Essay topics for Leo Tolstoi’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich :
1. Tolstoy begins chapter two with the words: “Ivan Ilyich’s life had been most
simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.” Comment on that.
2. The theme of “birth / death” permeates the text. Illustrate and explain.
3. How does Tolstoy contrast “healthy/natural” and “sick/unatural” in both
Three Deaths and Death of Ivan Ilyich.
4. Compare the description of society in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Tolstoy’s
Death of Ivan Ilyich
Some literature about the text, available in the library:
OZZ909
Edgerton, William B. “Tolstoy, Immortality, and 20th Century Physics.”
Canadian Slavonic papers 21 (1979): 300ff
Jahn, Gary R. “The Role of the Ending in Lev Tolstoi’s The Death of Ivan Il’ich”
Canadian Slavonic papers 24(1984): 229-38
Schaarschmidt, Gunter. “Theme and Discourse Structure in The Death of Ivan Il’ich”
Canadian Slavonic papers 21 (1979): 356-66
Smyrniew, Walter. “Tolstoy’s Depiction of Death in the Context of Recent Studies of the
Experience of Dying.”
Canadian Slavonic papers 21 (1979): 376-79
PN56 .I65 G6
Charles I. Glicksberg
“Tolstoy and The Death of Ivan Ilyitch” in:
The ironic vision in modern literatur, 81-86.
OZZ917
Gustafson, Richard F. “The Three Stages of Man”
Canadian-American Slavic Studies 12 (1978): 481-518
OZZ1129
Hirschberg, W.R. “Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich”
Explicator 28 (1969), no.3 , item 26