The plot of Family Happiness is extremely simple as compared to lauded Tolstoy works like Anna Karenina, War and Peace and Resurrection, but Tolstoy's straightforward style of writing and ability to relate every detail of his settings makes this book a highly enjoyable read.

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, was foremost among the great Russian novelists of the nineteenth century, and is widely considered one of the greatest writers of prose fiction in world history.

In his perceptive and moving depiction of Ivan Ilych, a worldly careerist facing his own mortality in the midst of a self-absorbed family and indifferent colleagues, Tolstoy provides one of literature's greatest and most memorable reflections on the meaning of the good life and on life as preparation for death.

This edition features the classic...

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.

The story concerns the love and marriage of a young girl, Mashechka (17 years old), and the much older Sergey Mikhaylych (36), an old family friend. The story is narrated by Masha. After a courtship that has the trappings of a mere family friendship, Masha's love grows and expands until she can no longer contain it.

In Petersburg in the eighteen-forties a surprising event occurred. An officer of the Cuirassier Life Guards, a handsome prince who everyone predicted would become aide-de-camp to the Emperor Nicholas I and have a brilliant career, left the service, broke off his engagement to a beautiful maid of honour, a favourite of the Empresss, gave his small estate to his sister, and retired to a monastery to become a monk.

In this short story, a land owner named Vasili Andreevich Brekhunov takes along one of his peasants, Nikita, for a short journey to the house of the owner of a forest. He is impatient and wishes to get to the town more quickly 'for business' (purchasing the forest before other contenders can get there).

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...