Tolstoy The Death of Ivan Ilyich M..., Leo Tolstoy
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Tolstoy: The Death of Ivan Ilyich & Master and Man

Author: Leo Tolstoy

Narrator: Simon Vance

Unabridged: 4 hr 12 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/01/2005

Categories: Fiction, Classic

Synopsis

In these two famous short novels, Leo Tolstoy takes readers to the brink of despair. At the end of life worldly ambition offers no consolation for the spiritually empty soul. But Tolstoy is the master of themes of redemption. He turns his morbid topic into hope, leading toward spiritual awakening. Tolstoy offers his readers a lifetime of perspective on a most human subject, death. // Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Illyich is a small book with singular depth of insight. The book was published in 1886, breaking a nine-year literary silence after the publication of Anna Karenina. It is considered to be one of the great explorations of death and dying in all of Western Literature. No author in so few words summons so many emotions into the reader's soul. This masterpiece is here paired with another Tolstoy short novels, Master and Man, which too examines the human response to mortality. Together these two stories will ultimately offer encouragement to the spiritually hungry. // Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) is considered by many to be the greatest novelist in Western Literature. Several classic novels belong to his pen including War and Peace and Anna Karenina. In addition he wrote many short novels, including The Death of Ivan Illyich.

Author Bio

Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana in central Russia and educated privately. He studied Oriental languages and law at the University of Kazan, then led a life of dissipation until 1851, when he went to the Caucasus and joined an artillery regiment. He took part in the Crimean War, and on the basis of this experience wrote The Sevastopol Stories, which confirmed his tenuous reputation as a writer.

After a period in St. Petersburg and abroad, where he studied educational methods for use in his school for peasant children at Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy married Sofya Behrs in 1862. The next fifteen years was a period of great happiness: the couple had thirteen children, and Tolstoy managed his estates, continued his educational projects, and wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

A Confession marked a spiritual crisis in Tolstoy's life; he became an extreme moralist, and in a series of pamphlets written after 1880, he expressed his rejection of state and church, indictment of the weaknesses of the flesh, and denunciation of private property. He published his last novel, Resurrection, in 1900.

Tolstoy's teaching earned him many followers at home and abroad, but also much opposition, and in 1901 he was excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church. He died in 1910.

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