Soviet Commentary to "Ivan"

I thought I'd share with readers a few things from the commentary in the back of the Jubilee Edition of Tolstoy's collected works. Trivia about a very untrivial book:

• Tolstoy began the novel in the fall of 1885.
  
• The novel was based, very loosely, on a real person, Ivan Il'ich Mechnikov (Иван Ильич Мечников), a lawyer from Tula (not far from Tolstoy's estate), whom Tolstoy apparently met and admired in the 1860s. Mechnikov died on the second of July, 1881. Tolstoy's sister-in-law, Tatiana Kuzminskaya, passed on to Tolstoy details of Mechnikov's death, which she learned from Mechnikov's wife. Very soon afterwards, Tolstoy began work on a story "The Death of a Judge," which eventually became Death of Ivan Il'ich.
• The story began originally as a first-person narrative, perhaps Ivan's own diary or letters from him, during the time leading up to his death. Tolstoy eventually abandoned the idea as too difficult, and switched over to the omniscient (all-knowing) third-person narrative device used in the story we are reading.
  
• Tolstoy wanted to tell the story of "a simple man who dies a simple death," though it's difficult to reconcile this initial plan with the book we are reading -- simple is one of Tolstoy's synonyms for "good," and Ivan Il'ich's life was anything but good or simple.
  
• He finished the novel on March 25, 1886, and presented it to his wife as a birthday present! ("Happy Birthday, Honey!") Sof'ia Andreyevna (his wife) was working on a "collected works" of her husband, in part because Tolstoy had, in 1886, more or less abandoned his literary endeavors (he returns to them, of course, and Ivan is the first of many masterful works from the last three decades of his life), more or less taken a vow of poverty, and more or less decided that everything and everyone around him was corrupt and immoral, including his wife... But more on this phase in Tolstoy's life in a later post.