The Death of Ivan Ilych

The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Smert' Ivana Ilyicha), first published in 1886, 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 whole of Russian literature

- Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.