Murder, greed, lust, vanity, love-four of Tolstoy's most famous and essential stories in one volume.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
Wonderful:
Tolstoy's brief novella 'Death of Ivan Ilyich' is one of the most compact and brilliant meditations on the meaning of death in literature. Tolstoy's breathtaking naturalism is truly miraculous. Ivan Ilyich is respectful administrator who is dying a painful death from a malignant tumor. Much as Kafka would later do in 'The Metamorphosis,' the dying man's suffering is nothing more than an annoyance for his friends and family. He spirals into a decline of intense suffering as he must stare into the meaning of... more info
Tolstoy Wrote with the Mind of God:
My life would be a poor thing had I never read Tolstoy. Why does Russian translate so very very easily to English? This I found in Russian literature.
Terrible translation:
I am currently reading "The Death of Ivan Ilych" by another translator and it is a remarkable and moving story. However,
the translation that is offered in this edition was so awkward that I found it unreadable. The purchase of this edition was a waste of money and it's now sitting on my bookshelf unread. I recommend the translation by Constance Garnett. I hope that Pevar and Volokhonsky (transaltors of War and Peace and Anna Karenina) will release translations of Tolstoy's shorter works. Their... more info
An Examination of a Soul.:
An excellent, soulful book in the vein of The Trial, and Crime and Punishment. Vladimir Nabokov sums my views of this Novella quite well. In his lectures on Russian Literature Russian born Novelist and critic Vladimir Nabokov argues that, for Tolstoy, a sinful life is (such as Ivan's was), moral death. Therefore death, the return of the soul to God is, for Tolstoy, moral life . To quote Nabokov: "The Tolstoyan formula is: Ivan lived a bad life and since the bad life is nothing but the death of the... more info
