Master and Man

It is a mark of Tolstoy’s significant ambition that he sought to represent the unrepresentable, including a person’s thoughts at the moment of death: “He felt himself free and that nothing could hold him back any longer. After that Vasily Andreevich neither saw, heard, nor felt anything more in this world” (498). In these sentences, the third-person subject (“he,” “Vasily Andreevich”) slips from a living person experiencing the passage into death to a corpse, viewed from the outside by a narrator. The slow departure of consciousness described in the first sentence leaves readers wondering whether it is still Vasily Andreevich who feels himself “feeling nothing at all.”

For many readers, Tolstoy succeeded in his ambitions to depict inner life in its most complex moments, including the passage from waking consciousness to dreaming. From the cold sledge that is symbolic of Brekhunov’s dead body in Nikita’s dream, to the box of candles that is Brekhunov’s sense of waiting for death, the story’s dreams symbolize Brekhunov’s demands turned into gifts, of his passivity turned into salvation. They are also a new way of depicting the levels of human consciousness and its relation to external surroundings.

By describing the gradual loss of consciousness and the multiple considerations that pass quickly through characters’ minds, Tolstoy draws readers so deeply into living consciousness that it often ceases be tied to the individual character.