Combining detailed physical description with perceptive psychological insight, Leo Tolstoy realistically sweeps aside the sham of surface appearances to lay bare man's intimates gestures, acts, and thoughts.

Ivan Ilych, a peaceful public official in the Russian provinces, has his life permanently changed by a serious illness which no doctor can accurately diagnose. Hailed as one of the world's supreme masterpieces on the subject of death and dying, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the story of a worldly careerist, a high court judge who has never given the inevitability of his death so much as a passing thought. But one day death announces itself to him, and...