Category: Unit 1: To Change, or Not to Change

Master and Man is an Novel by Leo Telstoy, about a rich landowner called Vasili Andreyevich Brekhunov  and one of his laborers, Nikita, who embark on a journey and learn that life is better when you don’t live for yourself only.

The novel is an interesting and entertaining short story. It has a good spread of well-painted characters, and it doesn’t focus on only one character too much; It’s almost as if there isn’t only one main character, but everybody plays a main role in the plot of the story. I would not change the plot, because it was very good and interesting.

The settings are well depicted, and perfectly pictured in the book. I can see the snow storm in my head when I read the chapter that the journey begun. I would change the way they talked about the homes. they didn’t put too much emphasis on Vasili’s or Nikita’s house, I would have talked about them more.

The words used in the book are perfectly in context and they are easy to understand even if i didn’t know what the word meant. I wouldn’t change the the way they used their wording, It fit the context very well.

I would rate this book as an 8.5 only because of the lack of emphasis on the houses.

I did not really enjoy this novella, I thought there were way to many filler words and things could have been said and described with way less words. I also didn’t really like how the majority of the story is just them being cold and lost in the woods with their horse, I feel that there wasn’t a lot to take in and felt it was very boring having pretty much the same topic and scene throughout most of the book. I also think the book could have better explained the time frame and it would have been nicer to read. Since the book was written long ago some words will be different which makes sense because they didn’t have the easier words or maybe you didn’t use the words when writing a book, if this was written in todays age I think I would have liked it more.