The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Master and Man
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- £2.49
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- £2.49
Publisher Description
This new edition combines Tolstoy’s most famous short tale, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, with a less well known but equally brilliant gem, Master and Man, both newly translated by Ann Pasternak Slater. Both stories confront death and the process of dying: In Ivan Ilyich, a bureaucrat looks back over his life, which suddenly seems meaningless and wasteful, while in Master and Man, a landowner and servant must each confront the value of the other as they brave a devastating snowstorm. The quintessential Tolstoyan themes of mortality, spiritual redemption, and life’s meaning are nowhere more movingly and deftly explored than in these two tales.
This unique edition also includes a critical Introduction and extensive notes by Ann Pasternak Slater, a Fellow at St. Anne’s College, Oxford.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the lovely, low tones of a fine storyteller, Oliver Fox Davies guides us through the stages of Tolstoy's mini masterpiece. Davies's skill with inflection, even within words, heightens the social satire of the early section and shifts with Ilyich's slide into ever increasing pain and irritability. With the terror and anguish of approaching death, his voice grows convincingly hoarse. Until his illness, Ivan Ilyich had never reflected on his life. But he slowly comes to see his life as "a terrible, huge deception which had hidden life and death." As he lays dying, his lifelong friends think of the promotions that may come their way, and his wife "began to wish he would die, but she didn't want him to die because then his salary would cease." He has always avoided human connection, but through the tender ministrations of a peasant he comes to recognize the "mesh of falsity" in which he's lived. Written more than a century ago, Tolstoy's work still retains the power of a contemporary novel.
