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The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories, by Leo Tolstoy
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Hailed as one of the world's supreme masterpieces on the subject of death and dying, Leo Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" is the story of a worldly careerist, a high court judge who has never given the inevitability of his death so much as a passing thought. But one day, death announces itself to him, and to his shocked surprise he is brought face to face with his own mortality. How, Tolstoy asks, does an unreflective man confront his one and only moment of truth? This novella was the artistic culmination of a profound spiritual crisis in Tolstoy's life, a nine-year period following the publication of Anna Karenina during which he wrote not a word of fiction. A thoroughly absorbing and, at times, terrifying glimpse into the abyss of death, it is also a strong testament to the possibility of finding spiritual salvation. Also included in this volume are "The Forged Coupon," "After the Dance," "My Dream," "There Are No Guilty People," and "The Young Tsar."
- Sales Rank: #98060 in Audible
- Published on: 2009-01-29
- Format: Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Running time: 476 minutes
Review
"A well-balanced reading that is easy to follow and that brings home the emotional punch of Ivan Ilych's stirring last weeks, days, and moments." ---AudioFile
Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Russian
About the Author
Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) was a nineteenth-century Russian author whose best-known works include War and Peace and Anna Karenina.
George K. Wilson has narrated over one hundred fiction and nonfiction audiobook titles, from Thomas L. Friedman to Thomas Pynchon, and has won several AudioFile Earphones Awards.
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
The smaller Tolstoyan platforms
By BOB
NOTE: This review is of the Richard Pevear/Larissa Volokhonsky translation.
One thing that Leo Tolstoy could never be accused of was being a minimalist. He is best known for the massive novel 'Anna Karenina' and the even more massive 'War and Peace'. Almost all of his fiction seems to be an attempt to pack in as much panoramic life as possible. This characteristic applies to his shorter pieces as well as his novels.
This new translation (2009) assembles his best known stories as well as some lesser known ones as well and is presented chronologically, from the earliest, "The Prisoner of the Caucassus", written between the composition of 'War and Peace' and 'Anna Karenina', to his final novella, "Hadji Murat," written over the last two decades of his life and published posthumously a few years after his death. All of the stories deal with the themes familiar in his other works—how can a man lead a moral life, what should his attitude be toward the pleasures of the flesh, honor in the midst of war and equality among the classes.
"The Prisoner of the Caucassus" deals with a young soldier who has obtained leave from his regiment to visit his ailing mother and perhaps marry before she dies. On his way through the mountain passes he takes a wrong turn and is pursued by Tartars. His bafflement as to why these people would want to kill him is similar to young Nicolai Rostov in 'War and Peace', who had grown up in the bosom of family love and could not conceive that anyone would wish him harm. The naiveté quickly disappears as a steely resolve to survive takes its place. Tolstoy is a master at depicting wartime action and the campaigns of pursuit, capture or killing which are inherent in war.
"The Death of Ivan Ilyich", "The Kreutzer Sonata" and "The Devil" are largely concerned with the subjective evolutions of individual consciousness in relation to external perceived challenges. My early exposure to the psychologically penetrating tales of Henry James has made me predisposed to be more comfortable in these subjective realms where specific characters undergo psychological/spiritual journeys. "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" depicts the life of an attorney/judge who has gone through all the right steps and played by the societal rules for reaching success and prosperity in life. He believes that his life has obtained a stability and order and that he has reached the pinnacle of success, until a random accident resulting in a bruise in his side, seemingly inconsequential but escalating to severe internal pain disrupts all of his sense of order. His selfish wife now seems self-absorbed and irritable with Ivan's health crisis as it presents an inconvenience in her life. His escalating illness, never named but presumably cancer, forces Ivan to reevaluate his life and question all his previous judgments. He goes through all the stages of dying to the point of ultimate acceptance. He reaches that point which always fascinated Tolstoy and compelled him to contemplate the process to the ultimate last step of consciousness that he also depicted in 'War and Peace', as if he wanted to venture as close as possible to the 'final frontier' and still be able to return to tell the tale. Ivan's serenity precedes his physical death and achieves the ultimate transformation.
The character in 'The Kreutzer Sonata" seems like he just stepped out of the pages of one of Dostoevsky's intense novels and wandered into Tolstoy's universe. Like Raskolnikov, he is a killer and, also like Raskolnikov, he needs to make a complete, thorough confession to another human. His jealousy and ambivalence to his wife's beauty and seductiveness has culminated in murder. The character repents of the murder, but not, as Tolstoy later made clear, of his aversion to sexual pleasure. Tolstoy's own revulsion toward sexual pleasure in his later life made explicit his own attitude. Despite this obvious bias, the story can be read as a compelling psychological fable without knowing the feelings of the author.
"Master and Man" is one of Tolstoy's most evocative tales. A greedy landowner, Brekhunov, takes his servant, Nikita, with him to a neighboring landowner in order to purchase a valuable piece of land. In his haste to reach his destination before other prospective buyers, he speeds his horse and servant on through a snowstorm, gets lost and, as night approaches, appears to be stranded through the frigid night. The horse is pushed beyond endurance and dies and he abandons his servant, who is succumbing to hypothermia, to find his way, gets lost and ends up back at his sleigh. He undergoes a radical spiritual transformation from self-obsessed aristocrat, willing to sacrifice anyone in behalf of reaching his goal to resignation. This predicament is no one else's doing but his own. He has refused a previous offer to stay with a family overnight and resume his journey in the morning. He realizes too late that he should have accepted that offer. Left with no one else to hold responsible but himself, he decides to cover his dying servant with his own body in the back of the carriage, dying in the process but enabling his servant to survive. Like Ivan Ilyich, he travels through different stages before reaching a spiritual epiphany and considering the worth of someone other than himself. The nocturnal cold and the slow, inevitable acquiescence to the harshness of the environment is reminiscent of the equally chilling Jack London tale, "To Build a Fire".
The final story in the collection, the novella "Hadji Murat," take us full circle back to the Caucassus and tells the story of real life Chechen rebel Hadji Murat who, through a chain of circumstances, felt forced to retain his honor by defying the more militant rebel Shamil, who has held Murat's mother, wife and son captive, and defecting to the Russian forces. Murat is constantly aware that he may be placing himself in an untenable situation in which he is not fully trusted by either the Russians or the Chechens. Against this foundation, Tolstoy wanders into the minds of various rebels and Russians, even launching into a tirade against the lecherous and cruel Tsar Nicholas I who prided himself on being against the death penalty while also condemning prisoners to run gauntlets of thousands of blows resulting in certain fatality. Tolstoy lost none of his descriptive powers in the final years of his life. 'Hadji Murat" is as compellingly cinematic as anything he had written previously. My only reservation with the story, as for most of the others in this collection, is that they could all benefit from being fleshed out in greater length. He has the material for several novels here and, while I'm not advocating expanding them to the sizes of his magnum opuses, I feel that they could have been improved by more intensive exploration of the characters and circumstances. The tales race by through successions of characters we don't have enough time to get to know thoroughly before being thrust into another setting. In my view, Tolstoy never reigned in his maximalist tendencies, even in his shorter works. Nonetheless, what we have are still vital and indispensable contributions to a titanic literary career.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Highly recommend
By planosue
I had previously never read Tolstoy's classic book. It is a very short read (finished in an hour or so) More short story than full blown novel. I came across the book while looking for something on the topic of "death and dying" for a friend (age 58) recently diagnosed with a fatal disease. I wanted a book that might help her gain perspective of how to deal with the awful news of her own impending death. Though this book does not meet the needs of my friend (Tolstoy's descriptions of Ivan's final hours are very graphic), it did offer a useful perspective for me in how to give support to my dying friend. Few of us think much about how we will die much less about when... much too morbid in modern society. So often, we live life as if there is no ending (as Tolstoy's Ivan did). For those of us (including my friend) who are forced to address death as a very short term prospect, there may be ways to gain peace of mind free of agitation and disturbance. Tolstoy's wonderful little book points this out. I give this book 4 stars because, compared to other classical literature of its genre, it is very good... but it is not the most excellent literature in genre.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Arguably some of the greatest stories ever put down on paper.
By simon belmont
Many people agree that The Beatles are the best band of all time (I'm actually not of this camp, but let's forget that for the sake of argument). However, imagine if The Beatles had a reputation as unlistenable, opaque, and virtually impenetrable. The first time you heard some actual songs by them, you'd be surprised at how easy it is to listen to them; the melodies are beautiful yet catchy, the instrumental parts well-structured and well-played.
This is the big surprise for me with Tolstoy. I've never come across an author, band, artist, etc. whose reputation is so contrary to their actual nature. Starting in childhood, we're told that War and Peace is an inaccessible tome of a novel. Tolstoy's prose is famously thought to be cold, formal, and difficult to get through.
This couldn't be further from the truth. Tolstoy's writing is beautifully flowing and sometimes even playful; his characters are well thought-out and sympathetic; the narrative motion of his stories is perfectly paced. This is not just true of this translation of some of his short stories, although Pevear and Volokhonsky seem particularly adept at honoring Tolstoy's gift with language.
At the danger of sounding fanatical, these stories are perfect. Literally nothing about them could be changed for the better. The volume begins with a fragment, Diary of a Madman, which discusses a religious man's breakdown. Parts of the story are even reminiscent of Sartre's Nausea, a book that came several decades later. There are two stories in the book that involve a realistic depiction of war: A Prisoner of the Caucuses and the novella Hadji Murad. I don't usually enjoy war writing, but Tolstoy has such a love for his characters, such a brutally honest and yet somehow optimistic view of human conflict, that these stories seem less about the actual logistics of war and more about man's contradictory disposition to violence.
The jewel of this book is the title story, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. I've recommended this story (among many others by Tolstoy) to several friends, and I've yet to find anyone who isn't in some way moved by it. The story involves a man who, at the end of his life, begins to question the choices he's made and how he's lived. Again, Tolstoy's compassion paints his characters as flawed but well-intentioned. If you have any doubts about this book, I'd recommend first reading The Death of Ivan Ilyich (even if it's an older translation -- some of these are even available online for free). The translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky is definitely superior, but the story is so strong that its genius is readily seen even in the older, stodgier translations.
Another thing that surprised me was the modern feel of Tolstoy's stories. These stories would be right at home in the 20th century literary canon -- sometimes it's even a shock when a character pulls up in a troika. You find yourself saying, "Oh, right -- this takes place in the 1800s." Because Tolstoy deals in morals and characters' subtle motivations, the writing is truly timeless.
Of course, once you read these stories, I'd recommend moving on to either Anna Karenina or War and Peace. Pevear and Volokhonsky have superb translations of both. And, when you come to the end of War and Peace, you'll have the same epiphany reached by most people who've read it: that this book, forever depicted as a cold, stern, tome, has some of the most beautifully depicted characters, the most involving and page-turning narratives, and the most memorable passages of any book you've ever read.
***One quick note: Many of the 1-star and 2-star reviews for this book claim it's full of errors and typos. However, if you look closely, you'll see that these reviews are actually for other Tolstoy compilations (which are also named for The Death of Ivan Ilyich), not for the P&V translation. For some reason Amazon lumps all these reviews together even though the books are vastly different. It's worth noting that, since Tolstoy's work is in the public domain, there are a lot of very shoddily put-together books of his stories.
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