The Bashkirian land (Visual Imagery)
"Pahom’s eyes glistened: it was all virgin soil, as flat as the palm of your hand, as black as the seed of a poppy, and in the hollows different kinds of grasses grew breast high" (19).
Here, the narrator provides a detailed sketch of the Bashkirian land, which starkly contrasts with the more objective, blunt descriptions of land throughout the story. The narrator uses heightened sensory language and similes—“as flat as the palm of your hand, as black as the seed of a poppy”—to evoke the allure of the Bashkirian land, especially through Pahom’s "glistening" eyes. The pristine image of the flat, virgin land elicits an instinctive and sentimental physical reaction out of Pahom, who remains unaffected throughout his self-inflicted tumult—including his abandonment of his family and moral devolution into a local pariah—in the story. A poignant tone thus infuses Pahom's response to the immense, sublime image of Bashkirian land: we finally see that all of Pahom’s emotion and humanity has been allocated to property purchases and material possessions.
Pahom's dream (Visual Imagery)
"And then he saw that it was not the peasant either, but the Devil himself, with horns and hoofs, sitting there and chuckling, and before him lay a man barefoot, prostrate on the ground, with only trousers and a shirt on. And Pahom dreamt that he looked more attentively to see what sort of a man it was lying there, and he saw that the man was dead, and that it was himself!" (17).
Pahom’s dream climaxes with the discovery of the Devil laughing at his own corpse. The imagery of the Devil standing over a lifeless Pahom illustrates the Devil's total control and domination, and Pahom’s submission to evil, avaricious external forces. Likewise, the Devil “chuckles” at Pahom, which suggests that Pahom is the ridiculed target of one protracted joke that capitalized on his impressionability and desire for upward mobility. The presence of Pahom’s lifeless body in the dream also foreshadows his death: we know that Pahom has fully surrendered himself to the Devil’s evil powers, and his attempts to section off Bashkirian land will prove futile and fatal.
The sun (Visual Imagery)
"The sun was close to the rim, and cloaked in mist looked large, and red as blood" (23).
Throughout his effort to claim as much Bashkirian land as possible before sunset, Pahom quickly gazes up at the sky to measure his progress against the sun’s rotation. Tolstoy frequently characterizes the sun as oppressively hot and bright—an antagonistic force thwarting Pahom’s efforts—but here, the startling imagery of the sinking sun foreshadows Pahom’s death. To reach his starting point on time, Pahom attempts to outrun the sun, despite it nearing its horizon and "close[ness] to the rim." Pahom's effort is fruitless: he is destined to die just as the sun is destined to set every day. Additionally, the sun’s "red as blood" appearance resembles and prefigures the image of Pahom’s blood rushing from his mouth after making his final collapse to the ground.
