Wow! Just in case War and Peace and Anna Karenina were not impressive enough, Tolstoy adds "The Death of Ivan Ilyich."
The writing is magnificent, largely because the two translators do such a superb job of rendering the original Russian into English that resonates with a 21st century reader. I have often found that books written in languages others than my own are difficult to read, but his volume reads smoothly and comfortably.
Even though I have read the two aforementioned books by Tolstoy, I was still blown away by his ability to create such a marvelous book. Here, Ivan Ilyich is the lead selection in a collection of other Tolstoy works and I found most of them excellent, providing deep insights into human nature. (The last selection, "Hadji Murat," did not seem as polished or complex as the others selections, and I felt more like I was reading Zane Grey or Louis L'Amour than Tolstoy).
I still cannot get over the deep insights into human nature Tolstoy reveals. His understanding of characters, motives and behaviors exceeds than that of many modern day psychologists. In fact, they could quit reading Freud and Jung and start reading Tolstoy.
My reading goals for the year include reading at least 4 classic of literature, re-reading one or two and reading other classics I have not yet read. I am delighted that I started with this excellent book. It encourages me as a return to reading the classics I have usually found so great in the past. Too long have I known of some classics, like this one, and applied Twain's definition to them: "books everyone talks about but no one reads." This book should change his observation to say: "books everyone reads and then can't stop talking about." ( )

It's nice to be reminded every now and then that moralization can be used to make great literature, since our literature is so dominated by the idea that moralizing is always a flaw. Tolstoy appears to have been a natural at moralizing.

Others will not doubt disagree, but I'm willing to argue that the best stories here are precisely those in which the moral of the story (or morality of the author) comes through most clearly: Ivan Ilyich, of course, but also The Kreutzer Sonata, The Devil, Master and Man, Father Sergius, and After the Ball (Alyosha the Pot is also moralizing, but unbearably dull. Alyosha is just good. It's important to the other stories that we see the evil as well as the simple hearts. The Forged Coupon is moralizing, but is also a Dostoevsky novel shrunk down to 1/10th of its original size and given a happy ending. No thank you).

The bookending tales set in the Russian borderlands, on the other hand, are rollicking, but not particularly inspiring. I was very disappointed with Hadji Murat, in particular, though it made me want to learn more (something, anything) about the region.

Anything else I have to say will be said better by Tolstoy. Well, almost anything. The Kreutzer Sonata features a wonderful proto-Bernhardian rant, in this case against marriage. I'd love to know if Bernhard had read it, what he thought of it, and if anyone has compared his work with Tolstoy's story. ( )

Wow! Just in case War and Peace and Anna Karenina were not impressive enough, Tolstoy adds "The Death of Ivan Ilyich."
The writing is magnificent, largely because the two translators do such a superb job of rendering the original Russian into English that resonates with a 21st century reader. I have often found that books written in languages others than my own are difficult to read, but his volume reads smoothly and comfortably.
Even though I have read the two aforementioned books by Tolstoy, I was still blown away by his ability to create such a marvelous book. Here, Ivan Ilyich is the lead selection in a collection of other Tolstoy works and I found most of them excellent, providing deep insights into human nature. (The last selection, "Hadji Murat," did not seem as polished or complex as the others selections, and I felt more like I was reading Zane Grey or Louis L'Amour than Tolstoy).
I still cannot get over the deep insights into human nature Tolstoy reveals. His understanding of characters, motives and behaviors exceeds than that of many modern day psychologists. In fact, they could quit reading Freud and Jung and start reading Tolstoy.
My reading goals for the year include reading at least 4 classic of literature, re-reading one or two and reading other classics I have not yet read. I am delighted that I started with this excellent book. It encourages me as a return to reading the classics I have usually found so great in the past. Too long have I known of some classics, like this one, and applied Twain's definition to them: "books everyone talks about but no one reads." This book should change his observation to say: "books everyone reads and then can't stop talking about." ( )

I read [The Death of Ivan Ilyich] in a collection that also included the short stories "The Diary of a Madman" and "The Prisoner of the Caucasus."

I did not care for the last; it seemed pointless, as though Tolstoy were retelling an event from his life without any depth or message (as legend has it, this kidnap for ransom did happen to him while he was in the military; apocryphal or not, I don't know). That isn't a crime, but it isn't what I expect in Russian literature. It just didn't have much depth to it.

Both Ivan Ilyich and Diary of a Madman take on that quintessential Russian literary question of the meaning of morality in daily life -- how do we spend our time, what do we owe, how do our sins revisit us later in life? They were both highly engaging novellas, though I have to say that I prefer Dostoyevsky and Turgenev over Tolstoy any day. Tolstoy's short fiction does not provide the same level of detail and rich sense of time and place that others do -- which I realize is strange to say given his master work is War and Peace, one of the most richly detailed novels in the canon! But especially in Ivan Ilyich, I yearned for more.

Brilliant. This novella could have been written yesterday, the themes are so universal, so timeless. And the writing is, as one expects from Tolstoy, positively gorgeous. ( )