A merchant and his peasant set out with a horse and sledge to close a land deal before a rival can, and drive into a blizzard neither of them takes seriously. Tolstoy wrote it in his sixties, after renouncing his own novels; it is short, plain and merciless about how a man calculates right up until the moment calculation stops. Fifty-eight plates of Russian genre painting, from Fedotov and Perov to scenes of troikas, tea drinking and provincial courtship, extend the world of the story across the long nineteenth century.
