Customer Reviews: Read 69 more reviews...
 Wonderful August 25, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Tolstoy's brief novella 'Death of Ivan Ilyich' is one of the most compact and brilliant meditations on the meaning of death in literature. Tolstoy's breathtaking naturalism is truly miraculous. Ivan Ilyich is respectful administrator who is dying a painful death from a malignant tumor. Much as Kafka would later do in 'The Metamorphosis,' the dying man's suffering is nothing more than an annoyance for his friends and family. He spirals into a decline of intense suffering as he must stare into the meaning of his life and his inevitable end.
Master and Man is also a wonderful novella, filled with stark, realistic depictions of the Russian peasantry, as a greedy landowner drags his obedient servant on a journey into a night blizzard to claim more property. As the pair become increasingly lost, they too must grapple with the possibility of their mortality.
Pasternak has provided competent, though clunky translations of Tolstoy's original Russian.
Tolstoy Wrote with the Mind of God June 24, 2008
My life would be a poor thing had I never read Tolstoy. Why does Russian translate so very very easily to English? This I found in Russian literature.
 Terrible translation June 13, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
I am currently reading "The Death of Ivan Ilych" by another translator and it is a remarkable and moving story. However,
the translation that is offered in this edition was so awkward that I found it unreadable. The purchase of this edition was a waste of money and it's now sitting on my bookshelf unread. I recommend the translation by Constance Garnett. I hope that Pevar and Volokhonsky (transaltors of War and Peace and Anna Karenina) will release translations of Tolstoy's shorter works. Their translations are my favorites.
 An Examination of a Soul. April 19, 2008
An excellent, soulful book in the vein of The Trial, and Crime and Punishment. Vladimir Nabokov sums my views of this Novella quite well.
In his lectures on Russian Literature Russian born Novelist and critic Vladimir Nabokov argues that, for Tolstoy, a sinful life is (such as Ivan's was), moral death. Therefore death, the return of the soul to God is, for Tolstoy, moral life . To quote Nabokov: "The Tolstoyan formula is: Ivan lived a bad life and since the bad life is nothing but the death of the soul, then Ivan lived a living death; and since beyond death is God's living light, then Ivan died into a new life- Life with a capital L."(Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich: Lectures On Russain Literature pg.237: Harcourt Edition)
Powerful and deep January 26, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Tolstoy had a great understanding of the human condition, as it's shown in this complex and thought-provoking novella about the mortality of man. It's the kind of book that, thanks to it's many layers, has to be read over and over. It's amazing how Tolstoy was able to build such an powerful story in only 100 pages, I've seen books with more than 400 pages that didn't have half of the depth he managed to put into this one.
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