The Death of Ivan Ilych

"It is finished!" said someone near him. He heard these words and repeated them in his soul.

"Death is finished," he said to himself. "It is no more!"

He drew in a breath, stopped in the midst of a sigh, stretched out, and died.

Ivan Ilych had an enviable life: a favoured son, he had just the right education, chose just the right career, made just the right marriage, wore all the right clothes, had all the right friends, and lived in just the right apartment. Everything around him was very comme il faut. How ironic, then, that an accident that occurred while he was hanging just the right curtains would precipitate an early and horrifically painful death.

For a brief novella, Tolstoy packed in all the details of a typically modern middle-class lifestyle; all upper-class pretension and never quite enough money. Even Ivan Ilych's family brought him little joy and the magistrate retreated from domestic life, spending his evenings in games of whist and bridge. Upon his death, his wife's chief concern was how to maximise her widow's pension and described his final agony:

"Oh, it was awful! For the last few hours -- not minutes, mind you, but hours -- he cried out constantly. For days he shouted in anguish. It was intolerable. I do not even understand how I withstood it. You could hear him three doors down. Oh, what I've been through!"

And yet, those last days of Ivan Ilych's life led to a sort of redemption. After suffering through the Kubler-Ross stages of anger, grief , and denial -- after realising that his "life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible" -- he learns that compassion is the only route to happiness and accepts his own death as a final act of compassion towards his suffering family.

There's obviously a moral in this: I am older now than the character of Ivan Ilych and have been known to climb a ladder and fuss over my own curtains -- without realising I was at risk of loosening my kidneys -- but, like the doomed magistrate (and like every soul on Earth) I, too, will die. And, although I have been forewarned, like the doomed magistrate, I, too, will likely not dwell too much upon my own mortality until I'm in the throes of death. This small work is a perfect little gem.