The story Master and Man often felt boring, drawn out, and tedious when I read it. Instead of engaging me with the characters by having them progress, it becomes repetitive, reuses the same character roles, and has an ending that takes too long to happen.
The biggest problem is the pacing. Pages are filled with endless descriptions of how Vasili and Nikita are lost. At one point, he writes, “Well, it looks like we’ve completely lost the road—Vassili Andreyich” (p. 72). This is the first time they get lost, and they subsequently went and got lost four more times. Rather than building tension, the story just uses the same thing over and over, making the journey feel slow and repetitive.
The characters themselves are not very engaging. Vasili Andreevich, the “master,” can be summed up as greedy and self-centered, as he “took seven hundred rubles out of his chest, and added to them two thousand three hundred rubles from the church funds in his care” (p. 63) Instead of developing, this trait, it is instead drilled into you over and over until it loses impact. Nikita, the “man”, is equally predictable, always passive and submissive. Vasili knows that Nikita can’t do much, or won’t do much to oppose him and uses that “Of course I understand, Vassili Andreyich, it’s like working for my own father.” ” (p. 65) The lack of variety when they talk together makes them tedious to read.
Finally, the conclusion is obvious long before it arrives. At first, after finishing the book, I thought it was short, but when I went to type this out, I began to change my mind. From the beginning, Vassili is warned many times that a big blizzard is coming, so the reader knows that something bad will happen. At many points, it felt like the pages were filled with filler substance, just getting lost, and then Vassili and Nikita talk about what to do, which is always to try to find the road.
In the end, Master and Man is way too boring, drawn out, and tedious and with all these things trying feebly to make a good story, it makes it more like a slog through a blizzard than a story.