Audiobook · read by volunteers
Death of Ivan Ilyitch
Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910)
Read by Laurie Anne Walden · 12 chapters · 2 h 32
About the book
Ivan Ilyitch has done everything right. He is a respected judge, a man of correct habits, who has climbed the career ladder, married suitably, and furnished his home with taste. Then, after a small accident while hanging curtains, a nagging pain begins that no doctor seems able to explain or cure.
As his illness advances, Ivan finds that his friends and family are more concerned with their own routines than with his suffering. Left alone with his fear, he begins to ask a question he has avoided all his life: what if the life he thought so proper was a mistake?
Tolstoy’s short novel is a masterpiece of economy, unsparing and surprisingly tender. It begins with the news of Ivan’s death and then goes back to examine how he lived, and then how he faced the end. In twelve brief chapters, lasting about two and a half hours, this recording gives a story that has moved readers for well over a century. It is a hard but deeply humane listen.
Introduction
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) wrote The Death of Ivan Ilyitch in 1886, after the spiritual crisis that changed his life and writing in the late 1870s. Having completed War and Peace and Anna Karenina, he turned away from large social canvases to questions of faith, morality and mortality, and the novella is one of the finest results.
The story is deliberately plain. Its hero is not a great man or a villain, just a successful official of the kind found everywhere in Russia’s legal system. That ordinariness is the point: Tolstoy wants the reader to recognise themselves. The narrative method, which opens with the funeral and then goes back, was influential, and the book is often cited as a landmark in the literary treatment of illness and dying. Writers and doctors alike have returned to it ever since.
This recording uses the English translation by Constance Garnett, who translated a great deal of Russian literature into English in the early twentieth century and made it accessible to many readers, though her style has also been criticised by later translators. The book is divided into twelve short chapters and runs for about two and a half hours, read by a LibriVox volunteer.
It is a short work, suitable for a single sitting or two, and it repays attention. Listeners new to Tolstoy will find a good place to start, and those who know the longer novels will find a compact, concentrated example of what he could do. Few books about death are so direct.
Public domain
Leo Tolstoy died in 1910: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text