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...
“All happy families are alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” (1.1.1) In this famed first sentence of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy alludes to the two kinds of familial happiness, almost comically simplifying the idea of ‘family’. However, this formula cannot be tested...
As said from the physicist Albert Einstein, “A quiet and modest life brings more joy than a pursuit of success bound with constant unrest.” By that, Einstein meant that to live well, we need to preserve and valorize the simple things of life; which is...
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy is, in many aspects, a story of love and relationships. Two couples, Kitty and Levin, and Anna and Vronsky, find some form of love and passion throughout the course of the novel, yet their personalities determine the success of their...
Nothing exists to hinder an individual’s pursuit of happiness besides the shackles built from the expectations of others. Societal norms become ironclad laws, and those who do not accept these constraints often find themselves lost, ostracized, and abandoned by their peers. Society’s current obsession with...
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...
Imagine if you are in the end of your life and in the way of the life you realize you is alone, you don’t have anyone to help you walk on the way of the death quietly, you realize you don’t have a support for...
Throughout the course of Leo Tolstoy’s iconic tragedy Anna Karenina, the presence of trains is essential both in terms of symbolic resonance and as a way to communicate social commentary and setting. Tolstoy employs train imagery as a way to talk about movement in terms...
The book “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” is a novella, the main character is the Ivan Ilyich, he and all his friends and his family are part of bourgeoisie, he distances himself from his family and focuses only on his work, living conformed to society in...
To quote Norman Cousins, “Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.” Ivan Ilyich discovers at the end of his life that he is surrounded by a lot of false friends and family, who...
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...
In Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, tracing the muzhik image throughout the novel provides an insight into Anna Karenina’s psyche and subconscious. The peasant is encountered at the time of Anna and Vronsky’s first meeting, a wretched peasant crushed to death by a backwards lurch of the...
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...
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...
Constantine Levin, a hero of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, longs to discover some harmonious part of himself through experiencing the peasant way of life. He believes there to be something profoundly rewarding in the simple act of working as one’s needs dictate. By working with and...
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...
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...
The question of judgment and sympathies in Anna Karenina is one that, every time I have read the novel, seems to become more complicated and slung with obfuscation. The basic problem with locating the voice of judgment is that throughout the novel, there are places...
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...
Anais Nin said, “People living deeply have no fear of death.”Ivan Ilyich it terrified of dying and has rather spent his whole life focussing on his status in society. He has an accident, falling from a ladder, because he is trying to make society happy,...
Sexual relations have different social implications depending on the society in which they take place. Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is a 19th century novel and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s Envy is a 20th century novel. Both novels portray the imperfect realities of coupling, yet in very different...
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...
Introduction Most literature authors involve different literary styles in their works, in a bid to leave a mark to the readers. Different literary methods are applicable. One of these literary styles is Rhetoric. Leo Tolstoy was famous for using this literary style, writing The “Death...
Facial expressions and body language communicate one’s intentions and emotions far better than words. Leo Tolstoy, in Anna Karenina, describes a plethora of physical descriptions, enabling the reader to more completely understand the characters’ emotional state of mind. Other characters and the narrator frequently describe...
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,...
There is one thing that several people fear in this world other than spiders, and that “thing” is death. Unfortunately death is inevitable, and each and every one of us is bound to die at some point in our life. In The Death of Ivan...
Though a majority of the characters in Leo Tolstoy’s momentous novel Anna Karenina are members of the nobility, the reforms Czar Alexander II put in place for the lower classes had profound effects on them. The time of his rule was an era of change...
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...
According to the German philosopher Karl Heinrich Marx, “In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality”. Marx defended this idea in chapter 2 of his Communist Manifesto, which is a criticism of bourgeois society,...
Two clashing movements existed within Russia in the 19th century. In the rural areas existed a movement that could hardly be called a movement. It was, in fact, more of a planted fixture. The indigenous foundation that had existed for time immemorial kept alive the...
Novelist, short story writer, playwright, essayist
Language
Russian
Notable works
War and Peace
Anna Karenina
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
The Kingdom of God Is Within You
Resurrection
Date
9 September, 1828 - 20 November, 1910
Activity
Leo Tolstoy was a Russian author, a master of realistic fiction and one of the world’s greatest novelists.
Works
War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, The Kingdom of God Is Within You, Resurrection
Themes
In his major works Tolstoy touches themes like importance of family life, search for the meaning of life, irrationality of human motivations, social changes in Russia in the nineteenth century.
Style
Tolstoy described conscious mental life with unparalleled mastery. His name has become synonymous with an appreciation of contingency and of the value of everyday activity. Oscillating between skepticism and dogmatism, Tolstoy explored the most-diverse approaches to human experience.
Quotes
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.”
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