A successful judge falls ill and dies, and in dying realizes he has never really lived. Tolstoy wrote this during his religious crisis, after rejecting the novels that made him famous, and it is a hundred pages of concentrated terror and illumination. The description of Ivan's dying is clinically exact: the pain, the isolation, the lies everyone tells him. The final three days are harrowing. Then, suddenly, the light. Tolstoy was searching for what mattered, and in this novella he found it. The story strips away everything comfortable. What remains is the question of how to live before you die.