Tolstoy’s diary is laconic:


On the road. Was lost all night at Belogorodtsevskaya, 100 versts from Cherkassk, and the idea occurred to me of writing a story, “The Snowstorm.” . . . Nothing on the road cheered me so much and so reminded me of Russia as a baggage horse which laid back its ears and despite the speed of my sledge tried to overtake it at a gallop.


“The Snowstorm” was written two years later. It is a scrupulously flat account of a night’s sleigh ride across a featureless steppe through an intense blizzard. The narrator distrusts his surly driver who, he suspects, is a novice. They set out at dusk, and soon lose their way. They halt repeatedly. The coachman climbs down and plunges about in the snow trying to find the road. They decide to turn back. Bells jingling tunefully, three troikas carrying the mail drive past. They turn again, follow the troikas, and lose them. They get lost once more. This time, the narrator dismounts and casts about in the snow. In the force field of the blizzard, he loses his bearings.

A moment’s anxiety before he touches the invisible sleigh right next to him.

Once again they decide to turn back—and meet the troikas returning. They follow them. En route, they overtake a long, slow wagon train. Then they lose the road. For a long time they have no sense of direction. They seem to be going in circles—and here is the baggage train they had left behind them, a dark line on the horizon ahead, still moving steadily onward.

It is bitterly cold. His fellow passengers fret about death from exposure, but the narrator insists on continuing their blind journey. He dozes off and remembers with incomparable vividness a hot day on the estate, when a young peasant drowned in the pond. . . .

Many details of this patiently monotonous story contribute to “Master and Man,” another journey through a snowstorm, written forty years later. But the two stories have a radically different atmosphere. In “The Snowstorm,” the characters reach their destination safely as the sun rises. There is a much larger cast of travelers. In company, danger seems more remote, whereas in “Master and Man” there is a strong sense of headstrong, vulnerable isolation.