It is so trite an observation as to be barely worth making, but the fact is that when you mention Tolstoy in this country, people think "War and Peace", immediately followed by ". . . and it's very long, and in my heart of hearts, I know I will never get round to reading it." Well, it is not the job of this column to make you feel bad about not having read War and Peace, but to offer a useful alternative. For Tolstoy, although associated with the broadest of canvases, was also a supremely competent miniaturist, as you'll be able to see from these two novellas.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich is probably his best-known work after War and Peace and with good reason. It is one of the most lacerating works of literature ever written, a hard, pitiless stare into the abyss, not just of death, but of human nature. It is one of those works that's essential: not because reading it means you can tick off a cultural milestone (much in the way that people imagine that one day, perhaps in retirement, they can tick off War and Peace), but because without it you're missing part of the picture of what it means to be human, and not just in late 19th-century St Petersburg, but now.
It is a superbly precise piece of work, devastating at the level of the sentence, like the bleakest parts of Waugh at his most bitter. The structure is crucial. Ilyich's death is announced at the beginning, and we can see exactly what effect it has on his colleagues. "'I'll probably get Shtabel's or Vinnikov's job now,' thought Fyodor Vasilyevich." And: "'I'll have to request a transfer from Kaluga for my brother-in-law now,' thought Pyotr Ivanovich. 'The wife will be delighted. And now she won't be able to say I've never done anything for my relatives.'" (You need not trouble yourself too much about who Fyodor Vasilyevich and Pyotr Ivanovich are: they are you and I.)
We learn early on that Ivan Ilyich, a judge, had spent the last three days of his life screaming continually; and then Tolstoy takes us into the nightmare, from its very beginning. It is an examination of a life not well lived, and the consequences of it. And as a memento mori it is terribly effective. Death, as Empson said, is the trigger of the literary man's biggest gun, and only the best marksmen should deal with it (I sometimes wonder whether Beckett's Malone Dies was written as a comic counterpoint to this work light relief, as it were).
Ilyich is assumed by most commentators to be the kind of man who deserves to see his life as an increasingly ghastly blunder, but there is scant evidence in the text for this: you might not have wanted to come up against him in court, you feel, but he is no more than averagely inconsiderate or fake. His delusions are no different from yours, mine, or for that matter Fyodor Vasilyevich's. That's what makes the book so astonishing.
The second novella in this edition, The Devil, was written a couple of decades later, and is the story of a much better man, Yevgeny Irtenyev, who, before his marriage, having inherited an estate in the country, finds himself in a position where he needs to have his lust satisfied. ("He was not a libertine, yet neither, as he told himself, was he a monk.") There is a funny side to this, especially from a modern perspective; but a modern perspective won't quite do here. Even so, you might think that the way Tolstoy wipes the smile off our faces is a little extreme; and here he is the full-bearded, stern-looking moralist that he has come to be known as. We are provided with an alternative ending; each is grim.
Oneworld are to be praised for bringing these works back to our attention; their classics series is turning into quite a neat little library (more than 170 titles and counting). The translation here reads fine that of Ilyich in particular the introduction is helpful, and there are 30 pages of biography, notes and suggestions for further reading, which weirdly do not include Nabokov's Lectures on Russian Literature, so I mention them here.
