by Leo Tolstoy
“What is it?” he asked. “What are you saying?”
“I’m dy . . . ing, that’s what,” said Nikita brokenly and with difficulty. “Give what is owing to me to my lad, or to my wife, no matter.”
“Why, are you really frozen?” asked Vasili Andreyevich.
“I feel it’s my death. Forgive me for Christ’s sake . . .” said Nikita in a tearful voice, continuing to wave his hand before his face as if driving away flies.
Vasili Andreyevich stood silent and motionless for half a minute. Then suddenly, with the same resolution with which he used to strike hands when making a good purchase, he took a step back and turning up his sleeves began raking the snow off Nikita and out of the sledge. Having done this he hurriedly undid his girdle, opened out his fur coat, and having pushed Nikita down, lay down on top of him, covering him not only with his fur coat but with the whole of his body, which glowed with warmth. After pushing the skirts of his coat between Nikita and the sides of the sledge, and holding down its hem with his knees, Vasili Andreyevich lay like that face down, with his head pressed against the front of the sledge. Here he no longer heard the horse’s movements or the whistling of the wind, but only Nikita’s breathing. At first and for a long time Nikita lay motionless, then he sighed deeply and moved.
“There, and you say you are dying! Lie still and get warm, that’s our way . . .” began Vasili Andreyevich.
But to his great surprise he could say no more, for tears came to his eyes and his lower jaw began to quiver rapidly. He stopped speaking and only gulped down the risings in his throat. “Seems I was badly frightened and have gone quite weak,” he thought. But this weakness was not only not unpleasant, but gave him a peculiar joy such as he had never felt before.
“That’s our way!” he said to himself, experiencing a strange and solemn tenderness. He lay like that for a long time, wiping his eyes on the fur of his coat and tucking under his knee the right skirt, which the wind kept turning up.
But he longed so passionately to tell somebody of his joyful condition that he said: “Nikita!”
“It’s comfortable, warm!” came a voice from beneath.
“There, you see, friend, I was going to perish. And you would have been frozen, and I should have . . .”
But again his jaws began to quiver and his eyes to fill with tears, and he could say no more.
“Well, never mind,” he thought. “I know about myself what I know.”
He remained silent and lay like that for a long time.
Nikita kept him warm from below and his fur coats from above. Only his hands, with which he kept his coat-skirts down round Nikita’s sides, and his legs which the wind kept uncovering, began to freeze, especially his right hand which had no glove. But he did not think of his legs or of his hands but only of how to warm the peasant who was lying under him. He looked out several times at Mukhorty and could see that his back was uncovered and the drugget and breeching lying on the snow, and that he ought to get up and cover him, but he could not bring himself to leave Nikita and disturb even for a moment the joyous condition he was in. He no longer felt any kind of terror.
“No fear, we shan’t lose him this time!” he said to himself, referring to his getting the peasant warm with the same boastfulness with which he spoke of his buying and selling.
Vasili Andreyevich lay in that way for one hour, another, and a third, but he was unconscious of the passage of time. At first impressions of the snowstorm, the sledge shafts, and the horse with the shaft bow shaking before his eyes, kept passing through his mind, then he remembered Nikita lying under him, then recollections of the festival, his wife, the police officer, and the box of candles, began to mingle with these; then again Nikita, this time lying under that box, then the peasants, customers and traders, and the white walls of his house with its iron roof with Nikita lying underneath, presented themselves to his imagination. Afterwards all these impressions blended into one nothingness. As the colors of the rainbow unite into one white light, so all these different impressions mingled into one, and he fell asleep.
For a long time he slept without dreaming, but just before dawn the visions recommenced. It seemed to him that he was standing by the box of tapers and that Tikhon’s wife was asking for a five-kopek taper for the Church fête. He wished to take one out and give it to her, but his hands would not lift, being held tight in his pockets. He wanted to walk round the box but his feet would not move and his new clean galoshes had grown to the stone floor, and he could neither lift them nor get his feet out of the galoshes. Then the taper box was no longer a box but a bed, and suddenly Vasili Andreyevich saw himself lying in his bed at home. He was lying in his bed and could not get up. Yet it was necessary for him to get up because Ivan Matveyich, the police officer, would soon call for him and he had to go with him—either to bargain for the forest or to put Mukhorty’s breeching straight.
He asked his wife: “Nikolayevna, hasn’t he come yet?” “No, he hasn’t,” she replied. He heard someone drive up to the front steps. “It must be him.” “No, he’s gone past.” “Nikolayevna! I say, Nikolayevna, isn’t he here yet?” “No.” He was still lying on his bed and could not get up, but was always waiting. And this waiting was uncanny and yet joyful. Then suddenly his joy was completed. He whom he was expecting came; not Ivan Matveyich the police officer, but someone else—yet it was he whom he had been waiting for. He came and called him; and it was he who had called him and told him to lie down on Nikita. And Vasili Andreyevich was glad that that one had come for him.
“I’m coming!” he cried joyfully, and that cry awoke him, but woke him up not at all the same person he had been when he fell asleep. He tried to get up but could not, tried to move his arm and could not, to move his leg and also could not, to turn his head and could not. He was surprised but not at all disturbed by this. He understood that this was death, and was not at all disturbed by that either. He remembered that Nikita was lying under him and that he had got warm and was alive, and it seemed to him that he was Nikita and Nikita was he, and that his life was not in himself but in Nikita. He strained his ears and heard Nikita breathing and even slightly snoring. “Nikita is alive, so I too am alive!” he said to himself triumphantly.
And he remembered his money, his shop, his house, the buying and selling, and Mironov’s millions, and it was hard for him to understand why that man, called Vasili Brekhunov, had troubled himself with all those things with which he had been troubled.
“Well, it was because he did not know what the real thing was,” he thought, concerning that Vasili Brekhunov. “He did not know, but now I know and know for sure. Now I know!” And again he heard the voice of the one who had called him before. “I’m coming! Coming!” he responded gladly, and his whole being was filled with joyful emotion. He felt himself free and that nothing could hold him back any longer.
After that Vasili Andreyevich neither saw, heard, nor felt anything more in this world.
All around the snow still eddied. The same whirlwinds of snow circled about, covering the dead Vasili Andreyevich’s fur coat, the shivering Mukhorty, the sledge, now scarcely to be seen, and Nikita lying at the bottom of it, kept warm beneath his dead master.
X
Nikita awoke before daybreak. He was aroused by the cold that had begun to creep down his back. He had dreamt that he was coming from the mill with a load of his master’s flour and when crossing the stream had missed the bridge and let the cart get stuck. And he saw that he had crawled under the cart and was trying to lift it by arching his back. But strange to say the cart did not move, it stuck to his back and he could neither lift it nor get out from under it. It was crushing the whole of his loins. And how cold it felt! Evidently he must crawl out. “Have done!” he exclaimed to whoever was pressing the cart down on him. “Take out the sacks!” But the cart pressed down colder and colder, and then he heard a strange knocking, awoke completely, and remembered everything. The cold cart was his dead and frozen master lying upon him. An
d the knock was produced by Mukhorty, who had twice struck the sledge with his hoof.
“Andreyevich! Eh, Andreyevich!” Nikita called cautiously, beginning to realize the truth, and straightening his back. But Vasili Andreyevich did not answer and his stomach and legs were stiff and cold and heavy like iron weights.
“He must have died! May the Kingdom of Heaven be his!” thought Nikita.
He turned his head, dug with his hand through the snow about him and opened his eyes. It was daylight; the wind was whistling as before between the shafts, and the snow was falling in the same way, except that it was no longer driving against the frame of the sledge but silently covered both sledge and horse deeper and deeper, and neither the horse’s movements nor his breathing were any longer to be heard.
“He must have frozen too,” thought Nikita of Mukhorty, and indeed those hoof knocks against the sledge, which had awakened Nikita, were the last efforts the already numbed Mukhorty had made to keep on his feet before dying.
“O Lord God, it seems Thou art calling me too!” said Nikita. “Thy Holy Will be done. But it’s uncanny.... Still, a man can’t die twice and must die once. If only it would come soon!”
And he again drew in his head, closed his eyes, and became unconscious, fully convinced that now he was certainly and finally dying.
It was not till noon that day that peasants dug Vasili Andreyevich and Nikita out of the snow with their shovels, not more than seventy yards from the road and less than half a mile from the village.
The snow had hidden the sledge, but the shafts and the kerchief tied to them were still visible. Mukhorty, buried up to his belly in snow, with the breeching and drugget hanging down, stood all white, his dead head pressed against his frozen throat: icicles hung from his nostrils, his eyes were covered with hoarfrost as though filled with tears, and he had grown so thin in that one night that he was nothing but skin and bone.
Vasili Andreyevich was stiff as a frozen carcass, and when they rolled him off Nikita his legs remained apart and his arms stretched out as they had been. His bulging hawk eyes were frozen, and his open mouth under his clipped mustache was full of snow. But Nikita though chilled through was still alive. When he had been brought to, he felt sure that he was already dead and that what was taking place with him was no longer happening in this world but in the next. When he heard the peasants shouting as they dug him out and rolled the frozen body of Vasili Andreyevich from off him, he was at first surprised that in the other world peasants should be shouting in the same old way and had the same kind of body, and then when he realized that he was still in this world he was sorry rather than glad, especially when he found that the toes on both his feet were frozen.
Nikita lay in hospital for two months. They cut off three of his toes, but the others recovered so that he was still able to work and went on living for another twenty years, first as a farm laborer, then in his old age as a watchman. He died at home as he had wished, only this year, under the icons with a lighted taper in his hands. Before he died he asked his wife’s forgiveness and forgave her for the cooper. He also took leave of his son and grandchildren, and died sincerely glad that he was relieving his son and daughter-in-law of the burden of having to feed him, and that he was now really passing from this life of which he was weary into that other life which every year and every hour grew clearer and more desirable to him. Whether he is better or worse off there where he awoke after his death, whether he was disappointed or found there what he expected, we shall all soon learn.
1 Introduction to Tolstoy’s Writings, by Ernest J. Simmons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).
2 From Tolstoy: A Life of My Father (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1953).
3 “First Glance” by Mark Van Doren, The Nation, 23 June 1926.
4 This translation of the title seems to have a religious connotation that is not present in the Russian. A more accurate translation would be “Master and Worker.”
5 Quoted in Introduction to Tolstoy’s Writings, by Ernest J. Simmons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).
6 From a translated letter of 1 May 1858 included in Tolstoy’s Short Fiction, edited by Michael R. Katz (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1991).
7 From Tolstoy, My Father (Chicago: Cowles Book Company, 1971).
8 It is the custom in Russia to congratulate anyone on his or her birthday, and also on receiving Communion.
9 “The better is the enemy of the good.”
10 “Good luck, my friend!”
11 “I love you.”
12 It is customary in Russia to congratulate people who have received Communion.
13 [A desyatin (more properly, desyatina) is about 2.7 acres.]
14 [A provincial assembly.]
15 At this place the alternative ending, printed at the end of the story [page 122], begins.—A.M. [Aylmer Maude, the translator of this story.]
16 [“Lise, look to the right—that’s him.” . . . “Where? Where? He isn’t so good-looking.”]
17 [“Whatever I want!”; or “Unconditionally!”]
18 [A verst is approximately one kilometer, or two-thirds of a mile.]
19 [“Ask them if they’re certain that their pilgrimage is pleasing to God.”]
20 [“What does he say? He doesn’t answer.” “He says he’s a servant of God. He must be a minister’s son. He’s got an aristocratic bearing. Do you have any change?”
21 [“But tell them we’re not giving it to them for candles, but so they can enjoy themselves with tea. Tea, tea for you, my friend!”]
22 [A sazhen’ is a Russian measure of length, equivalent to about seven feet.]