The Death of Ivan Ilyich / Master and Man by Leo Tolstoy

JUST ADDED: In addition to the Death of Ivan Ilyich, we will be reading
Master and Man, also by Tolstoy. This is also another very short story. The theme is also mortality, and the two stories will complement each other nicely. If you have only read Ivan Ilyich, that is fine.

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, was foremost among the great Russian novelists of the nineteenth century, and is widely considered one of the greatest writers of prose fiction in world history.

In his perceptive and moving depiction of Ivan Ilych, a worldly careerist facing his own mortality in the midst of a self-absorbed family and indifferent colleagues, Tolstoy provides one of literature’s greatest and most memorable reflections on the meaning of the good life and on life as preparation for death.

This edition features the classic Oxford translation of Aylmer and Louise Maude, of whom Tolstoy himself said, “Better translators, both for knowledge of the two languages and for penetration into the very meaning of the matter translated, could not be invented.”