The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories

A senior judge falls ill, realises he is dying, and discovers that the correct, agreeable life he built is no consolation at all; the only person who does not lie to him is a peasant servant. Tolstoy wrote it after his own religious crisis, and it is deliberately unsparing about respectability. The collection that carries it gathers other late short fiction, which varies by edition — the reason to read it in a curriculum is the title novella, one of the most direct treatments in fiction of what a life is worth when measured at the end of it.

Context: Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) published the novella in 1886, after War and Peace and Anna Karenina and in the middle of the moral turn that dominated his last thirty years.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the 468-title curriculum this card came from; listed in the Ages 13-99+ band under Fiction.
• Leo Tolstoy — the author.
• Death — the subject.
• Faith — the question left standing at the end.