The Death of Ivan Ilyich
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4.3 • 8 Ratings
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
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 death 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 the 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.
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.
