The Death of Ivan Ilych

By Leo Tolstoy

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sheba Blake Publishing
• Release date: Dec 30, 2013
• ISBN: 9781304719836

Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was a Russian author of novels, short stories, novellas, plays, and philosophical essays. He was born into an aristocratic family and served as an officer in the Russian military during the Crimean War before embarking on a career as a writer and activist. Tolstoy’s experience in war, combined with his interpretation of the teachings of Jesus, led him to devote his life and work to the cause of pacifism. In addition to such fictional works as War and Peace (1869), Anna Karenina (1877), and The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), Tolstoy wrote The Kingdom of God is Within You (1893), a philosophical treatise on nonviolent resistance which had a profound impact on Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. He is regarded today not only as one of the greatest writers of all time, but as a gifted and passionate political figure and public intellectual whose work transcends Russian history and literature alike.

Reviews for The Death of Ivan Ilych

[jakebornheimer · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Bought and read this book over the weekend in Montreal. I was really enchanted by the portrayal of Ivan's decline and death, being so detailed. I really empathize with his struggle to understand death as a thing that truly applies to / effects him. The descriptive quality (as noted by many other readers) of Tolstoy's prose was readily apparent, and I enjoyed it immensely. For sure, this is one that begs to be re-read. I'm especially interested in revisiting the 1st chapter, which is from the perspective of his "friends" who, greedy for his social position, callously snub his funeral and bereaved wife. Highly recommended for those interested in getting into Russian lit since it is so short and sweet.

[pegmcdaniel · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The subject of this short classic is the process of dying and finally, acceptance of death. It's a look into the mind of a dying man who had lived an ordinary life as a high-court judge, had a family and friends, and had not given much thought about dying some day. After being ill for a long time, he realizes that he will never get well again and uses the time to reflect and question how well he lived his life. Was it meaningful? He struggles with redemption and forgiveness as all of us would in his situation.I felt it was depressing about Ivan's agonizing end. The novel was written in 1886 and was easy to read. Leo Tolstoy put lots of meaning into a short novel and gave me plenty to think about.

[foggidawn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This novella opens with a scene reminiscent of the one shown to Scrooge by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come: Ivan Ilyich has died, and his friends, colleagues, and relations gather for the funeral, but also to advance their own interests. Who will be promoted into his old position? Can his wife wrangle a better pension out of the government? And the weekly card game will go on as scheduled, won’t it? The reader then gets a survey of Ivan’s life, from school days, to married life, through career advancements, and through the illness that eventually leads to his death. There’s a lot of focus on the big questions: why death, and why pain? Did Ivan lead the life he was meant to lead? What if he got it all wrong?One gets the sense that Tolstoy was working through his thoughts on these matters. It would be silly to say that I “enjoyed” this book, but I appreciated it (though, when it comes to the Russians, I’ll take Dostoyevsky over Tolstoy any day). It’s a big subject for such a small volume; I’m glad I finally read it, though I probably won’t read it again.

[thecrow2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The book is nothing more about than the life and death of an ordinary everyday man but Tolstoy was able to write this almost like a poem, beautifully and emotionally.

[quibee · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Wonderful from the start, where a colleague goes to the main character's funeral out of a sense of duty and the small inner dialogues and inner calculations that go on about Iván Ilyich's death, back through the (rather vapid) life of Ivan.Wonderful writing.

[reneepaule · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Nice. Very nice short story. A lot of self-reflection, which is right up my street, as it were.

[lilywren · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is my first venture into the land of Tolstoy. As with Camus, I was intimidated by the name 'Tolstoy' and, as with Camus, this should never have been so. The Death of Ivan Ilych is a rather poignant, striking novella written following a time where it is said Tolstoy went through a religious conversion. The book provokes thoughts around mortality and provides us with a harsh lesson in 'live life well'.Despite the book title, the story focusses upon the life which Ivan Ilych felt he had lived and the process of dying he goes through rather than the death itself. It is striking, emotive and, at times, frighteningly remorseful. It's that 3am in the morning kind of stuff. If you're the kind of person who lies in bed agonising over your mortality, that funny twitch in your arm, pain in your chest or asking yourself "Why is John's car far superior to mine?" "Is the cat ill running around like that or just being a cat?" then the themes running through this wonderful novella will certainly chime.Ivan Ilych is a well-respected judge who receives an unspecified diagnosis but deduces that he is terminally ill. As his condition deteriorates, we witness Ivan Ilych struggling to come to terms with his condition and the fact that he is dying. He begins to look back on his life with some sadness and regret."Lately in that loneliness in which he found himself....in these late days of horrific loneliness Ivan Ilych lived only by his memories of the past. One after another he imagined scenes from his life. He would always begin with the most recent and proceed to the earliest, to his childhood, and settle there." p.92Such memories proved painful to bear. On looking back through his life, Ivan Ilych realises that as he grew older, more removed from the innocence of childhood, as the worries of life, his career and family took hold, the more superficial and shallow his life had become."...the further back he looked, the more life there had been in him; both the more sweetness to life, and the more of life itself....There had been one point of light far back at the start of everything, and ever since everything had gotten blacker and blacker, and moved quicker and quicker." p.93Ivan Ilych starts to look on his friends, colleagues and wife with the same feelings of bitterness, regret and hate which he has for life and himself. The only moments of tenderness and understanding he finds are in Gerasim, the butler's assistant, who is able to emphasise and understand his needs as Ivan Ilych views others around him as looking inwards to their own needs."His marriage...so accidental, and such a disappointment, with his wife's bad breath, and her sensuality, and their hypocrisy. His moribound professional life, the obession with money...The further on in years the more deadening it became. In perfectly measured steps I went downhill imagining I was on my way up.... In public opinion I was on my way up, and the whole time my life was slipping away from under me....and now it's all over, and it's time to die."p.88The inevitability of death pervades the book and feeds into this readers mortality. As Ivan Ilych struggles to come to terms with his life, dying and death so the reader is also carried along and forced to ask questions of his/her own mortality and life. The fact that Ivan Ilych is terminally ill is, for want of a better word, irrelevant. Death is inevitable - we are all dying, we will all face death and this is the only thing we can be sure about in life. The important lesson we should learn is how to spend our time wisely as we move towards this inevitability.I'm so glad that this is my first experience of reading Tolstoy. It's a quick, compelling read with so much feeling and emotion packed into the 104 pages of this edition. It is without doubt a fantastic masterclass in writing where we are witness to emotions being laid bare for all to see.

[greeniezona · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Disclaimer: This book should not be read the day you find out that your grandfather has passed and you were sent home from work because you were sobbing too hard to be intelligible.

Even if you've already finished half of it and there's not much left.

Even if the first chapter, with work acquaintance friends discussing the death, then one showing up to the house to pay his respects, only to feel disaffected and take off for a card game, is actually pretty darkly funny.

Even if what you've read since then has been a pretty matter-of-fact discussion of Ivan's career and life so far, and hasn't really been sad at all.

Because when the turn comes, with the mysterious illness and the search for a diagnosis and the slow decline at home and the alienation from all those who are well and do not understand, who want to go on with their concerns of life and the living...

Well, it's best to put the book down and come back to it in a few days. Go cuddle with the kids on the couch.

Called a masterpiece on death and dying.

I concur.

[sanctispiritus · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An excellent, soulful book in the vein of The Trial, and Crime and Punishment. Vladimir Nabokov sums my views of this Novella quite well.In his lectures on Russian Literature Russian born Novelist and critic Vladimir Nabokov argues that, for Tolstoy, a sinful life is (such as Ivan's was), moral death. Therefore death, the return of the soul to God is, for Tolstoy, moral life . To quote Nabokov: "The Tolstoyan formula is: Ivan lived a bad life and since the bad life is nothing but the death of the soul, then Ivan lived a living death; and since beyond death is God's living light, then Ivan died into a new life- Life with a capital L."(Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich: Lectures On Russain Literature pg.237: Harcourt Edition)

[ohernaes · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Think over whether you live the life that you want to live or simply do the "correct" things unquestionably.

[amelish · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Oh non-Gothic, gothic horror. Oh sweaty relief. (ew)

I wish I'd been a writing sort in high school--the books I read then were arguably more interesting than the ones I read now, brief Michael Crichton preoccupation excepted.

[nospi-2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Absolute Masterpiece

Beyond my ability to use superlatives how incredible this short book is on delving into the relative importance of life, marriage, family, career, and death.

[trilliams · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Two spoilers: Ivan dies, and this book is great.

[pocketmermaid · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I read this for my World Lit II class. Actually, I read it twice. I read two different translations, because I wasn't satisfied with the one that was in my text book. I found another, and I liked it a lot better. Translation does make a difference.Poor Ivan Ilyich. I wasn't too crazy about this, but I understand its importance in literature. So many writers that came later have been influenced by this little novel! It's amazing how Tolstoy was able to capture all these emotions of human suffering and dying. I gave it three stars because it wasn't really all that life-changing or inspirational to me personally, but I'm glad to have read it. Twice, even!

[laphenix · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I liked the concept, but quickly grew bored.

[mahallett · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

a good story of a dying man. good introduction

[martinbodek · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I spotted this on a friend's shelf, borrowed it, and read it in an afternoon. I found it to be an interesting - and arrestingly short - contemplation of the end of life and life's worth/value. The introduction was extremely helpful in understanding the context of Tolstoy's complete antithesis regard for life in comparison with his character. I'm not exactly sure why this stands out for historians as a unique book of its kind, as the introduction reveals and reminds that other such literature exists, perhaps better. A good first experience with the author nonetheless.

[engpunk77 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This was one of my favorite stories of all time in 1999. I read it over and over again, thinking it contained and could reveal all the wisdom in the world.

[bayardus-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Until the nature of his injury makes itself known Ivan Ilych ambles through life, succeeding in both his career and personal life (at least he keeps up the facade of success in those realms). Yet Ivan Ilych never exhibits any passion, nor does he examine the path he has taken and where it might lead.

When a foolish accident brings home his own mortality, however, Ivan Ilych is forced to consider all the things he had taken for granted before. His unhappy marriage, his career that he sometimes enjoyed but largely performed for the sake of a salary and social advancement, and his life in general where he never stood for or against anything, all provide grist for Ivan's tormented mind. The nature of life and the inevitability of death spur in Ivan thoughts about dying for the first time. Tolstoy gives us a dying man who is bitter that everyone else is continuing their lives as if "the world was going on as usual." Of course, to everyone except the dying man, it is. He gives us a man who always thought of himself as death's exception. Everyone has probably done something similar, at least at times, because that thought is so much easier to grasp compared to the idea that we are mortal and will be dead someday, our consciousness ending like a candle being snuffed. He gives us a man railing against the cruelty of God while simultaneously railing against God's absence. Finally Tolstoy lets Ivan Ilych begin to examine his own life, and as he does so he realizes that his moments of purest happiness were during childhood, and since then his life has been one big death-spiral, before giving Ivan a moment of forgiveness and what I interpret as divine absolution.

Tolstoy in this book tells what I imagine is a universal tale of a person trying to reconcile themselves with his or her own mortality. We probably have all had the thoughts that go through Ivan's head in our own head at some point in our lives- if anything Ivan Ilych thinks about hasn't occurred to you in at least a general sense before then you probably don't spend much time thinking- but Tolstoy presents these thoughts well. That being said, his writing did not spur any realization about life or death that I didn't have before I began the book. Maybe I contemplate my own mortality more than most people do? I think that, despite the lack of new insight, the book could have been great if the scenes of Iva Ilych's terror and suffering were portrayed with great prose that made the scenes depicted viscerally striking. I didn't find the prose to be particularly impressive, unfortunately, though that may be the fault of the Maude translation. I also thought the ending was a bit of a cop-out, at least if you interpret the ending as his soul receiving forgiveness, as it undercuts the fear of death and the ensuing nothingness that was such an integral part of the story up until that point. I hope Tolstoy really believed in such forgiveness, and didn't include it so as to give a more uplifting ending, because the story would have been better off without it.

If you've never really thought about death, it's worth reading a book that contemplates such a thing. There are plenty to choose from: Death Comes for the Archbishop, Gilead, The Tartar Steppe, or Hamlet just to name a few (death is hardly a rare theme). Still, The Death of Ivan Ilych stands out as perhaps the work most focused on death. Choose it if that sounds appealing to you.

[clara53_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In this short novella Tolstoy ingeniously unmasks the raw emotions and the puzzled lamentations of one Ivan Ilyich, a typical personage of his time, as he lies dying while suffering physical and mental agony (the latter being as excruciating as the former), trying to grasp the seeming "unfairness" of his position and finally arriving at some startling realizations about his life. The surrounding characters come under harsh light as they hover around the dying man and reveal their most unattractive human traits, and Ivan Ilyich is finally able to see through the veil of human hypocrisy. Not an upbeat story in the least. But one with a pretty clever insight into human nature. It also does point to the unrelenting frailty of life.

[aliceanna-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A brilliant short work. He captured the psychology of a dying man and those around him with a great deal of thoroughness. The end of Illych had him questioning so many of the silly societal mores which he had self-imposed, but in the end, his resignation to the peaceful pull of death put the angst behind him. Wonderfully written.

[leslie398 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

4 1/2 stars. Somewhat disturbing but very moving novella of the thoughts and emotions of a dying man.

[leann-362203 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

WOW WOW WOW!!!!! What a masterpiece on death and dying!

[wanderlustlover_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Summer 2018, Audiobook:

I wanted to love this one more than I actually did end up loving it. It's hard to like Ivan Ilych, which I think is a large part of the point of this book. He makes a lot of not-great choices, which alienate him from everyone except coworkers, and doesn't really even engender them to have affection, so much as just genial respect for him. I don't regret picking this up at the steal of a deal sale price, but I am glad I didn't end up paying full price for it.

[paroof · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This novella is a reflection on the meaning or purpose of life. I have no idea why I didn't read it sooner, I should have. It's beautifully written and easy to understand and doesn't even require much time. It's a fabulous introduction to Tolstoy, too.Highly recommended.

[macleod73-292574 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A dark take that exposes the futility of living an unexamined life. The novella deals with the forces of civilization's expectations of us and the horror that life can become if we don't take responsibility for our own destiny.

[ionas_7 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

There were many good points in Tolstoy's little story, such as the inadequacy of doctors, our focus on becoming persons of power and importance, and our marrying not for love but material reasons.IIvan Ilyich suffered a lot of pain before he died; but the story was not entitled "the illness" or "the pain" of Ivan Ilyich, but "the death of Ivan Ilyich".I found it significant that some time before his death Ivan gained the insight that he had not lived his life correctly; he had been focused on irrelevancies and not the real values of life. He had had promptings from his soul, or God, if you will, about things in his life he should have changed, but these he ignored.He realized now that only his little son whom he had always pitied, loved him. And his servant Gerasim also had compassion for him, but not his wife or others in the family.Ivan had a little medal on his watch chain inscribed "Respice finem" (look to the end). And it is the actual "death" that is significant.Like most people, Ivan had been afraid of death, but as soon as he accepted the pain, he could not find the fear."There was no more fear because there was no more death.""Instead of death there was light, "What joy!" says Ivan.With this story Tolstoy is giving us a crucial message - there is no death, when our body dies, we go into the light.

[livelylady · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Brief history of a man's life and death. I thought, unless I am missing something, it was a book of nothing.

[la2bkk · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Surprisingly readable. Sometimes very funny, other times quite dark. This novella progresses very quickly, and unfortunately ends too soon – which is probably the ultimate compliment to any work. On a deeper level, there may be a serious lesson to learn about appreciating the value of life as opposed to simply living in a superficial state of complacency with the mundane. A fantastic introduction to the works of Tolstoy.

[kittycunningh-815148 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

This is a 2.5 hour audio book. I quit with an hour to go because I just couldn't stand the tedium any more.I've decided that Russian literature is not my thing.