The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
A judge on his deathbed discovers that his proper, successful life was empty, in Tolstoy's great novella.
A Penguin Classics collection of Leo Tolstoy’s shorter fiction, led by The Death of Ivan Ilyich. In that novella a successful judge, facing a painful death, realises that the respectable life he built was hollow. The volume gathers other stories from across Tolstoy’s career, in translations by Anthony Briggs, David McDuff and Ronald Wilks.
Recommended by 1 Person
Oliver James
It describes how easy it is to go through life, in the same way as Eliot describes in ‘Prufrock’, trying to please everyone and to be a good person, to conform, without really having any authentic intimacy with anyone. And the great importance really of waking up and smelling the coffee and seeing that the superficial things in life really are superficial and that what actually matters is how you conduct yourself in your relationships with your intimates.
Interview · July 2010
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