lane 341 .how much land

[mohammad_4909]

How Much Land does a Man need? By Leo Tolstoy
The protagonist of the story is a peasant named Pahom, who at the beginning can be heard complaining that he does not own enough land to satisfy him. A landlady in the village decides to sell her estate, and the peasants of the village buy as much of that land as they can. Pahom himself purchases some land, and by working off the extra land is able to repay his debts and live a more comfortable life.
However, Pahom then becomes very possessive of his land, and this gets him into discord with his neighbours. This is a first sign that greed is disrupting his moral values. Later, he moves to a larger area of land at another Commune. Here, he can grow even more crops and amass a small fortune, but he has to grow the crops on rented land, which irritates him.
Finally, he is introduced to the Bashkirs, and is told they are simple-minded people who own a huge amount of land. Thus, he goes to them to take as much of their land for as low a price as he can negotiate. Their offer is very unusual: for a sum of one thousand rubles, Pahom can walk around as large an area as he wants, starting at daybreak, marking his route with a spade along the way. If he reaches his starting point by sunset that day, the entire area of land his route encloses will be his. He is delighted as he believes that he can cover a great distance and has chanced upon the bargain of a lifetime.
His journey across the land illustrates his greediness. He tries to cover as much land as possible, not content with what he already has. As the sun nearly sets, he realizes his error and runs back as fast as he can to the waiting Bashkirs. He finally arrives at the starting point just as the sun sets. The Bashkirs cheer his good fortune, but exhausted from the run, he drops dead. They bury him in an ordinary grave only six feet long, thus ironically answering the question posed in the title of the story.
Another Essay
The story, "How Much Land Does a Man Need?", by Leo Tolstoy is a story about Americans taking advantage of the Indians. Although it is set in Russia, it is about the greed that many people had at the time and the outcome of that greed. The opening scene represents the Europeans coming over to America. During that time, the mid-1800's, the Europeans were rich and their relatives in America were poor. The younger sister in the story represents the Americans and the older sister represents the Europeans. The poor Americans, like the younger sister in the story, did not mind having to work hard all the time. They enjoyed their freedom and security. Even though they were content, it wasn't complete. In the story, Pahom agrees with his peasant wife but wishes they had more land to work with.

"Our only trouble is that we haven't land enough. If I had plenty of land, I shouldn't fear the Devil himself!" (p 212) The devil here is greed itself. It is here that we see the greed begin to manifest, as it did in Americans over a hundred years ago. The story goes on and we see Pahom becoming agitated the he has to pay fines all the time because of his animals wandering. This represents the American people having to pay fines, such as taxes and tariffs, to the government in the mid-1800's. Pahom lives in a commune and some of the people have begun to buy their own tracts of land. He sees this and decides that it would be a good idea if he did the same thing. He was worried that if he didn't act soon, he would miss his chance. He wouldn't have to pay any fines and could keep all the money he makes. The more people heard about it, the more they wanted it for themselves. Pahom finally gets his own land and is happy with it.

Inevitably, some problems arise with Pahom's land. Other people's animals were getting onto land and ruining his crops. At first he just put up with it. Eventually though he became a hypocrite. "So he had them up, gave them a lesson, and then another, and two or three of the peasants were fined." (p 214) He began to impose fines on people the same way they were imposed on him earlier in the story. Needless to say, people were very angry with him. Some people began to leave the commune, eastern United States, and leave for new parts, the west. Pahom was content to stay until he heard from a stranger that the land was great where people were moving. This could be compared to news getting back to the east coast about all that was happening on the move west. So Pahom went to check things out, liked what he saw, and moved.

Here things went well, for awhile. Pahom was happy having ten times as much land. He had land for everything he needed. But after awhile, it came to be to little. His greed was growing out of control. He was ready to buy more land but a passing stranger told him about a place he had just come from, more news from the west. Pahom was told about the best land ever and how cheap it was. Pahom travels to inquire about the land. When he arrives, he finds it just as he was told it was going to be. The people that live on the land, the Bashkirs, are a very simple and happy people. They do not speak the same language as Pahom, though. These people are the native Americans. As the European settlers moved west they came across the natives. Tolstoy describes: "They were all stout and merry, and all the summer long they never thought of doing any work. They were quite ignorant, and knew no Russian, but were very good-natured." (p217)

When people first encountered the Indians, they thought them to be stupid and lazy, easy to take advantage of. With the help of a translator, Pahom makes his purposes know. The Chief, though, speaks Russian. Many native Americans knew how to speak English because they were constantly exposed to English speaking men. They made a deal that whatever deal Pahom could walk around would be his. His greed was out of control at this point. He was so sure about how much land he could cover that he thought he was stealing for them.

The night before he had a dream that the devil was sitting over his dead body laughing. He dismisses it and goes back to sleep. The next day he starts out to stake his claim. He is trying so hard to get as much as possible that he miss judges how far he has gone and begins to have problems walking. He is tired, hot, and hurt. He has to start running to make it back in time. Pahom begins to realize that he should not have been so greedy, as it is taking it's toll on him. He barely makes it back on time, and alive. Right as he gets to the finish, he sees the Chief sitting and laughing, just like the devil in his dream. He collapses and dies right as he finishes. He is buried right there. "His servant picked up the spade and dug a grave long enough for Pahom to lie in, and buried him in it. Six feet from his head to his heels was all he need." (p 222)

This story represents the greed present in Americans during the time of the settlement of western America. Americans were very greedy people. They were never content with what they had and, in more than one way, destroyed their own lives to try and get more for themselves.

Analysis of Leo Tolstoy and his work "How Much Land Does A Man Need?"

Written by: rchs2002

"How Much Land Does A Man Need?," by Leo Tolstoy was influenced by his life and times. Leo Tolstoy encountered many things throughout his life that influenced his works. His life itself influenced him, along with poverty, greed and peasant days in 19th century Russia.
Tolstoy's eventful life impacted his works. Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born into a family of aristocratic landowners in 1828 at the family estate at Yasnaya Polyana, a place south of Moscow. His parents died in the 1930s when he was very young so his aunts raised him with an upper middle class lifestyle. His aunts were very important to him and when they died, he made them live on forever as characters in his stories (Alexander 16). While his aunts were still alive, they hired tutors to teach him out of Tolstoy's home (Tolstoi). After a few years of wandering about Russia, he recommenced his studies at sixteen years old at Kazan' University to study law and oriental language but preferred to educate himself independently and in 1847, he gave up his studies without finishing his degree (Troyat 28).
His next fifteen years were very unsettled. Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana to manage the family estate, with the purpose to improve himself intellectually, morally, and physically. After less than two years, though, he abandoned rural life for the pleasures of Moscow. In 1851, Tolstoy traveled to the Caucasus, a region then part of southern Russia, where his brother was serving in the army. He enlisted as a volunteer, serving with distinction in the Crimean War from 1853-1856 (Magill 382).
Tolstoy started his literary career in the 1850s during his army service. His genre of work includes novels, short stories, fiction, plays, nonfiction and letters. His first literary work was a trilogy; each section of the trilogy including a different part of growing up: Childhood, written in 1852, noted for a lyrical and charming picture of the innocence and joy of life through a child's eyes; Boyhood, written in 1854; and Youth, written in 1857. This trilogy focuses on the psychological and moral development of the hero from age ten to his late teens (Minitex).
A series of short stories followed, and when he left the military in 1856, he was acknowledged as a rising new talent in literature. Experiences in the Crimean War provided the material fir his three "Sebastopol Tales," which pay tribute to the common soldier while forcefully condemning war (Nitze 43).
Another short novel, "The Cossacks," grew out of Tolstoy's service in the Caucasus. The hero of the book, Olenin, decides to escape the artificiality of Moscow society to attempt a more natural life among the Cossacks in a Caucasian village. He finds that he cannot abandon his civilized values, and the Cossacks never accept him (Encarta).
Even in his first work, like most of his others, it was apparent to see the psychological realism and the "breadth of their approach" that Tolstoy was most praised for, although some authors, including E. M. Forester and Henry James felt that Tolstoy's novels lacked elegant form (Magill 382).
Tolstoy was never comfortable in the literary world, however, and in 1859, he returned to Yasnaya Polyana to manage his estate, to set up a school for peasant children, and to write about his progressive theories of education.
In 1862, Tolstoy married Sofya Andreyevna Behrs, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a Moscow physician. Married life at Yasnaya Polyana, a growing, happy family, and absorption in creating his finest literary work brought him stability for the next fifteen years (Pearlman 24).
War and Peace, another novel of Tolstoy, tells the story of the restless, questing Pierre Bezukhov and two upper-class families, the Belkonskys and the Rostovs, in the years leading up to and following French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte's invasion of Russia. The book depicts the everyday lives of four major characters that are also caught up in momentous historical events; they face similar challenges but respond in different ways. Each seeks to find meaning in his or her life: Pierre and the engaging heroine, Natasha Rostov, eventually find fulfillment in the family; Natasha's brother, Nikolai, also finds it in family and in running his estate; the doubting intellectual Andrei Bolkonsky finds it only on his deathbed, in withdrawing from life altogether. Tolstoy reveals both the inner and the outer lives of these characters, as well as more than 500 other characters, historical and fictional, through a combination of sharp physical detail and close psychological analysis. The novel also includes an extended essay treating the question of what moves history. Here, Tolstoy deflates the notion that history is made by great men such as Napoleon and argues that historical events can be understood only through the actions of extremely large numbers of ordinary people living their daily lives.
After a break of a few years, during which he turned again to educating peasant children, Tolstoy returned to literature with his second masterpiece, Anna Karenina, written between 1875 and 1877. While not as great as War and Peace, the novel still paints a broad and detailed picture of all levels of Russian life in the 1870s. Tolstoy examines three marriages: that of the heroine, Anna, who is married to the dry public servant Karenin and who has a passionate affair with a young army officer named Vronsky; the relatively happy and stable marriage of Konstantin Levin and Kitty Shcherbatsky; and the shaky but enduring marriage of Anna's brother, Stiva, and Kitty's sister Dolly. The novel is elaborately structured, with many subtle comparisons and contrasts among the three marriages. It ends darkly. Excluded from a deceitful society that cannot tolerate her honest and open expression of love for Vronsky, torn by guilt over her adulterous affair and the forced abandonment of her son, Anna takes her own life. Even Levin, having begun a family with the woman he loves, is beset by doubts about the meaning of his life.
While working on the later parts of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy began experiencing bouts of depression, which at times were so severe that he considered suicide. He was tormented by the need to find a meaning for his life that would not be extinguished by his death. His work "A Confession" describes this spiritual struggle and the solution he found: to practice what he saw as the essence of Christianity --that is, universal love and passive resistance to evil in the form of violence.
Tolstoy's literature reflected his ideas about how people should go about their way of life. In Tolstoy's "How Much Land Does A Man Need?," he tells the story of a plain farmer who is done in by his own greed. In the short story, the Bashkir chief tells Pahom that he can have all of the land he can walk upon if he can cover it in one day. The chief of the Bashkirs warns Pahom that he must return before sundown, or he will involuntarily give up the land that he walked and the money he gave for the land. Pahom's mind ponders all the wealth he can accumulate just by walking. Pahom realizes, too late, though, that he should not have been so greedy (Tolstoy). In this literary masterpiece, Tolstoy uses Pahom's quest to warn the reader that reaching for too much can result in loss of everything. Tolstoy uses the characters in his stories to reinforce his ideas (Kell 18).
Tolstoy used symbolism in his stories to teach lessons and to convey messages. Tolstoy uses Pahom's race against the sun to symbolize Pahom's race against time and the race for his life. The lower the sun gets on the horizon; the symbolism that Tolstoy uses creates a sense of urgency and panic. Pahom finally makes it to the place where he began, to claim his land, by the time that the sun sets, but as the reader comes to discover; Pahom dies upon his arrival. Tolstoy used this story to convey the moral that one should not try to exceed one’s limitations.
Leo Tolstoy encouraged communism and felt that capitalism was a great evil that had to be conquered in order to eliminate all social classes. In "How Much Land Does A Man Need?," Tolstoy's character, Pahom, works nonstop against the wealthy landowner who calls upon a steward to oversee her land. The steward forces Pahom to pay fines when his cattle stray upon the woman's property. Later on, when Pahom turns into the wealthy land owner that he before despised, he found himself acting the same way to people who's cattle strayed upon his own land and in turn, the people end up despising him. This story shows that the pursuit of wealth ultimately leads to misfortune and, in Pahom's case, death.
As Tolstoy grew older, he realized his wealth and began to distance himself from the gains he had made from it. Tolstoy had feelings of responsibility that he had been born into an upper class lifestyle, when others had not been so fortunate, so he began his school for underprivileged peasant children. The fact that he had to set up a school for underprivileged children angered Tolstoy because he felt that if it had not been for Capitalism, there would be no deviation of classes and, therefore, there would not be a need to commence a separate school for the underprivileged society.
A recurring theme in Tolstoy's writings is the Devil. In "How Much Land Does A Man Need?," the Devil recurs very often: as the Bashkir chief, as the guy(s) that tell Pahom about the great land(s), as an invisible creature, sitting upon the stove while Pahom and two women are having a conversation, and in a dream that Pahom has of getting his land. This story seems to follow along with many other themes in other stories of greed. One such mass of stories comes from the Bible, which is possibly where Tolstoy got his ideas for this story. His love of communism and his rejection of his own wealth were, of course, influenced by his own simplified, Christian beliefs.
While working on the later parts of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy began experiencing bouts of depression, which at times were so severe that he considered suicide. He was tormented by the need to find a meaning for his life that would not be annihilated by his death. His "A Confession" describes this spiritual struggle and the solution he found: to practice what he saw as the essence of Christianity -- that is, universal love and passive resistance to evil in the form of violence. A series of religious writings amplified this new faith. In these, he urged people to live according to the dictates of conscience, which meant practicing universal love and living as far as possible by their own labor. He also declared all forms of violence equally wrong, including war and the compulsion that the state uses against its citizens.
In addition to moral philosophy, Tolstoy also wrote about urban poverty, aesthetics, vegetarianism, capital punishment, and the evils of alcohol. The ideas of many of these writings clashed with the dogmas of official religion (Eastern Orthodox Christianity) and were banned in Russia, but they were translated into many languages and became known around the world. Tolstoyan communities sprang up in Europe and the United States, and Yasnaya Polyana became a destination of pilgrimage for people from all walks of life.
Tolstoy returned, eventually, to writing fiction, but with a growing audience of less educated people in mind. In the mid-1880s he wrote short stories, many of them based on fairy tales or religious legends. Written in a simple but expressive style, they were intended to convey his idea of ethical Christianity, but he also produced powerful and sophisticated pieces of fiction, such as “The Death of Ivan Ilich,” and “Master and Man,” which reflect his religious ideas. The heroes of these works are forced to re-examine their lives and values when they face death.
Tolstoy himself tried to live by his simplified beliefs, living on his own labor, and giving up his material possessions. His wife, however, did not share all of his beliefs, and their marriage shared under severe strain during their last years together. In 1910, relations between the two became so tense that Tolstoy decided to leave home for good. He contracted pneumonia while travelling and died at the small railway station of Astapovo.
Literary realism reached its peak in Tolstoy's novels, but it is his penetrating psychological analysis that has had great influence on later literature. His moral and social teachings have also altered the course of the 20th century. Spiritual and political leader Mohandas Ghandi applied Tolstoy's ideas of passive resistance to British rule and helped win India's independence. Ghandi's ideas, then, helped inspire Martin Luther King, Jr., in his struggle for racial justice in the United States. The most significant part of Tolstoy's legacy is his defense of the individual personality and conscience in a world where such issues as these are under attack (Magill 383).

A short article about How Much land

In this short story by Leo Tolstoy, a rich peasant named Pahom hears about good lands in the Bashkins' country, on the other side of the river Volga. They are humble people and he is able to get all the land he wants out of them without any problems. When Pahom arrives at the Bashkins' country, they tell them that, for a thousand rubles, he can have all the land he is able to circle in a day.
Pahom is ecstatic and despises them for their lack of sophistication. He's convinced he'd be able to cover a long distance. However, right after he starts walking, he stumbles upon interesting areas that he decides to include in his 'conquered' land, such as a pond here, or a piece of land especially apropriate to cultivate linen there. Until he suddenly realizes the sun is setting.
Realizing he is under the risk of losing everything, he runs as fast as he can to be able to get to where he started from on time. "I was too ambitious", he tells himself, "I ruined the whole deal". The strain ends up killing him. He dies next to the finishing pole and is buried there. "6ft from head to toe was all the land he needed" was Tolstoy conclusion.

[assem007]

what on earth was all that for???