The Death of Ivan Ilych (Complete Version, Best Navigation, Active TOC) (A to Z Classics)
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The Death of Ivan Ilyich was first published in 1886. It is a novella by Leo Tolstoy. It is one of Tolstoy's most celebrated pieces of late fiction. This work stems in part from Tolstoy's anguished intellectual and spiritual struggles which led to his conversion to Christianity. Central to the story is an examination on the nature of both life and death, and how man can come to terms with death's very inevitability. The novella was acclaimed by Vladimir Nabokov and Mahatma Gandhi as the greatest in the whol
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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.
