Paper and Porcelain’s Reviews > The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories > Status Update
Paper and Porcelain
is on page 36 of 304
The introduction fixed a mirror against another with a foundation of impartial glass, like a kaleidoscope where the peeker’s eye is voyeuring at itself like a self-summoned, biblically accurate angel’s eery judgment. Death of Ivan Ilyich becomes Death of Leo Tolstoy, dragging two feet out the door and kicking up two warring dust ghosts. Three dozens of pages along, the writer was cemently detached from himself.
— Oct 28, 2026 06:51AM
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Paper and Porcelain
is on page 100 of 304
A non-outshiningly typical reader with nationally median literacy cannot fight the feelings he was coerced to feel by Joyce's montages of city-caressing anecdotes in Dubliners, even while the emotions of Tolstoy have interlaced and mostly substituted the melancholy of his last read. The Death of Ivan Ilych's centerlining chapters pose the same curiosity, whether dying is the end all things or the start of others.
— 47 minutes ago
Paper and Porcelain
is on page 79 of 304
Previously materialized and sensorial - although never once synthetic, Leo (addressed by his first given name due to matured intimacy) has moved to the physicality of faces; not the mere simplicity of smiles and frowns, but them having their funeral, buried in palms and plain-colored hankerchiefs, the way mustaches and crow’s feet dancing grievously at the bass vibrations of the human owners’ tragic tunes.
— 12 hours, 16 min ago
Paper and Porcelain
is on page 59 of 304
Cushioning the polar-cold-pillow descriptiveness of Tolstoy’s emphasis on objects that define lives, he also makes the time and blood-oath contract of a tragic bond for every fallen soldier he has diven into the mundane and muddy traumatized army routine of. When a troop, a comrade, an old lover of unadulterated adult innocence - or what was left - falters at a bullet and its ricocheting sadness, the losses kill.
— Oct 29, 2026 11:07PM
Paper and Porcelain
is on page 20 of 304
The life of Tolstoy in the prefacing timeline colors The Raid - a retelling of his manipulated military memories - in the waking tones of nihilistic grays, like the storm before the calm, the dying flames of excitement flashing out the last drop of life’s lighter fluid.
— Oct 27, 2026 06:23AM
Paper and Porcelain
is starting
The deepest soul-digging a chronology and introduction have succeeded at doing so far.
— Oct 26, 2026 05:07AM
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Oct 28, 2026 06:57AM
Leo Tolstoy therefore was a person whose pen drew a funeral’s wake, only there to recount the coffin descending into the house of earthworms, nature and life’s decomposer. The scenes feel old, deliberately ancient, but recently deserted: liminal spaces. The forest - now and then a battlefield - has mudded footsteps where the puddles in them still ripple. The bonfire is its internalized nostalgia, charred logs and red heated cracks that look like rushing arteries. Lives who had interacted with and fostered the objects were just here, however also gone for good. The opening act is cold, material, an obligatory two-handed grip on metallic guardrails in winter, slipping with such agression that adrenaline pulls your tongue out and touches the stainless pole with it only to not slip, in the name of survival.
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