The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Open the novella and Ivan Ilyich is already dead. His colleagues, reading the notice between cases, feel first the small private arithmetic of whose promotion now follows, then the relief that it is him and not them. This is the world Tolstoy lays bare: a respectable judge who furnished his life as carefully as his drawing room, every choice correct, tasteful, like everyone else's. Then a bruise in his side begins to ache, the ache will not stop, and it teaches him the one thing he arranged his whole existence never to learn. What torments him is not the pain but the lie kept up around his bed, the cheerful pretense that he is only ill and will surely recover. Only Gerasim, the peasant who holds his legs through the night, tells the truth by refusing to pretend. The most ordinary life, Tolstoy shows, can be the most terrible, and the question that breaks open in the dark, whether he lived as he ought to have, is one you will not put down once you have heard it asked.