Leo Tolstoy: The Death of Ivan Ilych / The Confession

The Death of Ivan Ilych skillfully captures the rage and helplessness of a man confronted with the truth of his own mortality.

As the reality of his terminal illness sinks into him, his pangs of irrational hope in the face of death are heart-rending, and his perception that much of his adult life has been wasted chasing after status gives him a sense of nobility at the very moment when his dignity has been most taken from him. In accompanying Ivan Ilych to the very edge of the abyss, we look into our own lives, and our future, and see what awaits us there.

Confession is Leo Tolstoy's account of his own midlife spiritual crisis. In 1879, having written War and Peace and Anna Karenina, the 51 year-old Tolstoy began to perceive that his life until that time, including the imperfect satisfactions he derived from his aesthetic and literary triumphs, had been ultimately meaningless.

“Written more than a century ago, Tolstoy's work still retains the power of a contemporary novel.”

--Publishers Weekly

LEO TOLSTOY (1828-1910) a giant of world literature was the author of numerous masterworks, including War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Death of Ivan Ilych, and The Kingdom of God is Within You.