The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories: Family Happiness/the Kreutzer Sonata/Master and Man

Rating:
Summary: Haunting
Review: Prior to writing "The Death of Ivan Illych," Tolstoy had undergone a nearly overwhelming existential crisis, and here he lays it out with the black humor of a bemused undertaker. The result is an uncomfortably insightful work, both bleak and comical.

Rating:
Summary: Haunting
Review: Prior to writing "The Death of Ivan Illych," Tolstoy had undergone a nearly overwhelming existential crisis, and here he lays it out with the black humor of a bemused undertaker. The result is an uncomfortably insightful work, both bleak and comical.

Rating:
Summary: A small masterpiece and three more Tolstoy stories
Review: The four stories of this volume are ' The Death of Ivan Ilyich', The Kreutzer Sonata', Family Happiness','Master and Man'.
In the insightful afterword David Magarshack writes ."Poet,Calvinist, fanatic, aristocrat"- in these four words Turgenev summed up Tolstoy at the age of twenty-nine,and nothing in Tolstoy's subsequent life contradicts this shrewd characterisation. Indeed the four stories of this volume- 'Family Happiness' " The Death of Ivan Ilyich' 'The Kreutzer Sonata' and 'Master and Man' written in 1859, 1886, 1889, and 1895 respectively -quite clearly reveal these four fundamental traits of Tolstoy's character as well as the underlying motif of his writings during the first great creative period of his life, culminating in 'Anna Karenina', and the motifs of his later period when the' Calvinist and fantic' all but submerged the ' poet and the aristocrat'. The chief theme of his life work is summed up in the sentence that occurs several times in ' Family Happiness': "The only certain happiness in life is to live for others."
This theme certainly is at the center of Ivan Ilyich who at the end of his life comes to the great understanding that in living for himself alone , not even for his family , his life has been meaningless.
The reader of these stories will see how one of the world's great masters confronts fundamental questions of human existence.