Read this if you…
- want a fantastic Tolstoy that's WAY shorter than the other great works
- are interested in Death as the main topic
Skip this if you…
- don't like books about death
The 
Take
Simple, real, deep, short
The lineage through The Death of Ivan Ilych
- Ecclesiastes by Solomon. The Death of Ivan Ilych built on it. - 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
- Job by Unknown. The Death of Ivan Ilych built on it. - Ivan's question — why has this been brought on me? — is Job's question, deliberately - Tolstoy named Job (alongside Ecclesiastes) as inspiration; Ivan's protracted suffering and his protest against its injustice mirror the older drama of unmerited pain - Reading Job first shows you the ancient template Tolstoy compressed into one dying man's bedroom
Depicted in Art
Title-page cover of the original 1886 Russian first edition published in volume 12 of Tolstoy's collected works.
F. Ioganson, 1886
Russian-language title page of an 1895 edition of Tolstoy's novella, with ornamental typography typical of late-19th-century Russian book printing.
1895
Recommended Editions
Peter Carson
Liveright · 2014
Carson's posthumous Liveright pairs the novella with Tolstoy's Confession, intro by Mary Beard. Same Carson who did the Penguin Fathers and Sons: unobtrusive English that lets the late-Tolstoy moralism land without varnish. Reading them together is the right call.
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Notable Quotes
Ivan Ilyich's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.
Screen & Stage
Posters via The Movie Database (TMDB)
- Vladimir Nabokov, Russian-American novelist & critic, 1899–1977: "This story is Tolstoy's most artistic, most perfect, and most sophisticated achievement."
- Martin Heidegger, German philosopher, 1889–1976: "Tolstoi has presented the phenomenon of the disruption and breakdown of having 'someone die.'"
- Atul Gawande, Surgeon & writer, b. 1965: The Tolstoy story that moved Gawande most as a medical student, and the seed of Being Mortal.
- Harold Bloom, Yale literary critic, author of The Western Canon, 1930–2019: "No writer has ever dramatized the moment of death more powerfully than Tolstoy in Ivan Ilych."
More by Leo Tolstoy
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- 60War and Peace1869Leo TolstoyEasy·Epic·1,440 pagesInfluence76Popularity88The Age of the NovelHistorical FictionRussian