How Much Land Does a Man Need?
How Much Land Does a Man Need? (Russian Много ли человеку земли нужно? ) is a story by Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy. Their first release was in 1885.
Content
The farmer Pachom buys a piece of land and landowners. He is " proud and happy ". But his sense of ownership is awakened. With its land neighbors he enemies due small hallway damages subvert them to his field boundaries. He will also robbed. The thief he can not lead, his action is dismissed. "Well Pachom had quarreled with the judges and the neighbors. The farmers threatened him with the red rooster. So Pachom had indeed on his land enough space, but in the church it was too narrow for him. "
Eastward, in the interior of good land is inexpensive to buy. Having checked this rumor, he sold his property and moved four hundred miles to the east of the Volga. Pachom lives now " ten times better " than before. But there are richer farmers than him. In the urge to increase, he also falls out here with its neighbors. Then he hears of a visiting trader for the Bashkirs, further to the east, one could buy cheap good steppe country. Pachom travels with his servant five hundred miles to the steppe inhabitants. He is well received in their camp and may not buy as much land as he can circle from sunrise to sunset on foot. With the design of its future ownership Pachom overestimated his powers. He breaks when he finally walked around a very large piece of land, being last, desperate running at sinking sun, dead from exhaustion together. " The servant took the hoe, dug a grave Pachom, just as long as the piece of earth, that he with his body, from the feet to the head, covered - six cubits - and hid him one. "
Interpretation
Earth is a überfrachteter with many symbols term. Here he not only stands for land, but for material possessions at all.
The comic tragedy Pachoms lies in its one-sided ideals. Only owned it deems desirable. Other objectives, such as intellectual property, ie education, or life wrest entertainment value, how it manages the city's inhabitants - his sister, who lives in the city, reported it - he does not know or does not want to get to know them. " It's all true, 'he said to himself., Our one has to create from a child with the earth, and therefore it such follies never come to mind. ' "
Also the talent he lacks modesty or in other words: he is the sense of the Proper him, for realistic self-assessment from. He has neither a sense of the limits of his physical performance, nor for the limits that the vagaries of fate. "If I had enough land, so I feared no one, not even the devil. " This challenge has pride of something. No wonder that the devil, who hears this will trip him up.
The allegorical and timeless truth of the amendment prompted Stefan Zweig, put them to the stories of the Old Testament to the side. The title, with its portentous question has become a standing formula, a household word, with the striving, yes greed is questioned by ownership.