In “The Snowstorm,” death is a hypothesis repeatedly canvassed—and ignored. The actuality of death is raised only obliquely in the episode of the drowned peasant. This casualness seems characteristic not only of the youthful narrator but of Tolstoy himself. When he completed the story in February 1856, he wrote in his diary: “Quarreled with Turgenev, and had a girl at my place. . . . Finished ‘The Snowstorm.’ I’m very pleased with it.” There is an apparent thoughtlessness here that would be unthinkable for the later Tolstoy.

And yet the diary entry is disingenuous. In 1856, his elder brother Dmitri lay dying of tuberculosis. “I’m terribly depressed,” Tolstoy noted baldly. “From tomorrow I want to spend my days in such a way that it will be pleasant to recall them. I’ll put my papers in order . . . do a fair copy of ‘The Snowstorm.’ . . .” Later, Tolstoy wrote in his Reminiscences: Dmitri “did not want to die, did not want to believe he was about to die.” Did Dmitri’s deliberate denial, his blind refusal, become “The Snowstorm’s” insouciance in the face of death? Is that insouciance therefore ironic—carrying its own charge of covert criticism? Should we rather look death directly in the face?

A year later, in Paris in March 1857, the tourist Tolstoy took in the sights and touched on the same bruised spot:


Got up at 7 feeling ill and went to see an execution. A stout, white, strong neck and chest. He kissed the Gospels and then— death. How senseless! The impression it made was a strong one and not wasted on me. Morality and art. I know, I love, and I can.


The last line of that diary entry is significant, and will reverberate through Tolstoy’s later work.

One immediate consequence was a slight story, “Three Deaths,” written in January 1858. It contrasts the deaths of a lady, a peasant, and a tree. Predictably, the lady anticipates death with terrified evasion. She is traveling to Italy in vain hope of a cure, her entourage of bullied lady’s maid, doctor, and weak husband reluctantly in tow. The stuffy carriage smells of eau de cologne and dust. Terminally tubercular, fretful, and self-deceiving, the lady is, as Tolstoy wrote to a friend, “pitiful and bad.” Every failure to help her face death is sentimentally justified: “Oh my God!” her husband says. “Think of me, having to remind her about her will. I can’t tell her that.”

At a coaching inn where they stop for refreshments, a dying peasant coughs on the Dutch oven in the kitchen. Sergei, the coachman’s boy, asks him a favor: “I expect you don’t need your new boots now; won’t you let me have them?” “Need them indeed!” the cook snaps.