Master and Man

Brekhunov’s character is reducible to the singular preoccupation of his life up to the point of his conversion: money. Across various situations, from speaking to his wife to driving a horse, his tones and gestures are consistent with his favorite pastime of making a deal, as though there is nothing else that defines him. Brekhunov’s attachment to family pales in comparison to that of his social class; his memory of his father is reduced to the comparable poverty from which he had risen, and his son is viewed as a vessel for the furtherance of his achieved wealth. He is thus nearly completely defined by his status as a merchant of the second guild, the middle tier of merchants that suggests both how far Brekhunov has come, in his own terms, and how much more he has left to acquire.

As a social estate, merchants in 19th-century Russia were defined by legal status. They held a place in the social fabric of Russia long before the onset of capitalist practices after the abolition of serfdom in 1861, but the merchant nevertheless symbolized the new, money-based order of which many writers, including Tolstoy, were critical. Brekhunov is thus a negative type, symbolic of economic and social change. It is a mark of Tolstoy’s penchant for psychological complexity that even a caricature like Brekhunov is a complexly rendered individual, reflective of contradictory desires and universally recognizable behaviors. He is the master of the story’s title who must learn to become a man, understood not in terms of gender but as the uncorrupted essence of the human being in which Tolstoy believed. Before this moment, he is defined by his delusion—layers of distortion linked with certain economic and social conditions that cloud an essential self.