Summary
Part 7
Unable to sleep, Pahom lays on his feather bed and thinks about the Bashkirian land. He predicts that he will section off 35 miles in a day and eventually sell the poorer land, buy two ox-teams, and hire laborers.
Eventually, Pahom dozes off and has a strange nightmare. He dreams that he hears laughter outside his tent, only to spot the Bashkir chief grasping his side while "rolling about with laughter" (17). When Pahom approaches the chief to inquire about the laughter, he discovers that the chief is actually the passing dealer who informed Pahom about the Bashkirs' land. The dealer then transforms into the traveling peasant who told Pahom about the village past the Volga. Finally, the peasant morphs into the Devil with "hoofs and horns," sitting and chuckling (17). The Devil stands before a dead body, only wearing pants and a shirt, on the ground. After staring attentively, Pahom discovers that the dead man is himself. Horrified, he awakes but shrugs off the nightmare.
Pahom decides to wake up the Bashkirs, declaring that he wants to begin measuring his land. The Bashkirs offer him kumiss and tea one last time, but Pahom declines the gesture, eager to begin his day.
Part 8
Pahom and the Bashkirs travel via horse and cart to a small nearby steppe. The sun begins rising, and the chief stretches out his arms toward the land, telling Pahom, "...all this, as far as your eye can reach, is ours. You can have any part of it you like" (19). Pahom’s eyes glisten as he gazes upon the flat, virgin farmland. The chief removes his fox-fur cap to denote the starting point, reiterating that Pahom must return to the spot.
Pahom places his 1,000 rubles on top of the spot. He takes his outer coat off, attaches a water flask to his girdle, and places a small bag of bread inside his coat. Spade in hand, Pahom takes a few moments to determine the initial direction of his path. He turns to the east and begins walking toward the rising run.
After walking a thousand yards, Pahom uses his spade to dig a hole and mark his first spot. After quickening his place and steadily digging more holes, he looks back and spots the hillock faintly from the distance, concluding that he has covered three miles of land. With the temperature rising, he flings his undercoat across his shoulder. Pahom grows hungry and hot but forces himself to keep walking, removing his shoes to stay cool. Fatigued, he takes a sharp left turn, walks through tall grass for miles, and eventually sits down to pause for water and bread around noon.
The food and bread temporarily energize Pahom, but the fierce heat soon reinstates his fatigue. Pahom continues walking, thinking, "an hour to suffer, a life-time to live" (20). He nearly makes another sharp left turn before noticing a damp hollow primed for flax growing. He walks toward the hollow and digs a hole on the other side of it.
Pahom gazes through the hillock: the heart obfuscates the air, and he can scarcely see the Bashkirs. Startled, Pahom determines that he has made the sides of his journey too long and must quickly walk through the third side. He looks at the sun, which is nearly halfway to the horizon, and determines that he has to cover a whopping ten more miles before reaching his starting point. Feeling rushed, Pahom quickly digs a hole and turns toward the hillock.
Part 9
Pahom is exhausted on his frantic dash back to the starting point: the heat is unbearable, his feet are cut and bruised, and his legs are tired. With the sun waning, he doesn’t have enough time for some much-needed rest. The narrator comments, "The sun waits for no man, and it was sinking lower and lower" (23).
Several miles left in his journey, Pahom worries that he will not make it back to the hillock in time. He begins to quicken his pace and removes nearly all his garments and items. Still clutching onto the spade, he runs while "his breast was working like a blacksmith’s bellows, his heart was beating like a hammer, and his legs were giving way as if they did not belong to him" (23). He fears that he will die from exhaustion, but he does not stop running out of fear of the Bashkirs calling him a fool.
As he runs closer to the starting point, the Bashkirs shout at him, which grants him some more momentum and energy. With the sun nearly set, Pahom nears the hillock: "He could see the fox-fur cap on the ground, and the money on it, and the chief sitting on the ground holding his sides" (23). Pahom suddenly remembers his dream, once again worrying that he will not reach the spot in time and die. He musters up his remaining strength to move forward, but his legs give out, and he collapses to the ground just as he approaches the bottom of the hillock. The sun has completely set.
Pahom cries, "All my labor has been in vain…" and nearly stays on the ground (24). However, the Bashkirs’ shouting prompts him to take one long, final breath and sprint to the top of the hillock where there is still some light. He arrives at the top of the hillock and spots the Chief’s cap, as well the Chief laughing and grasping at his sides. Again, Pahom remembers his dream and collapses, reaching for the cap.
Pahom’s servant rushes over to Pahom, only to discover blood flowing from his mouth—he has died. The Bashkirs click their tongues out of pity. The workman picks up the spade and digs a small grave for Pahom, and the narrator remarks, "Six feet from his head to his heels was all he needed "(24).
Analysis
A poignant, sardonic mood infuses the climax, falling action, and resolution of "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" For years, Pahom tirelessly chases for more land, power, and prosperity; little does he know, his hard work ironically only leads to his downfall. Even as he climbs higher on the socioeconomic ladder, Pahom never feels like he has achieved a rewarding and fulfilling life, despite his elevated status and material success. He continually finds deficiencies with his properties, only for his insatiable desires and tireless pursuits to lead to an estrangement from his family; the loss of his values, community, and empathy (as foreshadowed by his wife in Part I); and, ultimately, his death.
As a symbol of man’s tendency for evil and avarice, the Devil plays a minor but significant role in Pahom’s life. In Part 1, the Devil vows to use land ownership to set Pahom onto a path of greed and moral decay. Part 7 opens with Pahom’s sinister, symbolic dream revealing the traveling merchant, peasant, and Bashkir chief as different embodiments of the Devil. Notably, each one of these men tempts Pahom into his various acquisitions throughout the story: the merchant enlightens Pahom about the limitless property available in Bashkiria, the traveling peasant informs Pahom about the village past the Volga, and the Bashkir Chief permits Pahom to claim as much land as he can for a thousand roubles a day. Through this linking of land transactions with the Devil, Tolstoy equates sinister, pervading forces of evil with the buying and selling of private land—the catapulting source of Pahom’s relentless greed and powerlessness.
Pahom’s dream takes a particularly suspenseful, ominous turn when he discovers the Devil laughing at his lifeless body. The image of the Devil standing over Pahom's corpse illustrates the Devil’s formidable control and power over Pahom. Pahom, however, is too engrossed with securing Bashkirian land to dwell on the disturbing imagery of his nightmare. He instead wakes up the Bashkirs to announce his eagerness to begin his walk immediately, and the Bashkirs respond with one last offering of kumiss. The Bashkirs joyfully consume kumiss together during celebratory occasions: they drink it upon Pahom’s arrival and after they clinch the details of his land acquisition. As such, kumiss symbolizes the pure pleasures of life, and the Bashkirs’ final kumiss offering to Pahom serves as a final opportunity to prioritize the joys of community and immaterial delights over property ownership and, by extension, higher socioeconomic standing. Pahom unsurprisingly declines the offer, again too consumed by his desire to attain as much land as possible in the day. Pahom’s rejection of the kumiss—in conjunction with the content of his dream and series of dissatisfying property purchases in Parts 4–6—foreshadows the only possible outcome of his claim Bashkirian land: death.
Indeed, Parts 8 and 9 depict an unfolding and actualization of the events in Pahom’s dream. The recapitulation of the dream instills the climax—Pahom’s rush to reach the hillock as the sun sets—with dread, as we already know Pahom is far past the point of no return, and his efforts are thus futile and fatal. At the beginning of the story, Pahom understandably wishes to ascend to a higher economic standing to improve his living conditions, but his whiffs of power and land ownership coalesce into a pathological avarice that surpasses all desires for community, family, and, inevitably, his own life. Fully aware of his exhaustion and his body’s deterioration during his walk, Pahom could rest and settle for less land, but his greed fuels him to persevere. As he removes his shoes and outerwear to stay cool, he begins to mirror the image of his dead body—barefoot and only wearing trousers and pants—in the dream. Pahom again remains ignorant of this and instead risks death for material gain.
Instead of the image of his debilitating health, it is the two separate instances of the Bashkir chief laughing and grasping his sides that prompts Pahom to remember the contents of his dream. Greed ignites his resilience to continue his walk, but so does his pride and fear of appearing foolish in front of the Bashkirs. To Pahom, the dream merely prefigures his forthcoming humiliation in front of others; he does not acknowledge, much less place significance into, the dream as a bleak warning of his own death, moral decay, and terminal surrender to the Devil. Finally realizing the infeasibility of reaching the hillock before sunset, Pahom acknowledges that he has "grasped too much, and ruined the whole affair" and fears that he will die (23). Nevertheless, he uses the Bashkirs’ perception of him to rationalize his refusal to rest, thinking, "After having run all this way they will call me a fool if I stop now" (23). In his final moments, Pahom is too preoccupied with frivolous concerns about his social standing and reputation to tend to the despair of his condition. Through this characterization, Tolstoy shows how two sinful forces, pride and greed, work in tandem to produce a man’s perdition.
Moreover, the ironic, downbeat final paragraphs further develop the theme of the arbitrariness of chasing wealth. The story’s title, "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" initially appears to be a rhetorical question, a tongue-in-cheek indictment of Pahom’s pursuit for greater quantities of land. However, after Pahom’s workman buries Pahom in a small hole, the last line of the story—"Six feet from his head to his heels was all he needed"—literally answers the question the title poses (23). It is Pahom’s death, ironically, that reveals how much land a man truly needs in life: just enough to bury him. Rife with verbal irony, the closing line understates the severity of physical and mental turmoil Pahom undergoes for property: traveling hundreds of miles by foot, purchasing hundreds of acres of land, abandoning his family, losing his decency, alienating himself from communes, and exhausting himself to death. Yet, Pahom’s avarice and commitment to land procurement in the end amounts to nothing more than a small grave; despite all the land Pahom acquires, he only needs six feet of it. The sardonic understatement of the last line thus illustrates the meaninglessness of ascending to a higher socioeconomic class. No matter the level of ambition, greed, or success we reach in life, we all are indiscriminately bound to the same fate: buried a few feet in the ground.
