The Death of Ivan Ilyich (2006)

By Leo Tolstoy
Well, I must say I do feel proud of myself having read some Tolstoy, even if it was only a little shortie like this one. Perhaps one day I will manage to read War and Peace – not this Readathon, though. Interesting that the publishers (Penguin) felt the need to have a testimonial on the front cover from Zadie Smith (‘Every time I read it, I find my world put under an intense, unforgiving microscope’). Not to belittle Smith, but it does seem a bit like getting Michael Leunig to talk up Rembrandt’s paintings, in hopes of making them seem hip and modern, when their work is a different kettle of fish altogether.

Spoiler alert: Don’t read on if you don’t want to know what happens. Still here? Sure you want to know? Okay: Ivan Ilyich dies. There, I’ve said it. I know this seems kind of obvious, given the title of this book, but I confess it came as a bit of a surprise.

Now, Tolstoy writes with an unerring sense of the satirical (in people’s actions, thoughts, motivations and so on), which kind of tricked me into thinking this book might be amusing, and that maybe Ivan Ilyich managed to cheat death somehow, or at least died with a fair amount of panache – perhaps also I was still in the grip of The Master and Margarita. Also I thought maybe his wife had some kind of secret plot to kill him going on, when in fact Ivan Ilyich just becomes ill and dies, fairly straightforwardly, but not pleasantly. (This red herring I gleaned from the blurb on the back cover, which I accuse of being slightly misleading).

No, this book details a man’s realisation that his death in unescapable, not just something that happens to other people, and in this realisation begins to question whether anything about his life was at all worthwhile. At the end of this book I had a slow, dim, small sort of epiphany. I’d always heard that Russian writers were pretty heavy going, but assumed it was something to do with the writing style and a cast of thousands with complicated Russian names. But it is the unflinching grimness of the subject matter, not the writing or the style, that is the source of the heaviness. The book was in fact exceptionally easy to read. It is, as Zadie Smith implies, pretty intense. It’s very good. But don’t read it at two o’clock in the morning, whatever you do.

Rating: 8 out of 10