Tolstoy is usually remembered as the author of three huge novels, yet he began and ended as a short story writer, and indeed is one of the greatest who ever lived: his many such stories are generally concise, pointed and unforgettable. Unlike his novels, his short stories are often written in a manner that clearly indicates his desire to reach out to an unlettered or unsophisticated audience and to draw from the riches of folk narrative. One such tale - a remarkable one - is Svechka.
Tolstoy, born a high aristocrat, began to involve himself closely in the way of life and education of the Russian common people soon after he turned 30 (c.1860), setting up a school on his estate at Yasnaya Polyana, near Tula, and writing brief tales for educational purposes. But even then he already had a moral agenda concerned with how life should be lived and death faced (cf. the story Three Deaths). Around 1880 he underwent a spiritual crisis and conversion to a highly personal form of Christianity. The stories written thereafter, above all in the middle and later 1880's (like Svechka, written in 1885), often combine this personal religious vision with the earlier general moral concern and profound, almost obsessive interest in folk wisdom and peasant life.
Tolstoy's writings after 1880 have long been recognised to present a special problem. Fiction or non-fiction, they generally represent uncompromising propaganda for a particular, and at times even eccentric, set of solutions to life's problems, whether on a socio-political, religious or moral plane. Most readers, whatever their degree of sympathy with Tolstoy's solutions (and few will either totally accept, or totally fail to sympathise with them), resist the mental manipulation that propaganda in any cause implies. Imaginative literature should not (we mostly feel) be enrolled in the service of external causes or used to demonstrate a priori principles. Yet we may also feel that the power of literary imaginativeness, and the many-sidedness of artistic meaning in such tales overcomes and transforms propagandistic content. A thoughtful reading of Svechka helps us make up our minds on this. It is worth noting that Tolstoy's disciple Chertkov, finding the end of the story too crude, prevailed upon the writer to "soften" it - but Tolstoy later withdrew this revision in favour of the original version, which to him was truer.
We never learn who tells the story, but from its first words the narrative has a strong and distinctive impact on us: it is recounted with an uncanny degree of authenticity in the manner of a folk story-teller, using the characteristic turns of phrase, popular proverbial commonplaces, laconic formulations, non-standard syntactical mannerisms of the real life story-tellers whom Tolstoy, incidentally, spent much time studying. (He claimed to have heard the story of Svechka from a drunken peasant, without adding much of his own.) Such a narrator seems extremely impersonal. Indeed we only get substantial passages in the narrator's own voice on the first and last pages of the story, to open and close it: otherwise virtually the whole text is the reported speech of others, from which we must draw our own conclusions as if from an overheard conversation. Yet the narrator's apparent impersonality rests on strong social and moral assumptions about right and wrong relations between the powerful and the powerless, about the right exercise of authority (not in itself questioned), about goodness and wickedness in their most simple manifestations. The narrator does not attempt to portray complexity of motivation or roundedness of character, qualities for which Tolstoy's novels are justly famous, but which would be inappropriate to the mentality that Tolstoy (admiringly, I believe) tries here to make his own. The story is in fact a remarkable, and rather early, example of the techniques of story-telling that in the twentieth century would become famous as skaz - a narrative literary voice imitating the distinctiveness of those characters who form the story's subject matter, and drawing validity from it. A curious illustration of Tolstoy's care in achieving this effect is that there seems not to be a single word of Western European origin in the entire tale (think how many such Western words beginners in Russian learn in their first few lessons!).
As for the overall message or meaning of the story, it does not at first glance seem problematic. It looks like a simple morality tale, in which the cruel and blasphemous demands of a privileged figure (the bailiff) are correctly resisted not by a murderous plot, but by the non-violent example set by the humble representative of goodness, Mikheyev. Tolstoy underlines the moral significance of this non-violent response through the Biblical epigraph that he sets at the head of the story: "You have heard it said, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. But I say unto you, do not resist evil" (Matthew, V, 38-39) - reminiscent of the epigraph for Anna Karenina; "Vengence is Mine says the Lord; I shall repay". Retribution is God's business, not humanity's.
Most effective short stories are structured around a 'turning point' of the plot, when some sudden reversal of situation occurs or mental illumination (what James Joyce called an 'epiphany') is recognised. The turning point in this story is clearly the moment when Mikheyev is reported to have fulfilled his ploughing obligations with an inextinguishable church candle stuck on his sokha (a primitive wooden plough). The story's very title points to the revelatory significance of this quaintly domestic miracle or near-miracle. It subtly converts the main area of conflict in the plot from that between Minayev (representing the 'murderous' peasants) and Mikheyev, or Minayev and the bailiff, to the latter versus Mikheyev: the bailiff subsequently keeps repeating, rather unexpectedly, that "he has beaten me".
This reading of the story must be correct, but probably insufficient alone: such a moralistic message may seem too pat, too simplistic, too obviously propaganda for well-known aspects of Tolstoy's religion, even too sentimental. We may object we do not need to be instructed that not to murder is better than to murder, or that the system of obrok is fairer than the system of barshchina. But there is more to the story than that, and its lasting power seems to reside in the combination of a simple moral with less easily explained features and messages, that undermine any possible sentimentality. Readers will make up their own minds about these: I shall merely point to the tone of irony, even black humour with which the bailiff's interrogation and grisly end are narrated; the presentation of his death as a sort of 'revenge drama' on one who has unwisely tested Fate - implying a morality closer to the ancient Greeks (or to aspects of Russian folk-belief) than to Christianity; a sense that the tale is a metaphor for the whole world of human activity and relations, in which an ideal, even Eden-like landscape is rendered a realm of discord by a disturbance of proper (traditional) relations, to be restored only by renewed obedience to the Divine Will manifested through supernatural signs.