The Death of Ivan Ilyich (novella)

by Leo Tolstoy

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Status: Finished on 01/10/2022

Rating: 4/5

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Reaction

• I listened to this audiobook while bicycling around Key West.
• The entire audiobook was only 2 hours long, so I might listen to it again.
• This is the first piece of Russian literature that I have ever finished.
  • Previously tried The Master and the Margarita and The Idiot
  • The audiobook might have made it easier.
  • I was easily engaged from the beginning and never considered dropping it.
• The book is highly-analytical and explicit. It tells you exactly what’s happening in Ivan’s minds.
  • The book describes feelings, thoughts and reasoning - as opposed to events and behavior.
  • When I have tried to do memoir exercises, I have felt like it comes out like this.
    • I’ve always thought that was bad, and violated the “show, don’t tell” guidance
    • However, it seemed to be great for this book. So maybe writing this way is okay?
  • Is this a distinctive feature of Russian literature?
• I predict that, when I die, my own thought processes will be very similar to Ivan Ilyich. This is what made the book so mesmerizing.
• I thought I understood the book, but I did miss some things - sometimes literally due to street noise.
  • I interpreted the book as literally about the processing of death, with a focus on:
    • Denial;
    • The pull of nihilism; and
    • The separation between the dying and non-dying.
  • According to Wikipedia, the philosopher Merold Westphal (who?) says the book is about:
    • the tyranny of bourgeois niceties;
    • the terrible weak spots of the human heart;
    • the primacy and elision of death; and
    • the consequences of living without meaning.
  • This makes me feel like I must have missed stuff, as I didn’t really pick-up on the “weak spots of the human heart” idea. I guess that’s referring to the failure of Ivan’s loved one’s to empathize with his condition.
• It’s so short, that I hope to reread soon, but I will probably wait until it settles some.

Comparison to Fault is in Our Stars and The Deep Places

This book had some similar themes with two books I have read in the previous month:

• The Fault in Our Stars
• The Deep Places

All three books deal with the separation between the sick and the healthy. The Fault in Our Stars seems particularly inspired by The Death of Ivan Ilyich, but Googling, I didn’t see much discussion of this connection. Maybe The Death of Ivan Ilyich is seen as so fundamental to death literature, that is just assumed to have influenced everything.

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