Audiobook · read by volunteers
Master and Man
Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910)
Read by Brooks Jensen · 10 chapters · 2 h 23
About the book
A winter's day in the Russian countryside. Vasili Andreevich, a prosperous landowner who is always looking for the next bargain, decides to ride to a neighbouring village to close a profitable deal. He takes with him Nikita, one of his peasants, and a horse harnessed to a sledge. The weather turns, the road disappears, and the two men find themselves wandering in a swirling blizzard with night coming on. Tolstoy sets the pride and greed of the master beside the quiet endurance of the servant, and the long hours in the snow slowly test both of them. This short tale, translated here by Louise and Aylmer Maude, is spare, tense and deeply humane, and it asks what a person is really worth when everything else has been stripped away.
Introduction
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) is remembered above all for the vast novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina. In the last decades of his life, however, he wrote many shorter works in a simpler style, aiming at moral clarity and addressing the questions of conscience, wealth and faith that increasingly occupied him. Master and Man, published in 1895, belongs to this later period.
The story is brief and tightly constructed. It has two principal figures, a landowner and his peasant servant, and one setting, a stretch of wintry steppe where snow does most of the plotting. Tolstoy uses the journey to examine the habits of mind produced by money and rank, and to set them against a plainer sort of dignity. Readers have long admired how much the story achieves with so little: no large cast, no elaborate scenery, only a sledge, a horse and a storm.
This recording uses the translation by Louise Maude (1855-1939) and Aylmer Maude (1858-1938), a husband-and-wife team who knew Tolstoy personally and did much to introduce his work to English readers. It is divided into ten short chapters and lasts about two and a half hours, read by a single LibriVox volunteer. It is a good place to begin with Tolstoy, and a good one to return to. Its themes of pride, mortality and compassion are as relevant now as they were then, and the shortness of the tale means that it can be heard in a single evening, leaving plenty of time afterwards for reflection on its quiet but unforgettable conclusion.
Public domain
Leo Tolstoy died in 1910: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text