He doesn’t want to have to rely on anyone to help alleviate his suffering. He feels he is a burden he believes everyone is just waiting for him to die. We get the briefest of glimpses of what it must be like for a man on the brink of death. He can’t stand the sight of her, the sound of her, the smell of her. He cannot escape it.Īnd then there’s his wife! She becomes like the walking, breathing embodiment of this pain. The gnawing ache in his side, the pain… unrelenting, demoralizing… every simple facet of existence plagued by torturous, insufferable, incurable pain. Tolstoy describes Ivan Ilyich’s failing health in such a way that the reader can almost FEEL what it was like for him. He is by all intents and purposes content with his position in life. He has all of the trappings of a “successful life”: respectable family, respectable job, respectable home.

Concise and relevant and beautifully written. See, I had mistakenly given up on the masters of Russian literature due to the struggles I had reading a particular novel (I’m looking at you Brothers Karamazov!), assuming they were all inaccessible and there was no point in expending anymore energy trying to make sense of books with characters that go by 3 different names and waaaaaaah the end. When I picked this book up at a library book sale, I did so without expectation that I would actually enjoy reading it. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker and social reformer. Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world's greatest novelists.

His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist fiction.

Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Николаевич Толстой most appropriately used Liev Tolstoy commonly Leo Tolstoy in Anglophone countries) was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories.

A Morte de Ivan Ilich by Leo Tolstoy