smark1342 's review for:

The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy

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My first Tolstoy and the first russian masters thing I've read in a long long time (maybe excepting a tuegenev short story). There's so much in the 60 pages of the book its astounding. The translators note about Tolstoy stripping away all the excess from the work is particularly fascinating when you realize how spare the translation actually is--it seemed to me like an unqualified success although I know some people don't care for the duo. Tolstoy basing Ivan on a guy he met once and hated is funny because he seems to have both a lot of contempt and a very woowoo Christian sense of forgiveness and ultimate non- judgement for all these characters even if you get the sense he's mocking them and their values systems. Quite a tension to get over on the page. There's so much specificty in there and yet you get the sense you know exactly what and who he's talking about the whole time and that maybe he (and the reader) aren't entirely exempt from the maladies he's diagnosing throughout. I still have never understood or been compelled by the concept of deathbed visions or conversions but I guess I've never had one. The spell was cast while I was reading it but now no more. Even if he was trying to strip away all the "artistic pretensions and superfluous detail" I think some of that is at the very core of any piece of storytelling. You can't get rid of it, you can just be better or worse about how you use it.