How The Death of Ivan Ilych drew on Ecclesiastes
A documented line of influence: Leo Tolstoy demonstrably engaged Solomon’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Ecclesiastes
Solomon · c. 250 BCE
BibleThe influenced
The Death of Ivan Ilych
Leo Tolstoy · 1886
The Age of the NovelRelevance
8/10
On The Death of Ivan Ilych’s page
- The book whose verdict Ivan Ilych spends his death trying to escape
- Tolstoy framed the wasted, decorous life directly on Ecclesiastes — the vanity of vanities he'd just wrestled with in A Confession, which fed straight into this novella
- Read it first and the novella's whole argument is already there: striving, status, possessions, all of it vapor, with only the dying left to see it
On Ecclesiastes’s page
- Tolstoy turned this book's verdict into a deathbed
- He quoted Solomon's vanity of vanities at the heart of his own spiritual crisis in A Confession — and even faulted the English rendering, the mark of a man reading it closely
- The Death of Ivan Ilych is that quarrel made into a story: a man who lived for the world's approvals discovering, too late, that all of it was vapor