SOURCE: “The Fruits of Conversion,” in Tolstoy, Elek Books Ltd., 1977, pp. 154–64.

In the following excerpt, Cain offers a thematic and stylistic overview of Master and Man and compares it to The Death of Ivan Ilych.

Though they too deal with conversion, the accession of illuminating insight as to the true meaning of life and death, the stories of Ivan Ilyich and of the dealer Brekhunov in Master and Man are altogether more convincing than is that of Pozdnyshev. Together, they represent the peak of Tolstoy's achievement in this group of stories and novels: more incisive and much more carefully made than the longer but uneven Resurrection, only the very different Hadji Murat can be put alongside them in an assessment of his work after Anna Karenina.

That this is so is doubtless due in part to the fact that sexual temptation is no longer at the centre of...