The Death of Ivan Ilyich

“This story is the brightest, the most perfect and complicated work of Leo Tolstoy,” - Vladimir Nabokov. Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy , also known as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian author was born into a wealthy aristocratic family on August 28, 1828. He primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. Tolstoy is also known for his 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. The best known Tolstoy’s novels are War and Peace and Anna Karenina which are considered to be the greatest novels of realist fiction. But not everyone knows that one of the greatest works of Leo Tolstoy is made in the genre of short story. “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” is a true masterpiece of Tolstoy’s talent. This short novel was written in 1886, it was the first major fictional work published by Tolstoy after his crisis and conversion. To understand “The Death of Ivan Ilych” you should understand Tolstoy's religious philosophy. Brotherly love, mutual support, and Christian charity, values that became essential to Tolstoy in the second half of his life, emerge as the dominant moral principles in “The Death of Ivan Ilych”. “The Death of Ivan Ilych” is the story of a painfully ordinary government official who comes down with an untreatable illness and dies at home slowly, painfully, and full of loneliness. He's middle aged, has an unhappy family life, and a petty personality. But despite his dying state he opens something unbelievable almost sacred not in life but in, paradoxically, death. Read the famous story “The Death of Ivan Ilych” and understand the unusual moral and religious view of Leo Tolstoy!