"Master and Man" says less about those statuses than I'd expected. Instead, its message echoes that of "The Death of Ivan Ilych": don't live for materialism or monetary gain, but for other people.
The difference in this later story is that the apparent master of the story, Andreev, gives his life to save the peasant Nikita whom he finally acknowledges as a fellow human being. With that in mind the English title of the story suggests that "master" and "man" are exclusive categories. Someone can be either one or the other but not both.
This retread of a the theme of "The Death of Ivan Ilych," but in a much bleaker setting fits perfectly as the final story in this collection. Not just because it's chronologically the last written among this collection's four, but because it works as denouement after the emotional action-thriller that is "The Kreutzer Sonata."
But taken on its own, I don't think "Master and Man" is Tolstoy's best work. Trading in the tight third person perspective of "The Death of Ivan Ilych" for split attention between Andreev and Nikita and a more or less omniscient narrator brings both of these characters close to being caricatures of their particular social stations.
Yet, the situation of the story, two men and a horse getting lost in a snowstorm who are given several chances to rest in town until morning but refuse and wind up stuck in the middle of nowhere, seems all to realistic considering the coincidences involved. It's a structure that mirrors the strange happenings of life too closely to be written off as mere contrivance.
And that's what sets "Master and Man" apart from the other three stories in The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories. It is the only one in which characters take a back seat to plot and setting.
Moving from Russian literature to something lighter, the next book on the list is Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions.
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