The Death of Ivan Ilyich

A novella published in 1886, after Tolstoy's religious crisis, about a man who discovers too late that he has not truly lived. It opens with Ivan Ilyich already dead, his colleagues thinking first of the promotions his death will bring. The story then goes back over his life, which Tolstoy describes as most simple and ordinary and therefore most terrible: a career as a judge built on propriety and pleasant appearances, a cold marriage, a fashionably furnished home. While hanging curtains he knocks his side, and an illness sets in that no doctor can name or cure. As he declines, he is tormented less by pain than by the lie that he is only ill, not dying, and by the realisation that the textbook syllogism about Caius being mortal applies to him. Only the young peasant servant Gerasim, who nurses him simply and honestly, gives him comfort. Heidegger cited the story in Being and Time as a portrayal of how everyday life evades death.

In under a hundred pages it asks what makes a life well lived, and confronts readers with their own mortality more directly than most philosophy can.