouncing the delusions of ownership, Brekhunov dies but leaves behind a new version of work as an inwardly acknowledged service toward God that others might strive toward.
Sleep and Dreaming as the Boundary of Human Understanding
The storm builds a blurred sense of reality which leads into the central motif of dreaming—a facet of conscious life which reveals its complexity and is, for that reason, central to “Master and Man” both as a theme and as a stylistic achievement. The characters are not always consciously aware of the implications of their internal thoughts, which are mercilessly revealed by the narrator. In Brekhunov’s case, they are signs of his indomitable egoism. Awareness of the surrounding world is also central to the travel plot, but it is sleep and dreaming that shows the limits of waking knowledge for both characters and narrator alike. Dreams are symbolic, up to a point, but more centrally they are indicative of the knowledge derived from loose association. Rational control is relinquished, just as it is in Nikita, who does not strain to impose his calculations on the world, as Brekhunov does.
In the first dream of the story, Brekhunov imagines that he is frozen in place, first in the church and then at home in bed, where he is anxious to meet a police officer who requires some task of him—“either to bargain for the forest or to put Mukhorty’s breeching straight” (497). This sense of paralysis turns out to be death, so that he is no longer called to the business of life—be it the pursuit of a deal or the smaller concerns of Mukhorty’s breeching that had floated through his mind before falling asleep. Although this dream is clearly demarcated, it is introduced by gradual degrees of conscious and unconscious thought; impressions of the day’s events and recollections of the past and other concerns blend together.
This also happens to Nikita, who “thinks […] of the drunkenness among the workers and his own renunciation, then of their present journey […] and the talk of the breaking-up of the family” (490). The second dream of the story is Nikita’s, in which he imagines he is traveling on an errand for Brekhunov when the cart tips over and pins him down. This foreshadows the conclusion Brekhunov uses his body to keep Nikita warm, so that the former’s erstwhile exploitation of the latter has become a form of sacrifice, and what feels oppressive at one time is now life-saving. In both cases, dreamers do not experience visions as if from beyond the world in which they live, but rather interact with that world in less filtered ways.
The blurred visions of the characters’ half-waking and dreaming states are themselves blurred with the day of travel they just experienced. Although there is a firm sense of what is real—an inner feeling for religion or natural conscience—there is also the sense that what matters about reality is how human minds experience it. In other words, Tolstoy shows readers the world he creates always through subjective perspective, rigorously explored to the depths of the unconscious, even as he questions the effects of even a rational type of mastery.
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