The pursuit of more and better land drives him on, beyond the Volga, and finally to the land of the Bashkirs. They offer him a bizarre bargain—they will sell him as much virgin soil as he can encompass on foot in a day. If he fails to return to his starting point before sunset, he loses his money and the land. Inevitably, acquisitiveness undoes him. The grassland here is so lush. The hollow there is just right for flax. He runs faster and faster to ring his territory. As the sun drops below the horizon, his last, desperate spurt up the hill where he started kills him. Six feet by two is all the land a man needs.

The parable is predictable and weakened by supernatural machinery—Pahom’s folly is diminished because he is the victim of the Evil One. “How Much Land” is less effective than the longer and more complex “What Men Live By”—though the two stories share a moral. After Michael, the fallen angel, has spent six years working for the cobbler, and his beautiful work is widely known, a rich merchant visits the hovel. He is a huge ox of a man. He demands a pair of boots to be made of the fine leather he provides. They must last a year without mending. The cobbler looks anxiously at Michael to see if he can do the job, but Michael is gazing into the corner behind the merchant, smiling. The cobbler agrees, the merchant leaves, and Michael sets to work. The cobbler’s wife is puzzled to see that he is doing the work all wrong. He has cut the leather round, and is sewing with one end of thread, not two. Instead of high welted boots with whole fronts he makes a pair of soft slippers with single soles, and the fine leather is wasted.* There is a knock at the door. The merchant’s servant has returned to change the order. His master died before reaching home; they need slippers for the corpse.

Michael smiled for the second time because he saw his old friend, the angel of death, behind the merchant, and learned the answer to God’s second question: Learn what is not given to man. It is not given to man to know his own needs.

“Master and Man” was written a decade later, from 1894 to 1895. Forty years had passed since Tolstoy was lost in the snowstorm at Belogorodtsevskaya. Over thirty had passed since he drove out to the distant Penza province to snap up an easy bargain from some fool who did not understand his own business. Like Tolstoy, Vassili Andreyich Brekhunov, the master, and his man Nikita—and the horse Mukhorty—are lost in a blizzard. Like Tolstoy and like Pahom in “How Much Land Does a Man Need,” Vassili Andreyich is impelled on his crazy journey by the determination to buy up land on the cheap. “Insensible of mortality, and desperately mortal,”† like Pahom and the rich merchant of “What Men Live By,” Vassili Andreyich does not know his own needs. Finally, Vassili Andreyich discovers that pity dispels the terror of death and, dying himself, saves the life of his servant. Not unlike Ivan Ilyich, who is released into death by pity for his wife and son.

4

“Morality and art,” Tolstoy’s unabashed response to the execution in Paris, creates difficulties for a sophisticated readership. “We hate poetry that has a palpable design on us,” Keats complained about Wordsworth.