Gentlemen... Ivan Il'ich has died!

I teach Tolstoy's masterful work, Death of Ivan Il'ich, at least once a year: At the conclusion of the fall semester in a small, intimate course in the Honors Program here at Stetson University. It's included at the end of a a very fine, thoughtful collection of essays about life's choices, Leading Lives that Matter. I also teach it in a larger course, a seminar "Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?" that I teach every couple of years in the Russian Studies program here at Stetson.

Besides my pedagogical relationship with Tolstoy's story, it's personally important to me: The Death of Ivan Il'ich, along with Tolstoy's A Confession, were formative influences in college. I cannot remember if I read them as an assignment, or if I just happened across them, but ultimately, in a complicated and not always coherent way, these stories led me to study Russian (at Indiana University), then to live in Russia (where I worked and taught in the 1990s), then to study Russian literature (at Northwestern, where I completed my PhD in 2001), then to teach Russian (at Stetson since 2000). My engagement with Tolstoy (it's a love-hate relationship, to be sure) led me to write my dissertation on Tolstoy's "non-resistance to evil," and I guess ultimately to my being appointed (anointed? condemned?) Editor of the Tolstoy Studies Journal.

Since I teach the work to non-Russian speakers, it's been a while since I've read it in Russian. In preparation for my presentation in April at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, I've decided to start by rereading the piece in Russian... And there's no better place to read it than volume 26 in the Jubilee Complete Collected Works of Tolstoy, a monumental edition of Tolstoy's literary works, articles, diaries and letters (ninety volumes, each about nine-hundred pages!!!!) which was begun in 1928, one-hundred years after Tolstoy's birth (thus the "Jubilee"). The Yasnaya Polyana Museum (the museum on Tolstoy's ancestral estate) has digitized all the volumes of the Collected Works and made them available online.