Paper and Porcelain’s Reviews > The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories > Status Update

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.

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.

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.

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.

The deepest soul-digging a chronology and introduction have succeeded at doing so far.