The children bring their treasures, show them to the class, and talk about them. In his parables, Tolstoy shows and tells. In great stories like “Master and Man” and “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” he shows more and tells less. Detail wins our conviction. Conviction drives us to share the characters’ experiences. And the art is moral when it evokes a moral response. Gradually, reluctantly, we are appalled by Ivan Ilyich’s deathly aridity. We suffer with him in his miserable sickness. And we are hugely relieved when at last he recognizes his son’s pity, and pities him. We watch with increasing horror each time the master Vassili Andreyich rejects the offer of shelter because business calls, and drives out yet again into the storm. We are disgusted when, in a final paroxysm of selfishness, he flings himself belly down across Mukhorty’s back and rides off into the blizzard, leaving Nikita to die. We feel for him and with him when, lying on Nikita, warming him, his jaw trembles, something chokes his throat, and the tears come.

Not all artists want to evoke a moral response. Tolstoy does. But note his curious formulation—“Morality and art. I know, I love, and I can” (his diary entry after the execution in Paris). There is love in Tolstoy’s extraordinary capacity for universal empathy. He is the artistic equivalent of the peasant Nikita, who talks companionably to everyone and everything—the chickens squawking in the rafters, the intelligent horse Mukhorty, even his belt as he draws it tight.

Turgenev describes a happy visit to Tolstoy one summer. After lunch they went out with the children, sat on the seesaw together, and then wandered over to a tethered horse. Tolstoy stroked it, whispering in its cocked ear, and told them what it was thinking. “I could have listened for ever,” Turgenev said. “He had got inside the very soul of the poor beast and taken me with him.” Likewise, Tolstoy’s affection was roused by the baggage horse that laid back its ears and tried to overtake his sledge at Belogorodtsevskaya. And so it is that Mukhorty is as fully realized as the human beings in “Master and Man.”

Early in his career, in the Sevastopol sketches he wrote when fighting in the Crimea, Tolstoy set out an early version of his artistic credo.


Where in this tale is the evil that should be avoided, and where the good that should be imitated? Who is the villain and who the hero of the story? All are good and all are bad . . .

The hero of my tale—whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is, and will be beautiful—is Truth.


The Sevastopol sketches were noticed and admired by Tsar Alexander II. They were also censored. A Confession was banned in Russia. In 1901 Tolstoy was excommunicated by the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church. Perhaps the narrator of “Memoirs of a Madman” was right—and Tolstoy’s beliefs were folly to the world.

ANN PASTERNAK SLATER, Fellow and Tutor in English at St. Anne’s College, Oxford, was brought up bilingually in Russian and English by her mother, the sister of Boris Pasternak. She has written and lectured on Pasternak’s translations of Shakespeare, and is the translator of his brother Alexander Pasternak’s memoirs, A Vanished Present (1984).