Who’s afraid of realism? ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ by Leo Tolstoy

In the late 1870s, shortly after the publication of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy experienced what might be described today as a midlife crisis. In his short autobiographical book A Confession, finished in 1880, he questioned what meaning there is in life that is not annihilated by the inevitability of death. His answer was to live according to God’s law, a realisation that shaped that rest of his life and writing, and guides the story of his late masterpiece, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886).

To discuss The Death of Ivan Ilyich and its place both in Tolstoy’s work and the development of realism, James is joined by the novelist Elif Batuman. They consider the way Tolstoy takes up Flaubert’s contempt for bourgeois life and strips it down to a spare fable of delusion and awakening, and why the unique authority of his style has proved so resistant to the critiques of realism in the 20th century.

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Read more in the LRB:

Michael Wood on War and Peace: https://lrb.me/realismep501

James Meek on the death of Tolstoy: https://lrb.me/realismep502

John Bayley on Tolstoy's diaries: https://lrb.me/realismep503