The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories

by Leo Tolstoy, Nicolas Pasternak Slater (Translator)

Paperback

Published January 8, 2015

About the author

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Николаевич Толстой; most appropriately used Liev Tolstoy; commonly Leo Tolstoy in Anglophone countries) was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist fiction. Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world's greatest novelists. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker and social reformer.

His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Reviews

[Charlie Dyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of great stories, particularly liked master and workman and how much land does a man need?

You can see how heavily he was influenced by Christianity and it honestly gives me a hopeful outlook on life and death. Also cool to see how it influenced the revolution

[Roshanak Forouzesh · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5

[Niels · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a painfully timeless story (5*).

[Zgurl · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm trying to read more classics. This was kind of interesting.

[Jonathon Kopp · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Two Old Men: 72/100
How Much Land Does a Man Need?: 68/100
The Forged Coupon: 84/100
Master and Workman: 79/100
Aloysha Pot: 80/100
The Death of Ivan Ilyich: 87/100