The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Master and Man (Modern Library Classics)
Leo Tolstoy
Language: English
Pages: 160
ISBN: 0375760997
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This new edition combines Tolstoy’s most famous short tale, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, with a less well known but equally brilliant gem, Master and Man, both newly translated by Ann Pasternak Slater. Both stories confront death and the process of dying: In Ivan Ilyich, a bureaucrat looks back over his life, which suddenly seems meaningless and wasteful, while in Master and Man, a landowner and servant must each confront the value of the other as they brave a devastating snowstorm. The quintessential Tolstoyan themes of mortality, spiritual redemption, and life’s meaning are nowhere more movingly and deftly explored than in these two tales.
This unique edition also includes a critical Introduction and extensive notes by Ann Pasternak Slater, a Fellow at St. Anne’s College, Oxford.
From the Hardcover edition.
good at separating official duties from his personal life, and just as adept at arousing widespread respect. The actual work of examining magistrate was much more attractive and interesting for him. In his previous post he had enjoyed wearing his uniform from Scharmer’s, strolling past anxious petitioners and official functionaries waiting for an audience, who enviously watched him going straight to the Governor’s office to have tea and a cigarette with him—but there were very few people who
killing him, and he could feel his own anger killing him but was unable to restrain himself. You might think he should have realized that his fury against people and circumstances aggravated his illness and consequently he should avoid paying attention to any unpleasantnesses, but his reasoning went the opposite way—he said he needed peace of mind, scrutinized everything that might disrupt his peace of mind, and the slightest disruption infuriated him. His situation was exacerbated by reading
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
attitude to him—that he isn’t doing something he ought to be doing, and it’s all his fault, while she lovingly reproaches him—and is now quite unable to divest herself of this attitude. “He just won’t do as he’s told! He will not take the drops on time. But the main thing is, he lies down in a position that must surely be bad for him, with his legs in the air.” She tells how he makes Gerasim hold up his legs. The doctor smiles gently-derisively. What are we to do? These invalids sometimes
happy time was no more: it was like a memory of another person. As soon as those things began that resulted in Ivan Ilyich, the man he was now, so all those apparent joys melted away before his eyes, turning into something trivial and often bad. And the further he went from his childhood, the nearer he came to the present, the more trivial and dubious his pleasures became. It began with law school. There was still something genuinely good there; there was enjoyment, there was friendship, there