# The Death of Ivan Ilyich

- Author: Leo Tolstoy
- Translator: Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
- Original title (Russian): Смерть Ивана Ильича
- First published: 1886
- Publisher: Vintage Classics
- This edition: 2012
- ISBN: 9780307951335
- Shelf: Tonight's Classic (one a night, from this pool); World Classics

## Card

A respectable judge falls ill after a small household accident and begins to question the life he has lived.  
Brief and plain-spoken, it watches the comforts of an ordinary, proper career fall away one by one.  
For a night of taking stock.  

## About this book

Ivan Ilyich has done everything correctly: a good post in the courts, a suitable marriage, a well-furnished apartment. A small fall while hanging curtains leads to a pain that doctors cannot explain, and his colleagues and family begin to treat him as an inconvenience. Only a young servant, Gerasim, offers him simple, unembarrassed kindness. The novella looks closely at fear, pretense and the question of what a life is for.

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