The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Unabridged) [Audio Download]

A very good collection of short stories, worthy as an introduction to Tolstoy for those who aren't ready to tackle War and Peace or Anna Karenina. They have much to say about the human condition, the nature of love and desire, marriage, family relationships and death, and as such have relevance for readers in many countries and cultures.

Family Happiness is probably the least good of the quartet, lacking the passion and drama of the other three stories. It is a study of the changing nature of love in the marriage between a young girl and an older man (though he is only in his late 30s!).

The Death of Ivan Ilyich is one I have just read separately, so I did not re-read it in this collection. For the sake of completeness here though: this concerns the thoughts and feelings of a man towards his family and those around him as he gets progressively more ill and is then dying from a wasting disease that sounds like cancer. The opening chapters are quite light-hearted with some ruefully amusing reflections on marriage and attitudes towards ones career, but then the mood becomes much darker and he ends being cynical about his family, seeing them as wishing his death to come sooner so they can be free of the burden of caring for him.

The Kreutzer Sonata is a very powerful story about the breakdown of a marriage, with some very advanced for the time (1889) views on how marriages evolve and how couples can grow to take each other for granted and eventually become actively hostile without wanting to grow apart. Tolstoy's postscript, published following the banning of the story in Russia and elsewhere, and concerning the moral superiority of celibacy, somewhat detracts from the dramatic impact of the ending, though.

The Devil is a powerful tale about how a nobleman's passion for the object of a former fling with a peasant wife destroys his seemingly happy marriage through obsession. There are two endings, the published one where he kills himself and the alternative one where he kills the object of his obsession.

An excellent collection, some of the best Russian literature of its type.

I studied Tolstloy's short story The Death of Ivan Illyich for an Access course in Education in 2006, before going on to study History at university. I found it to be an amazing short story too study and analysis. It has the equal realism in it that his much longer novels War and Peace and others had in them. The story questions our mortality and our place in the scheme of things through the dying of Ivan Illyich. Philosophical questions that were too dominate the latter part of Leo Tolstloy's life until his death in 1910.

I strongly recommend people read this because they will get lot out of it. I

I tried a few years ago to read War and Peace but never got beyond the first hundred pages. There was enough there though to interest me trying Tolstoy again another day and I saw this collection of short stories an an opportunity to try this great writer once more. I thoroughly enjoyed these stories; each was slow to start but built up increasing momentum. "The death of Ivan Ilych" is in my opinion the best of the bunch; I have never read anything that deals so insightfully with the loneliness of dying as this story does, it is simply wonderful.