It had one window with a red curtain.” He fell asleep, only to awake in renewed terror. Death was in the room with him. It followed him into the corridor in search of his sleeping servant. Everything seemed to be saying the same thing: “There is nothing in life. Death is the only real thing, and death ought not to exist.” In what we would now identify as a panic attack, it seems Tolstoy felt he was dying.


Life and death somehow merged into one another. Something was tearing my soul apart and could not complete the severance. . . . Again I went to look at the sleepers, and again I tried to go to sleep. Always the same horror: red, white and square. Something tearing within that yet could not be torn apart. A painful, painfully dry and spiteful feeling, no atom of kindliness. . . .


Like the Ancient Mariner, Tolstoy tried to pray, surreptitiously glancing over his shoulder in case anyone was watching him. In vain. No prayers would come. He woke his servant and they left in the dark. When they reached their destination, Tolstoy did not buy the land. He was forty-one years old.

Another decade passed. As letters to his wife, Sofya, and the reminiscences of his son Sergei testify, Tolstoy continued to experience terrifying intimations of death. When Anna Karenina was finished in 1877, he began A Confession, a self-critical, clear-sighted, autobiographical account of his deepening spiritual crisis. In form, its first half is comparable to the narrative of “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” Decades are sweepingly surveyed, significant moments seized on and coldly scrutinized. The content, too, is similar. Tolstoy categorically condemns his decade of early maturity from about 1845 to 1855, when he indulged his machismo—womanizing, quarreling, even killing in his army years. At that time, he had believed in a popular concept of “progress” as the justifying principle of life. This is comparable to Ivan Ilyich’s determination to fulfill conventional expectations, to live as others do, to achieve the status and acquire the furnishings other people respect. In his Confession, Tolstoy identifies the Paris execution as crucial. It shattered his faith in convention:


When I saw how the head separated from the body, and each separately rattled into its crate, I understood—not in my mind, but my whole being—that no theory of the good sense of Progress, and What Is, can justify this crime, and that if all the people in the world, on whatever theory, from the beginning of the world, should find it necessary—I still knew that it was not necessary but bad.