The life of Ivan Ilyich

Review of Leo Tolstoy’s ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’

This is a story of the worst case scenario for a comfortable man. A life completely planned, profitable, polite, and professional. A demise completely unforeseeable, unexplainable, and untreatable.

Perhaps, even more tragic, is how Ivan’s transformative moments of a spiritual turning point and final death, seem to have no ripple of positive influence on the vain society he vanished from. 

The impression is that Ivan, and perhaps Tolstoy also, were not completely convinced by the saving powers of acts of grace and compassion. 

I leave this book with a dissatisfaction and an inkling that Tolstoy continued to long for a more complete hope in something that could and would withstand not just death, but life and the more painful final stages of life. 

Ivan lived and died for not much so that the rest of us might learn to live and die for a bit more.