Lee Klein 's Reviews > The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories

Got this for the title story/novella but came away more impressed/interested by the last long story, "The Forged Coupon." It's a baton passer, like Linklater's "Slacker" at first, before it settles on a handful of characters. Really loved it structurally, how it dramatized a chain of connections and consequences, and didn't mind that it introduced a rural Russian serial killer into the mix -- but since this is late Tolstoy, Stepan the Killer of course finds God, not the church but the true spirit of the Scriptures, astounding everyone how infected (Tolstoy keyword) he was by one of his victims who calmly informed him that he'd be damned by what he was about to do (cut her throat). Of all the Tolstoy stories read so far, it's this one I'll definitely re-read and study.

"After the Ball" is worth a re-read too, the story of how one night changed the narrator's life, when he witnessed a colonel's grace in one setting and soon after his cruelty in another -- it changed his life because he would've married the colonel's daughter if he hadn't witnessed the colonel's brutality and decided he was better off passing on the colonel for a father-in-law.

"The Death of Ivan Ilyich" is notable in part for its structure, starting with the titular character's death and then backtracking to his life, lightly mentioning the knob that bumped his side and caused some difficult to diagnose kidney damage. The story infects you with his suffering, the sense that everyone around you is aware of something they don't directly say, and it ends with a sort of luminous release into joy as he dies.

These final three stories are worth the price of admission -- doubly clear compared to "The Cossacks" thanks to the maturity of the writer and also I think the translator. I sense that Briggs errs on the side of clarity and traditional syntax in a way that makes these stories seem more like fables. Same was true with his translation of W&P.

I don't have much to say about the other stories in the collection because I didn't read them -- I'd start them, find it difficult to engage/latch on, skip to the next one, and then the next one, before I finally got to the one I'd bought the book for ("Ivan Ilyich"). I'll probably re-read the title story in a different translation at some point to compare and try to return to the first few stories at some point when I can read them while walking instead of ready for sleep in bed.