Looking into the still unfinished sitting room, he envisaged the fireplace, the fire screen. . . .” The language tracing his thoughts becomes progressively suffused with his own idiolect: “The thought of how he would amaze Pasha and Lizanka, who also had taste in these matters, made him glad.” Pasha and Lizanka are affectionate diminutives for Ivan Ilyich’s wife and daughter. These diminutives appear uniquely here, when Ivan Ilyich’s feelings toward them are softened. Elsewhere, the narrative never refers to them by these names. And no one but Ivan Ilyich thinks that he, or his wife and daughter, have “taste in these things.” Certainly the main tenor of the objective narrative is that Ivan Ilyich’s new home is tastelessly conventional. But by now we are deep in Ivan Ilyich’s thoughts, as the present tense of the next sentence demonstrates: “They can’t possibly expect all this.” This is Ivan Ilyich thinking aloud to himself. And yet the text is unmarked by any explanatory quotation marks to distinguish his subjective thoughts from the objective narrative. Tolstoy is dipping in and out of free indirect discourse, style indirecte libre.

This narrative flexibility of tone is one of the great pleasures of “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” It occurs less frequently in “Master and Man.” And, regrettably, it is usually smoothed away in translation. Certainly the unexpected shifts of tense and person can be startling. Take the following passage, describing Ivan Ilyich’s recreations, beginning in objective third-person narrative, shifting to his own voice in reported speech, marked by his clichés, and ending in the unabashed, subjective first person:


His professional pleasures were the pleasures of self-esteem, his social pleasures were the pleasures of vanity, but Ivan Ilyich’s real pleasure was the pleasure of playing vint. He used to admit that after everything, after whatever unpleasantnesses might have happened during his day, the one pleasure that shone like a candle, brighter than all others, was the prospect of sitting down with good players, poker-faced partners, to play vint, in a party of four of course (it’s really unpleasant sitting out if there are five of you, even if you pretend oh, I love it). . . .


Tolstoy is like D. H. Lawrence—on occasion astonishingly repetitive, frequently clumsy. Both allow the thoughts of their characters to suffuse an apparently objective narrative. Unlike the controlled exploitation of free indirect discourse in, say, Joyce’s Dubliners, what we find in both Tolstoy and Lawrence is the instinctive imaginative projection of the sympathetic author. In spite of the apparent roughness of the unexpected shifts in person and tense, I have done my best to preserve this quality in Tolstoy’s texts.

Everything else is more or less routine. I have simplified the transliteration of Russian names for the reader’s sake, and tried to clarify things a little in “Master and Man,” where the servant Nikita is often called “Mikita” and even “Mikit” in the dialogue (a Ukrainian variant of the name). In this story, much of the peasants’ dialogue is enriched by malapropisms for which I was unable to find plausible English equivalents. Nikita’s “brigle” for “bridle” sounded silly and looked like a misprint. Uniquely Russian objects like valenki (felt boots) are annotated, and measurements have been modernized.

I have benefited from the great translations of Constance Garnett, Louise and Aylmer Maude—and Henry Bergen, whose forgotten translation of “Master and Man,” published as a sixpenny pamphlet in the “Simple Life” series in 1904, is not merely a fine translation but a bibliographic curio, having some sizeable omissions and additions not found in the standard Russian texts of this story.







THE DEATH OF IVAN ILYICH

AND

MASTER AND MAN

INTRODUCTION

Ann Pasternak Slater

1

“The Death of Ivan Ilyich” and “Master and Man” are Tolstoy’s late masterpieces. Written well after War and Peace and Anna Karenina, both stories directly confront the long, uneventful process of dying, some two decades before Tolstoy’s own death at the railway station of Astapovo. Yet both stories also draw on experiences described in his earliest work and resolve some of the questions overwhelming him during his crisis of faith in the 1880s.

The story begins in late January 1854. Tolstoy was twenty-five years old and on his way home from fighting in the Caucasus. It was the worst of the winter. There were no trains.