Book Report: The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

The Death of Ivan Ilyich: Torgo approves

I'm a sucker for novellas. I remember reading short novels in junior high and high school, things like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, C.S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet, and Cannery Row, not thinking of them as "Literature."

Then I read Kate Chopin's The Awakening in an English class and realized that short novels could be regarded as respectable, serious works. Then came many others, like Of Mice and Men.

I don't know what bias I believed existed towards novellas. Maybe it's because so many classics felt so interminably long. Plus, I was maybe 15. I didn't know a whole lot.

Anyway, back to Tolstoy. I've mentioned before how much I enjoy Russian authors. Tolstoy had been a wall to me, though. I'd tried War and Peace a couple of times, never getting out of the first chapter. M-N read and liked Anna Karenina, but I could never figure out how to pronounce the title, so, therefore, I didn't read it.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a novella. I skipped Ronald Blythe's introduction because it was about half as long as Tolstoy's book and I knew it could only make me not want to read the book. (That was a good call: I began reading it after finishing the book and Blythe makes a 100-page story sound like War and Peace.)

This is a good book. The entire book is vastly simpler than the first two pages of War and Peace. It's not even a Grapes of Wrath to Cannery Row analogy. It's more like a Grapes of Wrath to the back of a box of Honey Nut Cheerios comparison.

I don't want to Blythe the story by jabbering on, so let me just say I recommend it. And it takes about 3 train trips, tops, to finish.