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"The Snowstorm" is quite the patience test. While reading it, I couldn't help but think of Abe Simpson:

"So I tied an onion to my belt. Which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. Gimme five bees for a quarter, you'd say. Now where was I..."

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Side note, just watched the interview tonight with Kevin Fitton and NWS, they picked my question about Story Club! Loved listening to the two of you talk about process, readers, teaching...

Ok back to Tolstoy.

One of the things that interests me about "The Snowstorm" and "Master and Man" is how different the characters were in each story, and I wonder how Tolstoy thought to change that dynamic over those years, what his thought process was, especially knowing that it was based on an event Tolstoy experienced.

Both stories had passenger and driver, but the passenger/master in "Master and Man" (Vasili) is so obnoxious...it did add to the story to have the tension between the master and driver, and as a reader to have these strong feelings about the Master character. He's such a damn know-it-all, so arrogant, and the driver in Master and Man we've been told has tried to quit drinking, so we feel for him, his problems with his wife, we can really see him. We see Vasili as well, his church going and his opinions and his bullshit. I felt sorry for the horses and the driver in each story, but Tolstoy seems to have thought out what kind of guys would make the story have more drive and tension, which is lacking in the first story. I'm still thinking and will read both again.

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May 5, 2022·edited May 6, 2022

The Snowstorm was, to me, unreadable. Just all over the place, hard to follow, full of unnecessary detail, lacking any kind of escalation, and boring. So when George asks "what's the difference?" between the two, I'd say one is a story and one is an attempt at a story that fails (as a story). What's nice is to know that Tolstoy was once a beginning writer with a lot to learn. He, obviously, didn't give up and eventually figured out how to tell a story.

The two stories share a snowstorm and in both stories the characters are lost in that storm. But the earlier story simply stays in that place--a scary storm with the fear of death hovering (until the end). The stories share a few other similarities, but only as touchstones--there are drivers, there is drinking, there are horses, etc. In structure, The Snowstorm seems to spin in circles. There is no rising action, just repetition of events. In Master and Man, however, everything in the story builds to the final moment. The story has a unity of purpose. You feel as you read that what happens has been chosen on purpose by the author in order to escalate the plot. Tension builds. And then--payoff. The story ends in a magnificent way, with a character rising above himself to save another. The story has meaning. And everything in the story was chosen in order to point to that meaning.

I know we've been talking about organization, and it seems that Master and Man is closely and masterly organized while The Snowstorm is not (or at least, it is not organized in the shape of a story). In Master and Man, Tolstoy's decisions are evident--he no longer wants to simply show us what it is like to be in a storm and fear for one's life (as in The Snowstorm). He wants to tell a story.

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founding

This was a tough one for me. I think I had trouble getting into this story in part because I was looking for connections to Master and Man (e.g., when the narrator asked "But what is that black thing yonder?" I wondered if they would be wormwoods, like in Master and Man.) Also as dazzling as some of the descriptions were, it was all too foreign for me to ground myself in. I felt interested at first, then kind of confused by the logistics, and ultimately, bored. I'll re-read again later and hopefully get more out of it.

P.S. I recently watched Coco, which I adored, and watching the deleted scenes of that movie felt like the last couple of exercises we've been doing. It was super helpful to see how one of the main characters (Hector) started out kind of stiff but became so much more entertaining in the final version.

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I used to make costumes for a dance theatre group that worked completely from improvisation, and The Snowstorm reminded me of the times when many many hours of work would result in a hot self-indulgent mess of unconnected fragments in spite of the best intentions and talents of all involved. I think success has something to do with what Chaplin mentioned in his Meryman interview with regard to The Gold Rush: 'I had an agonizing time trying to motivate the story, until we got into a simple situation—hunger.' In the best work a kind of subconscious creative distillation occurs, wild yet fraught with intention, to paraphrase George. The connecting thread is there in Master and Man and it invites my reader trust. In The Snowstorm, as with our unsuccessful dance theatre pieces, I could find no real justifying motivation, rather a kind of presumption on Tolstoy's part that any and every bit of his snowstorm experience was interesting per se, when of course it wasn't except to his mother.

Btw along with the duds we did produce some great dance pieces, and Tolstoy, well. :)

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This is SUCH a trippy exercise... in part because unless they've refilled the Fountain of Youth in St. Augustine Florida, I don't have 40 more years!!!! I agree with Shaiza (comment below) that the land purchase as the purpose of the trip does some of the organizing, but I would also say that in M&M, Tolstoy gives us those early paragraphs which not only describe the characters (the driver (Nikita, his wife, and Vasily) but also their dynamic (we learn Nikita is being underpaid, and is teetotaling, and lives separate from his wife). I'm compelled by the charge between the two so the "road trip" excites me as ground for seeing that dynamic progress (like "Thelma and Louise" or "Alice in the Cities"). For me everything hangs on this dynamic -- "Snowstorm" feels more like writing from a journal though I can see the structure's scaffolding --- the sledge ride, events related to encounters during the sledge ride, and the "stages" of the snow storm, and then the repeated digressions --- like hallucinations or dreams. But without the tether or pull of goal or character dynamic, I'm floundering. Last thought, the "Snowstorm" feels so located in the mind of one character -- our speaker/story teller. By M&M, Tolstoy seems to have grown the bandwidth for embodying more than one character. I so love that story.

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Fruitful comments. I did find Tolstoy's lengthy sentences a marvel to read and re-read. He manufactures a clever stitching of thoughts. This is just one, but the layout is remarkable:

"I also made up my mind to get out for once and see for myself whether that was not the road

which I saw glimmering indistinctly; but scarcely had I taken six steps forward, with the utmost

difficulty, against the wind and persuaded myself that everywhere were the selfsame uniform

white layers of snow and that the road existed only in my imagination — than I no longer saw

the sledge."

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"The Snowstorm" felt more like an off-the-cuff report on Tolstoy's experience, with very little attempt to organize, dramatize, or in any way shape what happened. By contrast, "Master and Man" is fully organized and dramatized, with clear causality and vividly delineated characters (even the horse is a character with a personality). But one of the most striking differences between the two is that "Master and Man" is a redemption story: a man who is entirely selfish and self-absorbed sacrifices his life and so regains his soul. The moral element is very strong in this story, and was effectively absent in "The Snowstorm."

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I was intrigued by the reoccurrence of the three little sleigh bells and the troika sledges in The Snowstorm. I remembered the three visits to the village, Grishkino, in Master and Man and wondered about that. In an earlier post I mentioned the rainbow and the snow / white light that showed up in both stories. The similarities in the descriptions of the snowy landscapes and the roads that appeared in both stories must have been based on Tolstoy's memories.

But the character development and story line came from some other place. In Master and Man, I saw the foreshadowing and the character development of Vasili and Nikita, how Vasili was flawed, and how redemptive and forgiving Nikita was, unlike the characters in The Snowstorm who remained unchanged throughout the story.

As the main characters developed, a storyline emerged that didn't portend well for Nikita. Unlike the characters in The Snowstorm, we got to know Vasili and Nikita pretty well and I became interested in their relationship and the relationships of some of the other characters. And Tolstoy, instead of pulling a dead body out a pond as in The Snowstorm (as if every story needs onw) made the change of heart in Vasili seem believable and real. A real feat.

I found looking at the juxtaposition of the two stories worthwhile, just as studying the differences in the two Charlie Chaplin movies made clear, there is much to gain by developing and telling a good story.

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The difference to me, the most important one, is: Snowstorm is an event. Told in wandering, realilstic detail. Few are connected, that is, few details add to either the plot or the character, or the forward movement. Indeed, it's forward movement doesn't exist. M & M is a story, with an arc, with a character guiding it. Every detail feeds into it with intention.

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Hi George, I love Story Club! But how about reading a female author next?

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Where are the women writers?????

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I finally got to read "The Snowstorm" and found it quite funny.

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May 12, 2022·edited May 14, 2022

I don’t read The Snowstorm as a weak story that preceded the masterpiece but more as a document of an active, organizing mind in its first creative storm--an actual part of “Master and Man” which would never have found its way without The Snowstorm; it’s like the hard-working helpful servant lying alive beneath the heavier form of the master story. I loved reading “The Snowstorm”—which felt kind of like actually getting lost in a snowstorm, trying to see and hear and get somewhere despite all the drifts of focus. People, ideas, images appear and disappear, voices rise and then fade out again. They all will come clear later, like the admiration for the horses; the shifting offers of kindness; the narrator’s guilty dream of failing to save someone…One story is directionless creative wandering, the other is the master plan, but they need each other! Some passages in The Snowstorm even sound like Tolstoy describing the process of a first draft-- “sometimes the horizon seemed incomprehensibly far off, sometimes compressed within two paces distance in every direction …we absolutely did not know where we were or whither we were going.” The masterpiece is buried in there too—"It seemed to me that it would not be half bad if, by the morning, the horses were to drag us into some distant, unknown village half frozen; or, better still, some of us perhaps might be frozen to death outright. And in this mood a vision presented itself before me, with extraordinary rapidity and vividness.” Maybe the vision for “Master and Man”? High winds (rough drafts) are the weather of T’s mind creating, organizing, getting somewhere meaningful, slowly. So happy to see these two stories reveal one long, hard, worthwhile journey--Thank you!

BTW: I’ve been gone from Story Club for a long time. I missed you!

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Master and Man was more focussed. There was more at stake. Everyone lived in The Snowstorm (as far as I can make out). Someone died in Master and the Man and it was the obnoxious Master. The contrasting interlude in Master and Man when they were safe and sheltered in the house, yet insisted on driving ahead heightened the stakes as well. Master and Man explored social injustice and redemption which was not clearly present in The Snowstorm, except perhaps in the story of the man who drowned in the pond, which was not knitted into the story, merely a clumsy aside. Master and the Man focused upon social injustice from the start. It did not have as many asides which distracted from the story in The Snowstorm and focused upon two characters. There is such a proliferation of people in The Snowstorm that in the midst of this terrible storm it can seem like a snow highway. And Alec: what on earth happened to him? In bringing the storm and the forest and the horses down to their core elements - much less descriptive repetition in Master and Man- the tremendous beauty and power of nature was more deeply felt.

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I quite liked the dream sequence with the pond- although it was mighty odd. I think the snowstorm had too much happening and as someone else said: no overall purpose driving it. Sometimes too many people, carts and horses just gets confusing and the whole thing is fragmented by speech sections breaking up the flow and not always adding to the characterisation. I’m afraid I must confess to skim reading this story- all 24 pages of it. It loses the sense of urgency and suspense that M and M has.

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