Just read the Death of Ivan Ilyich and was sorely disappointed. I was expecting some beautiful writing, what gives? I could write a better novella than this drivel. Why was the greatest novella of all time so dull, dry, and uninsightful?
Just read the Death of Ivan Ilyich and was sorely disappointed. I was expecting some beautiful writing, what gives?
Oh, you're just mistaken.
the greatest novella is Father Sergius.
if someone can't enjoy Ivan Ilyich I highly doubt that they'd enjoy Tolstoy's later stories
Interestingly, I've read the top 7 of Tolstoy's works and found Ivan Ilyich the least compelling. The other 6 were near flawless masterpieces, but I found Ivan Ilyich to be lacking a bit of the depth of the other works, even short works like Family Happiness.
What is his top 7?
According to me:
War and Peace
Anna Karenina
Resurrection
The Kreutzer Sonata
The Cossacks
Family Happiness
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
This just made me all the more excited to dig into Tolstoy after finishing ilyich last week
Tolstoy has become my all time favorite author, and I've roughly placed my list in order of how much I liked each book. Savor your journey into this masterclass of literature my friend, I found it completely engaging, engrossing, uplifting, thoughtful, poignant, and more. War and Peace in particular, I had a certain amount of trepidation going into it based on it's reputation as long and difficult, but I was delighted to find how easy it was to read and how quickly I got invested in the characters and the family house dynamics (when I finished it, I actually wished it was longer and I had more time with these characters!) If you do read it, keep in mind the 4 main houses, The Rostovs, The Bolkonskys, The Kuragins, and the Bezukhovs (mainly just Pierre Bezukhov for this last one). The characters are all so well drawn and authentic. What could have been, in lesser hands, a maudlin affair on the level of a soap opera is, instead, elevated to one of the most striking works to illuminate and capture the essence of humanity in all it's completeness: the love, the hate, the envy, the jealousy, the despair, the joy, the passion, the fear, everything. Happy reading, anon!
He’s also my favorite artist. I love him dearly, not just because his works are so extraordinary but because I find him immensely inspiring as a person. All of his emotional struggles and contradictions and intellectual challenges are so poignant to read about. It’s hard to explain why I’m so moved by him. I suppose it’s because despite all his faults he was driven by a pursuit of truth and justice, and his art tries to guide people towards those values with sincerity and unparalleled skill
This has to be bait. The emotion this book evokes, the familiarity, the existential dread. This was probably the best fiction book I read last year
He looks into the back of the sofa and IT looks back, frick off aha
I expected as much
You’re a homosexual and I hate you
Not only are you guys too immature for literature, you seem to be proud of being too immature for literature.
It's much more relatable when you're older, you'll know it when you grow up and leave your adolescent phase.
I found it absolutely crushing. The figure of a mediocre middle class striver who lives simply to obtain all the external metrics of success is instantly recognizable and relatable to me. I know lots of people in my family that fit that profile.
Maybe you just have to come from that background to relate, but I found it bleakly horrifying the contrast between his impending death and the banality of his life. And at other points the novella is pretty funny in a dark way.
List at least one if not ten books you've read that are more "beautiful" and less disappointing than Ivan Ilyich.
I think it’s overrated but c’mon it’s still Tolstoy, he basically does an entire character-driven 300-pager 19th-C novel complete with the elongated death scene in a third of the length.
I thought it was great maybe op is reading a moronic translation.
i've said this on here a few times but i read this before going on a first date once and it made me so goddamned depressed I couldn't even speak to the person whatsoever and it was one of the most awkward experiences in my life.
Lmao. That's a good short story in itself.
>going on a first date once
normalgay
is it really that bad? jesus.
if its any consolation she wasn't very good looking, just average cute, big breasts though.
i'm sure you're joking a bit but shit it could be a good exercise. I wish i stopped putting off writing, i'm honestly afraid to though
Don't forget to describe the breasts
>He doesn't realize I have entire paragraphs dedicated to the subtle graces beautifully pronounced upon the female form as well as including, though certainly not limited to, long form excursions into realms of rhetoric that can only be referred to by names that evoke presumed accusations of practices bordering on mammary worship
It would be 10x better than the shit that gets tossed around in the writing general. I'd read it and give feed back.
Should have just spurged out and info-dumped your experience with the novel. At least you'd have been speaking then. Or your date would have just left.
You're just too pretentious to understand it.
It's Tolstoy's simplest, most accessible, moral story of the human condition, and OP can't appreciate.
Maybe it's because times have changed. Now death is filmed on go pro in high definition.
What is special about this story?
Russian culture in the 19th century surprised the whole world with its monstrous realism. In Europe, they wrote about montecristo, ivanhoe and similar sentimental oliver twists. And Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy took and wrote how a person dies of cancer. For real. And it made an impression. CRITICAL REALISM.
At the beginning of Tolstoy's story there is a scene of the beginning of the illness. When the doctor starts talking to Ivan Ilyich about the state of his health, about the functioning of the kidneys, stomach, liver, intestines, he talks for a long, long time, so long that Ivan Ilyich gradually realizes that it is not about the liver and intestines, but about life and death. HIS life and death. And here the author gives the reader the opportunity to independently make the next move. To understand that this is not a story about the death of a middle-class Russian official living in the second third of the 19th century, but a story about the death of a person as such. That is, the reader himself.
I also recommend to google for the keywords Heidegger and The Death of Ivan Ilyich, if you are interested.
>The way of thinking of Martin Heidegger, his concept of death (thanatology) was significantly influenced by the artistic philosophy of portraying death in Tolstoy, especially in the story about the Tula judge. The philosopher himself speaks of this in a footnote to one of his works: in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy depicted the shock phenomenon “a man dies.” W. Barret in his monograph on the philosophy of being, and later W. Kaufman in the book "Religion from Tolstoy to Camus" draw attention to the fact that here we are talking about a much stronger influence than it appears in the modest mention of Heidegger. “When in the next century the professional philosopher began to study the phenomenon of death, he took the story of the death of Ivan Ilyich Tolstoy as his starting point.” Kaufman is even more emphatic: “Martin Heidegger is a Tolstoyan, and the section on death he wrote is an unwittingly written commentary on The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” Both Tolstoy and Heidegger provide a masterful analysis of the alienated being related to death, with the only difference being that what is philology in the Russian writer becomes philosophy in the German thinker.
Blablabla. Get tf out with your imbecile heidegger moron.
All those words just to say "Heidegger's writing on death was influenced by The Death of Ivan Ilyich". And people say ChatGPT is bad.
I would agree but the tree doe, after it takes you on this existential journey of dread it tells the story of the trees death. That transcends drivel my friend idgaf what you say
I just read it recently and found it to be great.
While I was reading it I though it was a little bit boring, but the final portion elevated the whole work. As if it was just a russe by the author to describe a well off, mundane life of a man of few passions or drives just to create meaning out of it.
A similar tale, but a different perspective and just better, to one of my favourite films: A serious man.