The Death of Ivan Ilych

leo tolstoy aylmer maude louise maude

Hailed as one of the world's supreme masterpieces on the subject of death and dying, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the story of a worldly careerist, a high court judge who has never given the inevitability of his dying so much as a passing thought. But one day, death announces itself to him, and to his shocked surprise, he is brought face to face with his own mortality.

How, Tolstoy asks, does an unreflective man confront his one and only moment of truth?

This short novel was an artistic culmination of a profound spiritual crisis in Tolstoy's life, a nine-year period following the publication of Anna Karenina during which he wrote not a word of fiction.
A thoroughly absorbing, and, at times, terrifying glimpse into the abyss of death, it is also a strong testament to the possibility of finding spiritual salvation.

Genres classicsfictionrussiarussian literatureliteraturephilosophyshort storiesnovels19th centurynovella

86 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,1886

This edition

Format: 86 pages, Paperback
Published: August 3, 2006 by Waking Lion Press
ISBN
ASIN
Language: English

Characters More characters

Ivan Ilyich Golovin

Ivan Ilyich is a highly regarded official of the Court of Justice, described by Tolstoy as, "neither as cold and formal as his elder brother nor as wild as the younger, but was a happy mean between them—an intelligent, polished, lively, and agreeable man"...
Praskovya Fëdorovna Golovina

Praskovya Fëdorovna Golovin is Ivans unsympathetic wife. She is characterized as self-absorbed and uninterested in her husbands struggles unless they directly affect her personally....
Peter Ivanovich

Peter Ivanovich is Ivans longtime friend and colleague. He studied law with Ivan and is the first to recognize Ivans impending death.more...
Gerasim

Gerasim is the Golovins young butler. He takes on the role of sole comforter and caretaker during Ivans illness.more...
Lisa Golovina

...

About the author

leo tolstoy

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Николаевич Толстой; most appropriately used Liev Tolstoy; commonly Leo Tolstoy in Anglophone countries) was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist fiction. Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world's greatest novelists. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker and social reformer.

His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.