Ivan Ilyich has always led a proper life. Only as he dies does he begin to ask what that meant. The title story of this collection follows Ivan Ilyich, a successful official battling a mysterious illness. His family visit his bedside, their faces masks of concern. His colleagues pay their respects but think only of the advantages created by his death. As Ivan’s suffering deepens, the respectable life he has built begins to seem hollow, and the truth of death becomes impossible to avoid. It is one of the masterpieces of Tolstoy’s late fiction. The 10 other stories in this collection include ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’, ‘The Devil’ and ‘Hadji Murat’, and range across military captivity, jealousy, spiritual crisis, peasant life and moral awakening. These are stories written with the force of final questions. Tolstoy looks at illness, jealousy, violence and faith not as abstractions, but as pressures that reveal what his characters have built their lives upon. 'As good as anything Tolstoy ever wrote... Self-assured, vital, unforgettable' Guardian
