The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Master and Man
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Authors: Leo Tolstoy
Tags: #Fiction, #Classics, #Literary, #General
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A new translation, with an Introduction and Notes,
by Ann Pasternak Slater
THE MODERN LIBRARY
NEW YORK
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OLSTOY
Count Lev (Leo) Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born on August 28, 1828, at Yasnaya Polyana (Bright Glade), his family’s estate located 130 miles southwest of Moscow. He was the fourth of five children born to Count Nikolay Ilyich Tolstoy and Marya Nikolayevna Tolstoya (née Princess Volkonskaya, who died when Tolstoy was barely two). He enjoyed a privileged childhood typical of his elevated social class (his patrician family was older and prouder than the tsar’s). Early on, the boy showed a gift for languages as well as a fondness for literature—including fairy tales, the poems of Pushkin, and the Bible, especially the Old Testament story of Joseph. Orphaned at the age of nine by the death of his father, Tolstoy and his brothers and sister were first cared for by a devoutly religious aunt. When she died in 1841 the family went to live with their father’s only surviving sister in the provincial city of Kazan. Tolstoy was educated by French and German tutors until he enrolled at Kazan University in 1844. There he studied law and Oriental languages and developed a keen interest in moral philosophy and the writings of Rousseau. A notably unsuccessful student who led a dissolute life, Tolstoy abandoned his studies in 1847 without earning a degree and returned to Yasnaya Polyana to claim the property (along with 350 serfs and their families) that was his birthright.
After several aimless years of debauchery and gambling in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Tolstoy journeyed to the Caucasus in 1851 to join his older brother Nikolay, an army lieutenant participating in the Caucasian campaign. The following year Tolstoy officially enlisted in the military, and in 1854 he became a commissioned officer in the artillery, serving first on the Danube and later in the Crimean War. Although his sexual escapades and profligate gambling during this period shocked even his fellow soldiers, it was while in the army that Tolstoy began his literary apprenticeship. Greatly influenced by the works of Charles Dickens, Tolstoy wrote
Childhood,
his first novel. Published pseudonymously in September 1852 in the
Contemporary,
a St. Petersburg journal, the book received highly favorable reviews—earning the praise of Turgenev—and overnight established Tolstoy as a major writer. Over the next years he contributed several novels and short stories (about military life) to the
Contemporary—
including
Boyhood
(1854), three Sevastopol stories (1855–1856), “Two Hussars” (1856), and
Youth
(1857).
In 1856 Tolstoy left the army and went to live in St. Petersburg, where he was much in demand in fashionable salons. He quickly discovered, however, that he disliked the life of a literary celebrity (he often quarreled with fellow writers, especially Turgenev) and soon departed on his first trip to western Europe. Upon returning to Russia, he produced the story “Three Deaths” and a short novel,
Family Happiness,
both published in 1859. Afterward, Tolstoy decided to abandon literature in favor of more “useful” pursuits. He retired to Yasnaya Polyana to manage his estate and established a school there for the education of children of his serfs. In 1860 he again traveled abroad in order to observe European (especially German) educational systems; he later published
Yasnaya Polyana,
a journal expounding his theories on pedagogy. The following year he was appointed an arbiter of the peace to settle disputes between newly emancipated serfs and their former masters. But in July 1862 the police raided the school at Yasnaya Polyana for evidence of subversive activity. The search elicited an indignant protest from Tolstoy directly to Alexander II, who officially exonerated him.
That same summer, at the age of thirty-four, Tolstoy fell in love with eighteen-year-old Sofya Andreyevna Bers, who was living with her parents on a nearby estate. (As a girl she had reverently memorized whole passages of
Childhood.
) The two were married on September 23, 1862, in a church inside the Kremlin walls. The early years of the marriage were largely joyful (thirteen children were born of the union) and coincided with the period of Tolstoy’s great novels. In 1863 he not only published
The Cossacks,
but began work on
War and Peace,
his great epic novel that came out in 1869.
Then, on March 18, 1873, inspired by the opening of a fragmentary tale by Pushkin, Tolstoy started writing
Anna Karenina.
Originally titled
Two Marriages,
the book underwent multiple revisions and was serialized to great popular and critical acclaim between 1875 and 1877.
It was during the torment of writing
Anna Karenina
that Tolstoy experienced the spiritual crisis that recast the rest of his life. Haunted by the inevitability of death, he underwent a “conversion” to the ideals of human life and conduct that he found in the teachings of Christ.
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.
T
RANSLATOR’S
N
OTE
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. 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.