“What does he want with boots? They won’t bury him in boots.” The euphemistic lies of the gentry contrast sharply with brutal peasant honesty. In mild acquiescence, the dying man gives up his unused new boots. The coachman’s boy agrees to put a stone on his grave in exchange.

That night the peasant dies in his sleep. Next spring, the lady dies in her town house, without ever reaching Italy. Even as she receives the last sacrament her attention is distracted by the priest’s recommendation of a local quack. Later, the deacon reads the Psalms over the dead body—monotonously, through his nose, without understanding the words. But beyond the door of the death chamber, there is renewal—children’s voices and the patter of feet. And what do the words of the Psalms actually say? They, too, speak of renewal. “Thou hidest thy face, they are troubled: thou takest away their breath, they die, and return to their dust. Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created: and thou renewest the face of the earth.”

In the coaching inn, the cook rebukes Sergei, the coachman’s boy, for failing to keep his promise. If he can’t afford a stone, he should at least mark the grave with a wooden cross.

As the dawn mists disperse, Sergei’s axe strokes can be heard, and a tree falls.

Tolstoy’s letter about this parable is explicit. The lady has lied all her life and lies in the face of death. Her understanding of Christianity cannot resolve the questions of life and death. The peasant dies in peaceful accord with the natural laws that governed his years of sowing and harvesting, delivering calves and slaughtering cattle. The tree dies “calmly, honestly, and gracefully.” The adverbs are pointedly anthropomorphic.

The loaded contrast between the gentry’s reluctance to confront death and the equanimity of the peasants, who have known a lifetime’s hardship, recurs in “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” and “Master and Man.” The irrelevance of formal religion is also repeated, and its rituals are satirized. And, like the lady of this story, as Ivan Ilyich receives the last sacrament, he is momentarily tempted by the promise of a curative operation.

A decade after writing “Three Deaths,” in August 1869, soon after finishing War and Peace, Tolstoy heard of land for sale in the distant Penza province. As he wrote later, “I wanted to buy an estate so that the income from it, or the timber on it, should cover the whole purchase price and I should get it for nothing. I looked out for some fool who did not understand business, and thought that I had found such a man.” In high good humor, he set out with one servant and decided to cover the long last lap of the journey without stopping. Dozing through the night, he woke with a sudden sense of horror and futility:


“Why am I going? Where am I going to?” I suddenly asked myself. It was not that I did not like the idea of buying an estate cheaply, but it suddenly occurred to me that there was no need for me to travel all that distance, that I should die here in this strange place, and I was filled with dread.


So they stopped at a small post station, woke up the attendant, and were shown into the only bedroom. The place was called Arzamas.

In his biography of Tolstoy, Henri Troyat makes the experience a melodrama in the style of Poe. The room was white and square, “like a big coffin.” The furniture was soiled. “The doors and woodwork [were] painted dark red, a color of dried blood.” Shaken by his sudden horror of death, “questions fell upon him like a flock of ravens. . . . He was the only person awake on a sinking ship.”

Tolstoy’s own account is drier. It is normality that frightens him. “A sleepy man with a spot on his cheek (which seemed to me terrifying) showed us into a small square room with whitewashed walls. I remember it tormented me that it should be square.