Death of Ivan Ilych 1 Introduction 2 About The Author 3 Summary of the Text 4 Analysis of the Novel 5Characters of the novel 6 Theme of the Novel 7 Important Quotation explained 8 Important Questions and Answers 1 Introduction: The Death of Ivan Ilych – alternately called a short story or a novella – is probably the most famous shorter work of Count Leo Tolstoy. Since it was published in 1886, in Volume 12 of Tolstoy's collected works (edited by his wife, Countess Sofia Tolstoy), it's been hailed as a masterpiece by critics and readers. Ivan Ilych also acquired a reputation as one of the modern treatments of death – one that has changed the way that subject is treated. Writing about death was nothing new, to be sure. In the 19th century, death had been a favorite subject of the Romantics and many writers who came after them. They just couldn't stop talking about it, and created dying romantic heroes of all kinds: star-crossed lovers with tragic deaths, lonely tortured artists who came to painfully beautiful ends, and valiant men in battle who sacrificed themselves. (Our popular culture still owes a lot to the Romantics.) What was new and remarkable in Tolstoy's work was how unremarkable its main character – and his death – was. 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. Rather than turning to religion, art, or the love of his life to cope with death, he turns to doctors. About as far from a dying romantic hero as you can get. Much more like, well, us normal people. Tolstoy himself, on the other hand, was very far from being an average Joe by the time he wrote Ivan Ilych. Tolstoy was born in 1828 to one of the most prominent Russian families (yes, he was a real count). Before he turned 50 he had produced both War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877), which are traditionally considered to be among the greatest novels ever (Time magazine ranks them at number 3 and number 1, respectively). It's no surprise, then, that he also enjoyed the reputation of being one of the greatest writers in the world at the time. In spite of all his fame and accomplishment, not long after writing Anna Karenina Tolstoy had a midlife crisis and decided that he couldn't go on living unless he found the meaning of life. The crisis only ended after an extremely powerful conversion experience (to a more radical variety of Christianity), which in Tolstoy's eyes changed everything. He announced his personal transformation to the world in his 1881 book entitled A Confession. He stopped thinking of himself primarily as an artist and began writing on religion and politics, advocating things like non-violence, simple and communal living, and anarchism. Followers began showing up at his estate (Yasnaya Polyana) like pilgrims to hear his pronouncements on life and see his experiments in practicing his ideal with his peasants. The Death of Ivan Ilych was the first significant work of literature Tolstoy produced after his conversion. It's a forceful confrontation with the problem of death, and through death, the meaning of life. It's also a sharp satire of the "false" modern middle-class lifestyle (embodied in the character of Ivan Ilych). Tolstoy saw this lifestyle and attitude taking shape in his day, and thought that those who embraced it were incapable of facing death because they did not understand life. Some readers admire the novella for its powerful moral message. Others say it shows the beginning of Tolstoy's loss of his art, and that once he became interested in teaching moral lessons, his writing lost its complexity and became one-dimensional. What do you think? Get back to us after you've read The Death of Ivan Ilych. Even if we don't have a freak drapery accident and wind up with a drawn-out illness like Ivan Ilych, we're still faced with death. Death is just easier to forget about when everything seems pleasant. That's why Ivan doesn't think about it. But it doesn't matter: death sneaks up on him when he least expects it.And when Ivan becomes ill, he finds that he isn't able to enjoy many, or any, of the things he once did. Ivan finds that the friends he'd made aren't real friends, that his family doesn't really love him, and that he's totally alone. He finds that barely anything he's done in his life means anything to him. The Death of Ivan Ilych brings to our attention the unpleasant fact that we all have to die, and that we might have to suffer a whole lot first. Our medicines might be better than those of Ivan's doctors, but we haven't gotten any closer to escaping mortality, and many people still die only after a long and painful period of disease. Perhaps Ivan Ilych, which is famous for its psychological depth, will help you understand what many people go through when they're dying. Perhaps Ivan Ilych will also get you thinking about what mortality means for you. Like Ivan, you might start wondering how you should live your life, and how you can find 2 About the author: On August 28, 1828 Leo Tolstoy was born into a wealthy aristocratic family that resided at a country estate called Yasnaya Polyana, about 120 miles south of Moscow. Death visited the Tolstoy family early. When Tolstoy was only two, his mother died while giving birth to her fifth child. And Tolstoy's father followed suddenly in 1837. Orphaned but well off, Tolstoy was cared for by a succession of female relatives until he attained his maturity in 1848. Although he attended Kazan University for three years, he never completed a degree, choosing instead to return to Yasnaya Polyana to take up permanent residence. The life of a wealthy Russian master was not for him, however, and in 1851 he joined his brother on active duty with the Russian army. It was during his tour of duty that Tolstoy published his first work, Childhood, an account of the life and experiences of a young boy. The novel garnered him immediate literary recognition. His celebrity status only grew throughout subsequent years as he published more stories and completed two sequels to Childhood: Boyhood and Youth. Yet in 1859, disillusioned with his calling as a writer, Tolstoy returned to Yasnaya Polyana where he devoted himself to estate management and the study of educational practices. In 1862 Tolstoy married Sofia Andreevna Bers and seven years later, in 1869, published his epic work, War and Peace. Anna Karenina, the second long novel on which Tolstoy's fame as a writer is mainly based, followed in 1877. From 1875–1878 Tolstoy experienced a period of increasing depression and psychological crisis that was to alter both his philosophy and his art. In A Confession, an autobiographical account of his life and moral struggle written after the crisis, Tolstoy writes that the principal cause of his depression was his inability to find an acceptable meaning in human life. The inevitability of death overwhelmed him, and all formulations of life's meaning appeared to him shallow and valueless. Neither the great philosophers of the past nor his contemporaries could provide him with satisfying answers. Desperate, he turned to the Russian people. Tolstoy found that the uneducated peasants possessed a definite conception of the meaning of a life, a comfort and security derived from "irrational knowledge," from faith in a creator God. This faith rescued them from despair and suffering and infused their life with meaning. Confronted with the choice of irrational faith or meaningless despair, Tolstoy chose faith. At first attempting to renew contact with the church of his childhood, Tolstoy eventually resolved to develop his own system of belief. And devoting the four years after his crisis (1878–1882) to that purpose, Tolstoy published a series of four works elaborating upon and explaining his unique religious philosophy, works that Tolstoy regarded as his most important achievement as a writer. It is not insignificant that The Death of Ivan Ilych, written in 1886, was the first major fictional work published by Tolstoy after his crisis and conversion. Tolstoy's religious philosophy serves as a background to the understanding of the novel. 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. And just as Tolstoy's discovery of the true meaning of life led him to fulfillment and an acceptance of death, so too, Ivan Ilych's awakening exposes him to the light of a meaningful life and assuages his fear of dying. Thus, The Death of Ivan Ilych can be seen as a reflection and an elaboration of Tolstoy's post- conversion philosophical concerns. The novel is a fictional answer to the questions that plagued Tolstoy during the mid 1870s. From the time of his conversion to his death, Tolstoy remained actively engaged in publicizing his religious beliefs. He wrote various pieces on social, political, and economic topics ranging from vegetarianism to capital punishment. In hopeless opposition to the government, nearly all of his writings were censored or banned. Tolstoy died in 1910 after nearly a decade of continuing ill health.