The Death of Ivan Ilyich

The indignant and frightened thoughts of a good man who is, suddenly and inexplicably, dying: this is the crux of The Death of Ivan Ilyich, composed by Leo Tolstoy in the period just following his vehement conversion to a more virulent form of Christianity. A sharp criticism of the mediocre – and in Tolstoy’s view, meaningless – life being played out by an emerging middle class in Russia, Ivan Ilyich was written as a kind of warning against complacency masked as contentedness and a call for his readers to contemplate the possible meaninglessness of their own lives.

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