Customer Reviews

The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Master and Man

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These are two of Tolstoy's best short novels, wonderfully translated, with an insightful introduction and biographical note. Both stories are masterpieces of craft -- fun to read, but with a strong moral center -- the way all good fiction should be. I had stayed away from Tolstoy for a long time, unwilling to tackle War & Peace or Anna Karenina, but these two short novels show his mastery of story and psychological insight, so this is a great place to start. I know I'll be reading more Tolstoy after this.

In the end as death approaches Ivan Ilyich gives himself credit for living a right life. That is, he considers that he has lived a life which fulfills the expectations that he has had for himself. He has after all become a successful and even influential magistrate in the judicial council. Essentially, he considers himself an ethical man. The question which which torments him, as he approaches the end of his life, is whether he led the right life. Did he lead a life that was the best possible one for him? It's one thing to become educated, marry, have children, work hard and die. It's quite another to choose a life which is fulfilling. "There is no explanation. Suffering, death ... for what?" he asks. He becomes consumed with the question as to what is the point of his life? And he has no satisfying answers to this question. His ultimate judgment is upon himself and yet the verdict lacks clarity. Ultimately, to his colleagues the greatest importance is who will take his place upon the judicial council after he is gone. The irony is rich in this story by Tolstoy who has a gift for defning the great questions of life (How Much Land Does a Man Need?) You can never do wrong by reading Tolstoy: this is a very fine and accessible piece of writing beautiflly and lyrically translated by Ann Pasternak Slater.

The former was thoroughly engrossing but I don't think I gave the latter adequate attention with all that has been going on and will have to go back to it again at some point. It was my first Tolstoy, he has been on my list forever but his longer works are daunting :-) I have always wanted to read Anna Karenina.

This review is for the Modern Library release of Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" and "Master and Man."

Death is obviously something that people don't want to talk about, or even think about. We're always afraid of dying, unless you're someone who doesn'y really give a crap about yourself or the world. But what does this fear mean? Can there be a good side to death? What will happen to those around us once we've passed? These are just some of the questions that that we ask ourselves once we delve into these two short stories. In "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," a disease is killing a man of success, while in "Master and Man," a peasant and his master are trapped in the middle of a heavy snowstorm. While both stories are different, both deal with death and what happens (and what we think) when we're about to pass away. I won't give much on what happens (you might know what happens in "Ilyich" just by the title, but there's actually more to it in the story), but these short stories have to be some of the finest from Tolstoy. I don't think I've ever read such powerful tales about death before. It really shows you how marvelous this author really is.

A little reminder, though: "Ilyich" is a bit depressing, so don't read it until you have the heart to.

I was not aware that Random House still even issued editions of its Modern Library series until my wife came home with, a few weeks back, an edition of The Death Of Ivan Ilyich & Master And Man, by Leo Tolstoy. Now, I was hesitant to read the book because I've always thought the great Russian prose masters- Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, were vastly overrated. As mixed as my feelings were about Charles Dickens' and his overly long epics are, my feeling that the Russians were worse has not been greatly argued against. Pushkin's poetry always appealed more to me than his prose. Turgenev is a total blank, although I did read two or three of his most famous works, Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov was excruciating, and his Notes From The Underground dull and clichéd, so I have been loath to read Crime And Punishment since I know the basic tale, and figure why torture myself with the excess verbiage? As for Tolstoy? I read War And Peace and only remember the two nouns took place. Anna Karenina is Tolstoy's Crime And Punishment to me. In fact, the only Russian prosist I can stand (and I've not read the prose of Vladimir Nabokov nor Boris Paternak) is Nikolai Gogol. He is the only one with a dram of humor, and a bent to be concise. As a whole I vastly prefer Russian poetry to its prose- give me Marina Ttsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, and Osip Mandelstam any day. As a bit of synchronicity, this translation is by Ann Pasternak Slater, the niece of Boris Pasternak.... the ideas explored in the tale are far more interesting than the prose used to convey the points. In a sense, Ivan Ilyich is a person who is wholly anonymous, save that we have dropped in on his life. He is not rich nor handsome nor an intellectual nor artist. Nor is he a particularly nice nor engaging person, and his death seems rather random- as in life. His suffering is needless, for while not a great man, father, nor husband, he is certainly no villain- merely a vain, aimless, materialist with a slavish conformist devotion to contemporary propriety. In fact, his ultimate end is wholly accidental. Yet, this calls for a tale that focuses in on these aspects. By the time the reader gets to this end few are engaged by the plight, for the rest of Ivan's life is, well, dull. He does make observations on how the doctors play God with his life as he has with those of criminals brought before him when he was a judge, and his disaffection for life and family as his pain increases, are both possible ins to a deeper tale, but they are barely grazed. Ivan's death scream has been taken to be greatly symbolic, and it is- but it is also a nice feint away from deeper issues that could be explored. These are things which should have been substituted for some of the dull and rote aspects of Ivan's earlier life that Tolstoy lingers too long on. In short, Tolstoy is a writer of surfaces, and in describing those surfaces he has moments of greatness, but his understanding of the human condition is apple skin deep.

Too many details are thrust up that, like the overuse of certain words detailed above, merely state the same rather manifest aspects of his character. Why Tolstoy thought that hammering points over and over was effective I can only feel was perhaps because many novels in Europe in that day were serialized for the masses, and thus, to reach a wider, less educated, audience he felt he needed to grind points to pabulum. Yet, this gratuity, which may have been needed to establish his name, now undermines it.

Another thing that stands out about this tale is how utterly nihilistic and existential it is, especially since Tolstoy, and this tale in particular, are often portrayed as being suffused with the glory of Christianity. Ivan's life, despite his steady social rise, is never enough. There is no step outside, spurred by religion or intellect, until the last moments of pain induce the requisite human quest for relief. Tolstoy wisely makes this not the last moment of Ivan's life, therefore lending the end of the tale an exhalation, not just a climax. Critics have often carped that the title is the tale's outline, but that's unfair. However, there was a lot more he could have done with it.

The other story, Master And Man, is shorter- 47 pages- but even less engaging, about the death of a wealthy businessman- Vassily Andreyich- lost in a blizzard, whose corpse ends up saving the life of his serf, Nikita, whom he's cheated most of his life. The duo end up in their predicament because Vassily pushes them on at night, in hopes of greater profit. It's not a particularly deep tale, although, again, it probably was written with a good sense of the times, and Tolstoy's displaying an egalitarian conscience was a good move to help endear him further to the mass public. This tale has an O. Henry-The Gift Of The Magi-type twist, in its end, but overall was even less compelling than The Death Of Ivan Ilyich. In fact, while reading it I had the old poem Snow-Bound, by John Greenleaf Whittier, in mind, and that poem's descriptions seemed far more powerful, albeit also more pleasant.

Both of these Tolstoy tales put me in mind of a far superior short story by Daphne DuMaurier, The Apple Tree, in which the death of the lead character, in a snowstorm, is far more existential than Vassily's, as well as being far more dramatically satisfying than Ivan's. Overall, Tolstoy makes his points- they just are not particularly new nor cogently presented; which seems to be all that Tolstoy's writing was, and hoped to be.