The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy

So I was rummaging through our hall closet at home and I came across my dad's old literature anthology from college. This presented me with a fascinating moment for self-reflection. I have always taken an instinctively pragmatic approach to evaluating works of fiction- is the work instructive? redemptive? satisfying? and ultimately, is it entertaining?- rarely able to muster up sufficient appreciation for the darkly profound or avant-garde.

I believe this tack stems, at least in part, from a conviction I've intrinsically harbored that a work is not worth reading if I could not in good conscience recommend it to my dad, whose own tastes, indeed, I have often seen mirrored in mine. When I was in the sixth grade I discovered Jules Verne, and I gleefully passed on Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island to him after I devoured them. We marveled at Verne's clairvoyant depictions of scuba diving and delighted in the re-emergence of Captain Nemo together. Excellent books to be sure, but, as I learned later, essentially only science fiction, turn-of-the-century boys' adventure novels, and not necessarily the revered classics that for many years I'd held them to be, on par with Faulkner and Hemingway and Joyce, who figure heavily in the aforementioned textbook, and for whom I retain respective distastes.

But it was within this textbook that I found Tolstoy's delineation of death. Ivan Ilych contracts a fatal illness and declines rapidly. He is, until this point, a self-satisfied middle-aged judge well-situated in life with a wife and children. The realization that he is dying devastates him. The heretofore self-sufficient man cries out to God: "'Why hast Thou done all this?'" He recalls the major events of his life and marvels that it should end in such a manner. "'Maybe I did not life as I ought to have done,'" he muses. "'But how could that be, when I did everything properly?'" In the agony of his final days he is unable to continue to justify a life spent striving for power and reputation and position. "He tried to add, 'Forgive me'...knowing that He whose understanding mattered would understand."

The story ends with an allusion to a verse of Scripture my dad is fond of quoting: "He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. 'Where is it? What death?'" mirroring, of course, Paul's defiant "Death, where is thy sting?" And so, amidst the scathing social commentary, the sardonic irony, and the esoteric symbolism of the untenably profound, I encountered a story of which I could say to my dad, "Here, read this. It's really good."