I'm certain I've written some "Snowstorms" in my life--bogged down by description, no real stakes, a narrator whose fate leaves me . . . cold (sorry). It was next to unreadable, and I kept reminding myself, "This is Tolstoy!"
The good news is I'm coming away from today's exercise thinking that if I'm lucky enough to live another 40 years, I might finally have the skill, wisdom, and maturity to write my very own "Master and Man." Just 40 more!
I can't tell which of these posts is the one where we discuss the stories, so I'm posting in both!
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.
I thought The Snowstorm resembled a (rather confusing) witness statement. Master and Man is organized like a piece of music, all rhythm and with a purposeful beat or pulse throbbing through and underneath: Setting out, getting lost, setting out again, passing landmarks, emerging, offers to stay, refusing the offers, setting out again, passing landmarks, emerging again, offers to stay, refusing, setting out again, passing landmarks, getting lost again. This is like the second Charlie Chaplin clip we watched where he’s “dancing” with the opponent and the ref. I think it’s amazing and evocative.
Nikita and little Mukhorty broke my heart – I especially love the way Nikita projects his own feelings on to the animals, e.g.: ‘feeling lonely?’. I loved them so much, (was so cleverly made to love them, I suppose), that it came as an enormous surprise and shock how much love I felt for Vasili at the end. I had loathed him and felt such anger towards him and his attitudes, but all of that fell away so that I cried when I read of his death. Wow. Way to go, Tolstoy.
Going back to the organizing, the wind and the snow are punctuated by the warmth and light; there are recurring things like the various attempts between people to communicate and the failures to hear: ‘who are you?’, picked up again at the end: ‘I know about myself what I know.’ The red and white shirts, repeated, then repeated as missing and picked up again at the end with the fluttering kerchief. Again, I think this is all like a score of music where you get little repeating themes and variations of themes popping up.
This was such an interesting exercise. I struggled a bit while reading The Snowstorm, but what a great opportunity to compare a less "mature" or "good" story with another by the same author.
Some of the differences I noted were:
– There is a lot of descriptive detail in The Snowstorm, all attended to with equal emphasis, which I think makes it difficult to ascertain what is important and what is not. In Master & Man, Tolstoy seems to be more selective – for example focussing on the sledge, the drugget, the men's clothing, the harness and its components – and his descriptions are more spare (e.g., two or three times he mentions the snow swirling "above and below" (I think)). As others have observed, The Snowstorm strikes me as a story in which Tolstoy was focussed on rendering accurately an experience he had, and so it is packed with details and characters. In M&M, everything leads to Andreevich's transformation, and maybe with that in mind Tolstoy could identify which elements of the story were integral and leave out the rest. By contrast, The Snowstorm is an episode, with less of a narrative arc, and so maybe it would be less clear which details and characters were important to the story and which were not.
– In M&M, Tolstoy devotes the first 7 pages to establishing Andreevitch's and Nikita's respective characters, and their relationship. I am not sure exactly why or how that works better, but I suspect it makes the events that follow resonate more strongly.
– In The Snowstorm, it was sometimes difficult to follow events, in particular whether the narrator and driver were still heading away, or back, to the post-station they originally departed from. I counted 4 instances of their turning around the sledge. There were reasons why they did so (it began to snow; another troika driver embarrassed the driver; they lost their sense of direction; they see the courier heading back towards them), but I didn't get a sense of escalation at those parts, or subsequently (e.g., the collision; the narrator gets into Ignashka's sledge; then chats with the old man and the counsellor). By contrast, in M&M there are fewer such changes, and the causation is more compelling (e.g., leaving Grishkino; Andreevich becoming scared when he realises it's only midnight).
I found it interesting that were features of M&M that seemed to have been retained from The Snowstorm; for example, the tendency of the driver (and Andreevich) to blame others, the description of a dream, and Nikita's "driving away flies" (flies also buzz around the narrator during his dream, in the Snowstorm).
I also really liked the way in which Andreevich's speaking to Nikita, when he is keeping him warm ("That's our way!") echoed the way in which Nikita spoke to Mukhorty and other animals.
I found the prose in "The Snowstorm" astonishingly beautiful in many places. Tolstoy's attention to detail (somehow that phrase does not do his noticing of his world and seemingly everything in it justice) is so keen, the descriptions of the snow (and the snow, and the snow), the wind, the light, the sounds, the smells, are so real and at the same time, dreamlike.
The images of the drowned man in the pond that the narrator re-experiences, his passing between sleep and wakefulness, the seamless blending of consciousness and unconsciousness, the exterior world of the storm and the interior of the mind, these have all stayed with me from the story as vivid, strange, and lovely.
"Master and Man" is very different! In "The Snowstorm" we don't know who the first person narrator is or much about him at all, and everything we learn passes through his awareness. Here we have a third person story, which is yet so much more personal and intimate. We become close to two people and the interactions between them, from life into death, and almost beyond, where Tolstoy seems to want to follow Nikíta to find out what happens to him.
Here I feel the prose is much more "in service to" the aims of the story, not so much for the beauty of itself, as perhaps in "The Snowstorm," but for the telling of the tale. The story has the same keen attention to detail of "The Snowstorm" but is never overwhelmed by it, but uses it differently, judiciously, simply, and plainly.
I love that the horse is a character in "Master and Man," not just a suffering animal like the horses in "The Snowstorm." This is because of Nikíta, I think. It shows you who he is in a way that if the horse Mukhórty hadn't been part of the story we could not have seen.
When I look through "Master and Man" for a quote that is simply beautiful I can't find one. The prose has other concerns, is workmanlike (master workman). It's as if between the two stories Tolstoy had reached a distillation of understanding what his questions were, of intent and purpose.
Somehow, I feel that in his focus on the utterly ordinary in "Master and Man" Tolstoy came much closer to the extraordinary - the great mysteries of life and death, than he did in "The Snowstorm" which seems to be reaching to those things too but does not resolve into anything coherent but stays a kind of terrifying dream.
Thank you for this exercise, George. I think it’s fascinating when a writer revisits an experience. The poet Elizabeth Bishop had an experience when she was a child (orphaned at an early age) waiting in the dentist’s office while her aunt, in whose care she was after her father died and her mother was permanently institutionalized. Years later, she wrote about it in a fine short prose piece. But she returned to it years after that in the poem called “In the Waiting Room” which I include herein for anyone who’s interested. It is a wonderful poem about the realization that one is a self, and not another.
For me, The Snow Storm was a rambling, difficult read with no sense of direction and no characters that I cared about, even though I tried. It reminded me of that moment when you realize you just asked a ten-year-old to tell you the plot of a movie they liked. It’s too late to tell them never mind, so you just listen and nod and try to follow.
Master and Man, on the other hand, is a beautiful ride. I had read it before in A Swim in a Pond, so I remembered the story. I kind of dreaded reading it again, only because I knew it was going to be painful — the cold, the wandering in circles, the loss of the beloved horse. But I did read it again, and I loved it even more than I had the first time.
There are so many organizational elements in Master and Man that make it a great story, I don’t even know where to begin commenting, so I won’t for now. Meanwhile, I’m eagerly reading what everyone has to say, and glad for the opportunity to think about both of these.
When I first read this post, I was a little daunted. Back in January, when I was reading A Swim, it was so hard for me to get through MM. I read it in slow teaspoonfuls each night like bitter medicine I knew I had to take. It was dreadful--not because I thought it was bad, but because it was terrifying for me. From the get go, I was covering my eyes, not wanting to look. (I know, I'm a baby.) To think I had to read a similar story--I just couldn't do it. After reading all the comments, I feel that it was maybe okay that I sat this one out!
That said, I am enjoying this discussion on Organization with this lens of time. To see how time can sculpt art. As a person who is living the complexities of middle age, it's all resonating with me on a deeper level than just my craft. When I was younger, I wanted to do everything and all at once. Lately, as I winnow out the parts of my life that seem extraneous, I might be creating a life that is more focused and meaningful. Not there yet, but I'm trying!
Anyway, as someone who is visual and loves photography, I feel it's like turning a lens to focus on your subject. To sharpen what you are looking at. I love that moment, in an old manually focused camera, where you finally focus on your subject, and all the softness tightens up into a sharp crisp image.
I have decided that dreams are rarely interesting to anyone other than the person whose dream it was...true in real life as in literature. I suspect there are exceptions but I am not aware of them. I slogged through "The Snowstorm" ... my duty completed.
Well, my head is full of snowdrifts now though I sit in the green and still greening pasture and meadows of Vinegar Hollow on a very rain day. I got up early and read the first one at 7:00 am, then had a break trying to repair a stubborn washing machine, and went on to the second story. 'Master and Man' is much streamlined, with fewer characters, and goes deeper into themes of life and death and the hereafter. In 'The Snowdrift' there were so many characters with little characterization, while in "Master and Man" the "peasant" is elevated to "man" with full flawed humanity, and the selfish master has a mysterious, interesting epiphany. Thank you, George, for bringing our attention to this comparison of early Tolstoy and late Tolstoy. A storm is a good "test tube" for analyzing human nature. "Master and Man" is so much more effective, for me, than "The Snowdrift." [One part of the story that I loved was the horse, who was well characterized as well. The interactions of the characters with the horse and the nature and behavior of the horse itself generated emotion and tenderness.]
I read 10 pages and started to skim. The voice of the narrator does not sound like the Tolstoy I am used to reading. Not enough bite. No sense of the hedgehog and fox. It's as if "The Snowstorm" is nothing more than Tolstoy's notes or first pass on an event he survived. The idiomatic "I say"'s and "I fancy"'s distract me as an American reader, but I wonder how an older British reader would read those tics. Too much detail of the snow and storm. The focus in Master and the men is on the struggle of/between the two men. In Snowstorm, it's a mob scene. "Master and the Man" was one of the stories in "A Swim" that appealed to me most because of its sleek design. One word is slowly emerging (at least in my mind) from all these exercises we've been doing. And it's interesting that Master and the Man epitomizes in a graphic way what we've been considering all along: drive, the drive toward a destination. "Drive" can contain escalation and pulses.
While The Snowstorm certainly conveyed the visceral terror of being caught all night in a deadly snowstorm, I found it hard to follow at times. It’s very detailed, yet I became confused as to the layout of the troikas and sledges. The dream sequences, although effective in conveying the merge of memory and present circumstances, went on too long and broke the tension of the narrative.
Master and Man, which I enjoyed reading in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, immediately establishes conflict between the master and his driver through specific details about their characters. Tolstoy situates the reader in the setting more concretely than in the earlier story, through dialogue and the actions of Nikita and Vasili Andreevich. Just the fact that the men and the horse are named, from the start, helps to clarify the narrative. The encounter with the peasant family reinforced the danger and foolhardiness of continuing the trip in the storm, thus strengthening our awareness of Vasili’s stubbornness and greed. Through his thoughts, we see how selfish he is and how he considers himself superior to Nikita, who has more sense and compassion. The story has a stronger arc, with Vasili’s death and Nikita’s survival.
The comparison of the two stories shows a similar change to that of Chaplin’s two fight scenes. In the first film, the camera was static, but in City Lights, he shows its power and flexibility. We are closer to the action and see the facial expressions of a few characters, instead of the whole crowd. Tolstoy also moved from a more general tale, a series of events, to one grounded in character, specificity and causality.
Quote from section 8 of The Snowstorm: “The tale-teller was telling some tale about the rainbow — and above us, indeed, was a ceiling of snow and rainbow.”
Quote from section 9 of Master and Man: “Afterwards all these impressions blended into one nothingness. As the colours of the rainbow unite into one white light, so all these different impressions mingled into one, and he fell asleep.”
I found the images of snow / whiteness and rainbows interesting, maybe more of a coincidence than anything meaningful, but interesting nevertheless.
I've just added the pdf to the post on the website. And will now send it out as a new post...
I'm certain I've written some "Snowstorms" in my life--bogged down by description, no real stakes, a narrator whose fate leaves me . . . cold (sorry). It was next to unreadable, and I kept reminding myself, "This is Tolstoy!"
The good news is I'm coming away from today's exercise thinking that if I'm lucky enough to live another 40 years, I might finally have the skill, wisdom, and maturity to write my very own "Master and Man." Just 40 more!
I can't tell which of these posts is the one where we discuss the stories, so I'm posting in both!
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.
Sorry for the confusion on the link. The post is now corrected on the website.
Or, as Mary G suggests, you can Google: "Tolstoy The Snowstorm."
I thought The Snowstorm resembled a (rather confusing) witness statement. Master and Man is organized like a piece of music, all rhythm and with a purposeful beat or pulse throbbing through and underneath: Setting out, getting lost, setting out again, passing landmarks, emerging, offers to stay, refusing the offers, setting out again, passing landmarks, emerging again, offers to stay, refusing, setting out again, passing landmarks, getting lost again. This is like the second Charlie Chaplin clip we watched where he’s “dancing” with the opponent and the ref. I think it’s amazing and evocative.
Nikita and little Mukhorty broke my heart – I especially love the way Nikita projects his own feelings on to the animals, e.g.: ‘feeling lonely?’. I loved them so much, (was so cleverly made to love them, I suppose), that it came as an enormous surprise and shock how much love I felt for Vasili at the end. I had loathed him and felt such anger towards him and his attitudes, but all of that fell away so that I cried when I read of his death. Wow. Way to go, Tolstoy.
Going back to the organizing, the wind and the snow are punctuated by the warmth and light; there are recurring things like the various attempts between people to communicate and the failures to hear: ‘who are you?’, picked up again at the end: ‘I know about myself what I know.’ The red and white shirts, repeated, then repeated as missing and picked up again at the end with the fluttering kerchief. Again, I think this is all like a score of music where you get little repeating themes and variations of themes popping up.
This was such an interesting exercise. I struggled a bit while reading The Snowstorm, but what a great opportunity to compare a less "mature" or "good" story with another by the same author.
Some of the differences I noted were:
– There is a lot of descriptive detail in The Snowstorm, all attended to with equal emphasis, which I think makes it difficult to ascertain what is important and what is not. In Master & Man, Tolstoy seems to be more selective – for example focussing on the sledge, the drugget, the men's clothing, the harness and its components – and his descriptions are more spare (e.g., two or three times he mentions the snow swirling "above and below" (I think)). As others have observed, The Snowstorm strikes me as a story in which Tolstoy was focussed on rendering accurately an experience he had, and so it is packed with details and characters. In M&M, everything leads to Andreevich's transformation, and maybe with that in mind Tolstoy could identify which elements of the story were integral and leave out the rest. By contrast, The Snowstorm is an episode, with less of a narrative arc, and so maybe it would be less clear which details and characters were important to the story and which were not.
– In M&M, Tolstoy devotes the first 7 pages to establishing Andreevitch's and Nikita's respective characters, and their relationship. I am not sure exactly why or how that works better, but I suspect it makes the events that follow resonate more strongly.
– In The Snowstorm, it was sometimes difficult to follow events, in particular whether the narrator and driver were still heading away, or back, to the post-station they originally departed from. I counted 4 instances of their turning around the sledge. There were reasons why they did so (it began to snow; another troika driver embarrassed the driver; they lost their sense of direction; they see the courier heading back towards them), but I didn't get a sense of escalation at those parts, or subsequently (e.g., the collision; the narrator gets into Ignashka's sledge; then chats with the old man and the counsellor). By contrast, in M&M there are fewer such changes, and the causation is more compelling (e.g., leaving Grishkino; Andreevich becoming scared when he realises it's only midnight).
I found it interesting that were features of M&M that seemed to have been retained from The Snowstorm; for example, the tendency of the driver (and Andreevich) to blame others, the description of a dream, and Nikita's "driving away flies" (flies also buzz around the narrator during his dream, in the Snowstorm).
I also really liked the way in which Andreevich's speaking to Nikita, when he is keeping him warm ("That's our way!") echoed the way in which Nikita spoke to Mukhorty and other animals.
I found the prose in "The Snowstorm" astonishingly beautiful in many places. Tolstoy's attention to detail (somehow that phrase does not do his noticing of his world and seemingly everything in it justice) is so keen, the descriptions of the snow (and the snow, and the snow), the wind, the light, the sounds, the smells, are so real and at the same time, dreamlike.
The images of the drowned man in the pond that the narrator re-experiences, his passing between sleep and wakefulness, the seamless blending of consciousness and unconsciousness, the exterior world of the storm and the interior of the mind, these have all stayed with me from the story as vivid, strange, and lovely.
"Master and Man" is very different! In "The Snowstorm" we don't know who the first person narrator is or much about him at all, and everything we learn passes through his awareness. Here we have a third person story, which is yet so much more personal and intimate. We become close to two people and the interactions between them, from life into death, and almost beyond, where Tolstoy seems to want to follow Nikíta to find out what happens to him.
Here I feel the prose is much more "in service to" the aims of the story, not so much for the beauty of itself, as perhaps in "The Snowstorm," but for the telling of the tale. The story has the same keen attention to detail of "The Snowstorm" but is never overwhelmed by it, but uses it differently, judiciously, simply, and plainly.
I love that the horse is a character in "Master and Man," not just a suffering animal like the horses in "The Snowstorm." This is because of Nikíta, I think. It shows you who he is in a way that if the horse Mukhórty hadn't been part of the story we could not have seen.
When I look through "Master and Man" for a quote that is simply beautiful I can't find one. The prose has other concerns, is workmanlike (master workman). It's as if between the two stories Tolstoy had reached a distillation of understanding what his questions were, of intent and purpose.
Somehow, I feel that in his focus on the utterly ordinary in "Master and Man" Tolstoy came much closer to the extraordinary - the great mysteries of life and death, than he did in "The Snowstorm" which seems to be reaching to those things too but does not resolve into anything coherent but stays a kind of terrifying dream.
Thank you for this exercise, George. I think it’s fascinating when a writer revisits an experience. The poet Elizabeth Bishop had an experience when she was a child (orphaned at an early age) waiting in the dentist’s office while her aunt, in whose care she was after her father died and her mother was permanently institutionalized. Years later, she wrote about it in a fine short prose piece. But she returned to it years after that in the poem called “In the Waiting Room” which I include herein for anyone who’s interested. It is a wonderful poem about the realization that one is a self, and not another.
IN THE WAITING ROOM
In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist's appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist's waiting room.
It was winter. It got dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited I read
the National Geographic
(I could read) and carefully
studied the photographs:
the inside of a volcano,
black, and full of ashes;
then it was spilling over
in rivulets of fire.
Osa and Martin Johnson
dressed in riding breeches,
laced boots, and pith helmets.
A dead man slung on a pole
--"Long Pig," the caption said.
Babies with pointed heads
wound round and round with string;
black, naked women with necks
wound round and round with wire
like the necks of light bulbs.
Their breasts were horrifying.
I read it right straight through.
I was too shy to stop.
And then I looked at the cover:
the yellow margins, the date.
Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
--Aunt Consuelo's voice--
not very loud or long.
I wasn't at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn't. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I--we--were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.
I said to myself: three days
and you'll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world.
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance
--I couldn't look any higher--
at shadowy gray knees,
trousers and skirts and boots
and different pairs of hands
lying under the lamps.
I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.
Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities--
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts--
held us all together
or made us all just one?
How--I didn't know any
word for it--how "unlikely". . .
How had I come to be here,
like them, and overhear
a cry of pain that could have
got loud and worse but hadn't?
The waiting room was bright
and too hot. It was sliding
beneath a big black wave,
another, and another.
Then I was back in it.
The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.
For me, The Snow Storm was a rambling, difficult read with no sense of direction and no characters that I cared about, even though I tried. It reminded me of that moment when you realize you just asked a ten-year-old to tell you the plot of a movie they liked. It’s too late to tell them never mind, so you just listen and nod and try to follow.
Master and Man, on the other hand, is a beautiful ride. I had read it before in A Swim in a Pond, so I remembered the story. I kind of dreaded reading it again, only because I knew it was going to be painful — the cold, the wandering in circles, the loss of the beloved horse. But I did read it again, and I loved it even more than I had the first time.
There are so many organizational elements in Master and Man that make it a great story, I don’t even know where to begin commenting, so I won’t for now. Meanwhile, I’m eagerly reading what everyone has to say, and glad for the opportunity to think about both of these.
Holy Sh--! Tolstoy looks exactly like Will Ferrell if he had an old man beard!
When I first read this post, I was a little daunted. Back in January, when I was reading A Swim, it was so hard for me to get through MM. I read it in slow teaspoonfuls each night like bitter medicine I knew I had to take. It was dreadful--not because I thought it was bad, but because it was terrifying for me. From the get go, I was covering my eyes, not wanting to look. (I know, I'm a baby.) To think I had to read a similar story--I just couldn't do it. After reading all the comments, I feel that it was maybe okay that I sat this one out!
That said, I am enjoying this discussion on Organization with this lens of time. To see how time can sculpt art. As a person who is living the complexities of middle age, it's all resonating with me on a deeper level than just my craft. When I was younger, I wanted to do everything and all at once. Lately, as I winnow out the parts of my life that seem extraneous, I might be creating a life that is more focused and meaningful. Not there yet, but I'm trying!
Anyway, as someone who is visual and loves photography, I feel it's like turning a lens to focus on your subject. To sharpen what you are looking at. I love that moment, in an old manually focused camera, where you finally focus on your subject, and all the softness tightens up into a sharp crisp image.
I have decided that dreams are rarely interesting to anyone other than the person whose dream it was...true in real life as in literature. I suspect there are exceptions but I am not aware of them. I slogged through "The Snowstorm" ... my duty completed.
Well, my head is full of snowdrifts now though I sit in the green and still greening pasture and meadows of Vinegar Hollow on a very rain day. I got up early and read the first one at 7:00 am, then had a break trying to repair a stubborn washing machine, and went on to the second story. 'Master and Man' is much streamlined, with fewer characters, and goes deeper into themes of life and death and the hereafter. In 'The Snowdrift' there were so many characters with little characterization, while in "Master and Man" the "peasant" is elevated to "man" with full flawed humanity, and the selfish master has a mysterious, interesting epiphany. Thank you, George, for bringing our attention to this comparison of early Tolstoy and late Tolstoy. A storm is a good "test tube" for analyzing human nature. "Master and Man" is so much more effective, for me, than "The Snowdrift." [One part of the story that I loved was the horse, who was well characterized as well. The interactions of the characters with the horse and the nature and behavior of the horse itself generated emotion and tenderness.]
I read 10 pages and started to skim. The voice of the narrator does not sound like the Tolstoy I am used to reading. Not enough bite. No sense of the hedgehog and fox. It's as if "The Snowstorm" is nothing more than Tolstoy's notes or first pass on an event he survived. The idiomatic "I say"'s and "I fancy"'s distract me as an American reader, but I wonder how an older British reader would read those tics. Too much detail of the snow and storm. The focus in Master and the men is on the struggle of/between the two men. In Snowstorm, it's a mob scene. "Master and the Man" was one of the stories in "A Swim" that appealed to me most because of its sleek design. One word is slowly emerging (at least in my mind) from all these exercises we've been doing. And it's interesting that Master and the Man epitomizes in a graphic way what we've been considering all along: drive, the drive toward a destination. "Drive" can contain escalation and pulses.
While The Snowstorm certainly conveyed the visceral terror of being caught all night in a deadly snowstorm, I found it hard to follow at times. It’s very detailed, yet I became confused as to the layout of the troikas and sledges. The dream sequences, although effective in conveying the merge of memory and present circumstances, went on too long and broke the tension of the narrative.
Master and Man, which I enjoyed reading in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, immediately establishes conflict between the master and his driver through specific details about their characters. Tolstoy situates the reader in the setting more concretely than in the earlier story, through dialogue and the actions of Nikita and Vasili Andreevich. Just the fact that the men and the horse are named, from the start, helps to clarify the narrative. The encounter with the peasant family reinforced the danger and foolhardiness of continuing the trip in the storm, thus strengthening our awareness of Vasili’s stubbornness and greed. Through his thoughts, we see how selfish he is and how he considers himself superior to Nikita, who has more sense and compassion. The story has a stronger arc, with Vasili’s death and Nikita’s survival.
The comparison of the two stories shows a similar change to that of Chaplin’s two fight scenes. In the first film, the camera was static, but in City Lights, he shows its power and flexibility. We are closer to the action and see the facial expressions of a few characters, instead of the whole crowd. Tolstoy also moved from a more general tale, a series of events, to one grounded in character, specificity and causality.
Quote from section 8 of The Snowstorm: “The tale-teller was telling some tale about the rainbow — and above us, indeed, was a ceiling of snow and rainbow.”
Quote from section 9 of Master and Man: “Afterwards all these impressions blended into one nothingness. As the colours of the rainbow unite into one white light, so all these different impressions mingled into one, and he fell asleep.”
I found the images of snow / whiteness and rainbows interesting, maybe more of a coincidence than anything meaningful, but interesting nevertheless.