The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories

byLeo Tolstoy, Richard Pevear (Translator), Larissa Volokhonsky (Translator)

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Ivan Ilyich has always led a proper life. Only as he dies does he begin to ask what that meant.

The title story of this collection follows Ivan Ilyich, a successful official battling a mysterious illness. His family visit his bedside, their faces masks of concern. His colleagues pay their respects but think only of the advantages created by his death.

As Ivan’s suffering deepens, the respectable life he has built begins to seem hollow, and the truth of death becomes impossible to avoid. It is one of the masterpieces of Tolstoy’s late fiction.

The 10 other stories in this collection include ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’, ‘The Devil’ and ‘Hadji Murat’, and range across military captivity, jealousy, spiritual crisis, peasant life and moral awakening.

These are stories written with the force of final questions. Tolstoy looks at illness, jealousy, violence and faith not as abstractions, but as pressures that reveal what his characters have built their lives upon.

'As good as anything Tolstoy ever wrote... Self-assured, vital, unforgettable' Guardian

As good as anything Tolstoy ever wrote... Self-assured, vital, unforgettable
Guardian

About Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 in the Tula province. He studied at the University of Kazan, then led a life of pleasure until 1851 when he joined an artillery regiment in the Caucasus. He established his reputation as a writer with The Sebastopol Sketches (1855-6). After a period in St Petersburg and abroad, he married, had thirteen children, managed his vast estates in the Volga Steppes and wrote War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877). A Confession (1879-82) marked a spiritual crisis in his life, and in 1901 he was excommuincated by the Russian Holy Synod. He died in 1910, in the course of a dramatic flight from home, at the railway station of Astapovo.

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