Essays on Tolstoy

In Kholstomer – The Story of a Horse, Leo Tolstoy uses an animal’s point of view as a method to increase the exquisiteness of the piece wherein Kholstomer (Strider) suffered an unfortunate life as a horse because he was being physically and emotionally tormented. This...

Human Morality’s Presence Through Ivan Ilych’s Death Leo Tolstoy eloquently weaves together the lackluster life tale of a dying man who lived for vanity in “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”. Tolstoy bluntly portrays the agonizing awareness of death growing within Ilyich, while Ilyich is recognizing...

Leo Tolstoy, a Russian Writer known for his stories involving subject matter of isolation and societal class, further elicits these common themes in The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Throughout the story, the main character, Ivan Ilyich, struggles immensely with society and class. It is something...

The concept of the “superfluous man” began appearing in Russian literature in the 19th century. It refers to a man who often has superior intellect, leading him to feel misunderstood and victimized in a society that does not give him the opportunity to fulfill his...

Like death or abandonment, alienation is one of the deepest-rooted fears experienced by human beings. As social creatures, humans have the need to identify themselves as one of a group, whether that group is a family, a culture, or a religion. The experience of alienation...

Strangeness helps us break apart our old eyes and to see the world in a slightly new way. Seeing things in an unfamiliar way will let us to look more closely at things that people assumed that something is true without questioning because they stigmatize...

In the short story, “How Much Land Does a Man Need” By Leo Tolstoy, Tolstoy employs Pahom, the protagonist to endure a fatal flaw of excessive greed and power that leads to his downfall. It touches upon the human nature that we are bound by...

The tell-tale heart begins on the eighth night as he was peering in at midnight, and perhaps the old man heard it because he startled awake. He wonders if anyone was there. After waiting a long while, he decided to open the lantern and a...

There are many philosophical questions that humans have been trying to answer since the birth of our species. What is my purpose on earth? Is there divine beings? Who created me and this world? The short story The Death of Ivan Ilych tactfully incorporates two...

In the first chapter, Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy gives the reader almost all the problems of society and human nature, which it hurt in those days, is sick now, and we will not disassemble – it will continue to hurt.    Indifference – the first human...

“It is as if I had been going downhill while I imagined I was going up. And that is really what it was. I was going up in public opinion, but to the same extent life was ebbing away from me. And now it is...

Ivan Ilych is dead. His death is hardly what one would call “mourned”, and his family and friends think only of how they can profit from his timely demise. He has led a terrible life, and suffered through a generally meaningless existence. One might wonder...

Poor Ivan Ilych is plagued by not one, but two diseases. While his “floating kidney” ends his life, it is a temporal disease – which is actually healed as his kidney disease progresses – that ruins his life. Ivan spends his life in a small...

Ivan Ilych’s funeral, like all funerals, is not his own. While it is held in his honor, and he provides the token corpse for the occasion, each person experiences his funeral in the same self-centered way that they experience his death. Pyotr Ivanovich, one of...

In his novella The Death of Ivan Ilych, Count Leo Tolstoy offers readers a glimpse into the life and death of a socially ambitious Russian gentleman, Ivan Ilych. During the story, Ivan’s character is revealed in several different ways: firstly, oddly enough, at his funeral,...

Tolstoy uses The Death of Ivan Ilyich to show his readers the negative consequences of living as Ilyich did. Ivan Ilyich made decisions based on what others thought and what would benefit him monetarily. As death approaches, Ilyich realizes that he squandered everything pure and...

In 1898, Tolstoy wrote in a Letter on Suicide that “suicide is immoral.” He vehemently condemned the act of it, by qualifying it as unreasonable and wrong. However, in his earlier books, such as War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Tolstoy treats suicide, along with...

In War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy clearly values characteristics such as spontaneity, honesty, vitality, and liveliness. He makes this obvious to the reader through narratives that indicate that he values forms of naturalness over forms of artificiality. In the novel, Tolstoy’s exoteric message is that...

Constantine Levin’s pair of pivotal experiences contribute significantly to Anna Karenina’s psychological tapestry because these moments of crisis draw out and highlight the subjectivity of the protagonist’s life experience. The novel’s overarching theme of emergent moral consciousness is thus foregrounded in these scenes that feature...