A Confession (1882), which was banned in Russia, marked this change in his life and works. Afterward, he became an extreme rationalist and moralist, and in a series of pamphlets published during his remaining years Tolstoy rejected both church and state, denounced private ownership of property, and advocated celibacy, even in marriage. In 1897 he even went so far as to denounce his own novels, as well as many other classics, including Shakespeare’s King Lear and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, for being morally irresponsible, elitist, and corrupting. His teachings earned him numerous followers in Russia (“We have two tsars, Nicholas II and Leo Tolstoy,” a journalist wrote) and abroad (most notably, Mahatma Gandhi) but also many opponents, and in 1901 he was excommunicated by the Russian holy synod. Prompted by Turgenev’s deathbed entreaty (“My friend, return to literature!”), Tolstoy did produce several more short stories and novels—including the ongoing series Stories for the People, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” (1886), The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), “Master and Man” (1895), Resurrection (1899), and Hadji Murat (published posthumously)—as well as a play, The Power of Darkness (1886).

Tolstoy’s controversial views produced a great strain on his marriage, and his relationship with his wife deteriorated. “Until the day I die she will be a stone around my neck,” he wrote. “I must learn not to drown with this stone around my neck.” Finally, on the morning of October 28, 1910, Tolstoy fled by railroad from Yasnaya Polyana headed for a monastery in search of peace and solitude. However, illness forced Tolstoy off the train at Astapovo; he was given refuge in the stationmaster’s house and died there on November 7. His body was buried two days later in the forest at Yasnaya Polyana.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE






Tolstoy’s style is simple and direct—famously so.

This is not entirely true. In both these stories there are many passages where the syntax is clumsy. There is much repetition. This is a literal translation of a passage from “Master and Man”:


The thought came to him that he might, and very probably would, die that night, but this thought didn’t seem particularly unpleasant to him, nor particularly frightening. The thought didn’t seem to him to be particularly unpleasant because his whole life hadn’t been a perpetual holiday, but on the contrary an uninterrupted round of hard labor, which was beginning to tire him. Nor was the thought particularly frightening because, apart from the masters he served here, like Vassili Andreyich, in this life he always felt himself dependent on the main master, the one who sent him into this life, and he knew that even in death he would stay in this master’s power, and this master would not treat him badly.


Often, but not always, there is a literary justification for the repetition of single words.


The corpse lay with that particular ponderousness common to all corpses, the dead limbs sunken in their corpse-like way deep in the lining of the coffin, the head bowed forever on its pillow, displaying—prominently, as corpses always do—a waxy yellow forehead. . . . (“The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” p. 6, literal translation)


Since the root of the Russian adjective “dead” is the same as that of the noun “corpse,” the original text is even more repetitive. The dead weight of the dead is laid on with a deliberately heavy hand. Or again, when Ivan Ilyich is distracted from his legal duties by anxieties about his health:


He went into his study and promptly sat down to his files. He read them, worked at them, but the consciousness that he had postponed an important, intimate business he would deal with as soon as he finished, did not leave him. When he finished his papers, he remembered that this intimate business was to think about his blind gut.


For each of the italicized variants, the Russian text has the single word delo, meaning specific “files,” “business,” and “work” in general. Even in linguistic terms, Ivan Ilyich’s physical preoccupations are taking over his professional duties.

In a couple of instances, the repetition of a single phrase seems to emphasize a significant glissando in sense, which I have identified in the Notes (see notes 36, 38). In general, I have tried to maintain as lucid, emphatic, and direct a style as possible, diminishing the repetition and clarifying syntactical clumsiness where I felt it was not serving a perceptible purpose.

The first quotation from “Master and Man” illustrates another peculiarity of Tolstoy’s late style. It has a repetitive, circular ruminativeness which could almost be called authorial stream of consciousness. The narrator appears to be thinking aloud. Very often this objective narrative shifts imperceptibly to a character’s subjective impressions. Here is Ivan Ilyich preparing his new home in Petersburg. The passage begins in traditional, factual third-person narrative: “Ivan Ilyich oversaw everything himself: he chose the wallpaper, bought more furniture.” Then it shifts to his thoughts: “Falling asleep, he imagined the reception room as it would become.