The Master and the Employee (Master and Man)

The plot follows timber merchant Vasili Brekhunov, bent on profit, and his hired horse-keeper Nikita as they lose their way in a blizzard: the master circles greedily toward a forest sale, the servant endures hunger and frost, and, at dawn, one body lies frozen while the other rises transfigured by sacrificial warmth, a pattern of inversion that Tolstoy narrates without sentimental sugar.