In his "Abridged Classics: Brief Summaries of Books You Were Supposed to Read but Probably Didn't", John Atkinson summaries Leo Tolstoy's more than a thousand-pages long novel "War and Peace" very succinctly: "Everyone is sad. It snows."
He never attempted to summarise Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilych", perhaps because, at just over fifty pages, it's already short enough, or because its themes of death and the search for the meaning of life are a little more difficult to put into five words.
Actor and director Alexander Kaidanovsky made the only Russian movie adaptation, which includes Tolstoy's living voice reading his story "Wolf".
But back to "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" which brings to our attention the unpleasant fact that we all have to die, and that we might have to suffer a whole lot first. Our medicines might be better than those of Ivan's doctors, but we haven't got any closer to escaping mortality, and many people still die only after a long and painful period of disease.
Perhaps Ivan Ilych will also get you thinking about what mortality means for you. Like Ivan, you might start wondering how you should live your life, and how you can find meaning in it - click here. It all ends soon enough some fifty pages later: "He drew in a deep breath, broke off in the middle of it, stretched out his limbs, and died."
