The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Leo Tolstoy (1828 - 1910)
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, first published in 1886, is a novella by Leo Tolstoy, one of the masterpieces of his late fiction, written shortly after his religious conversion of the late 1870s.
The novella tells the story of the death of a high-court judge in 19th-century Russia.
Interpretation
In his article of 1997, psychologist Mark Freeman writes:
Tolstoy's book is about many things: the tyranny of bourgeois niceties, the terrible weak spots of the human heart, the primacy and elision of death. But more than...