The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

Combining detailed physical description with perceptive psychological insight, Leo Tolstoy realistically sweeps aside the sham of surface appearances to lay bare man's intimate gestures, acts and thoughts. In The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy follows a successful, unremarkable government official through his final illness, as the comfortable routines and social ambitions that once defined his life fall away and force him to confront the question he spent a lifetime avoiding: has he actually lived?

Widely regarded as one of the greatest novellas ever written, the book dissects the drives, emotions and quiet self-deceptions of an ordinary man searching, too late, for self-knowledge. Chekhov called Tolstoy his favorite among all writers, and Turgenev described him simply as a master.

This book is featured on The Book Club with Michael Knowles, PragerU's show dedicated to the great books of Western civilization. In this episode, Michael Knowles is joined by Matt Walsh, host of The Matt Walsh Show, to discuss what Tolstoy's novella reveals about mortality, conformity and the anguish of denying death, themes Walsh connects to the cultural reckoning brought on by the events of 2020.

📺 Watch the episode: Matt Walsh — The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

Read Tolstoy's masterwork on facing mortality honestly, and discover why its reckoning with a wasted life still unsettles readers more than a century later.