GajimaruClassics.
The Death of Ivan IlyichOn the coverOver Eternal Peace, Isaac Levitan, 1894
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
A successful, conventional judge who has lived exactly as he was supposed to falls ill, and in facing his own dying is forced to ask whether his whole comfortable life was a lie. Tolstoy’s short, piercing masterpiece on mortality.
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Perhaps the greatest short work ever written about death and how to live, quiet, terrifying, and finally luminous. Read in an evening, it can genuinely change how you see your days.
SettingImperial Russia, 1880s
The respectable professional world of late-nineteenth-century imperial Russia, where a man might climb the ladder of career, property, and propriety without once asking what it was all for.