Second: Schopenhauer’s philosophy is so black that it sees life as nothing but suffering, a constant striving without any satisfaction; death, then, should be warmly anticipated as a welcome release. Yet the knowledge of death, far from providing a soothing promise of relief, ruins what small happiness can be found in living. Third: although Tolstoy couldn’t have known it, at the time when he was being addressed so ominously by the voice of death, his life was actually at its meridian. He had lived for forty-one years, and had another forty-one still ahead of him. At that time, incidentally, the expectation of life in Russia stood at forty-one years.

DEATH IN THE MIDST OF LIFE

The Book of Common Prayer reminds us solemnly that ‘in the midst of life we are in death’, and until recent times that used to be true in a literal sense: all families experienced death repeatedly at first hand. Tolstoy’s was one such. Death visited his home at regular intervals; for instance, five of his children did not survive childhood, and in one short period, 1873 — 5, five family members died. He saw men shot or blown up on the battlefield, watched a man die under the guillotine blade in France, and sat with his brother until he died from consumption. All of this must have been very painful, but it is probably more significant that Tolstoy’s own childhood was badly affected by the death of his mother when he was two, his father when he was nine, a devoted grandmother when he was ten, and his doting Auntie Tatyana when he was thirteen. True, he was loved and protected throughout by family members, but perhaps the early loss, one after the other, of four parental figures instilled into him a particular sense of the fragility of human life and a sharper than normal fear of death. Mortality would become one of this writer’s most persistent themes, as he worked against the idea attributed to Samuel Johnson that our fear of death is so great that the whole of life is but keeping away the thought of it. All of the stories in this volume are connected by this preoccupation, along with the author’s simultaneous attempts to help us improve our lives. However, far from being overt morality pieces, they are all gripping narratives, and should be enjoyed as such before being examined for lessons in living and dying.

But this volume is only a representative selection of Tolstoy’s writing on the subject. The idea of death haunts his work from Childhood in 1852 to Hadji Murat in 1904 and Alyosha the Pot in 1905. The Sevastopol Stories (1855 — 6), transmitted straight from the Crimean warfront, necessarily pile up the corpses of soldiers, many of which Tolstoy saw with his own eyes on the battlefield. The vitality of The Cossacks (1863) is undermined by the suffering of the story’s mortally wounded hero, Lukashka. In War and Peace the deaths of old Count Bezukhov, Lise, Hélène, Andrey, Count Rostov, Petya Rostov and Platon Karatayev bring particular poignancy to the subject that has been generalized in thousands on the field of war. And in Anna Karenina the famous suicide of the heroine is hardly more moving than the death of Nikolay, brother of the novel’s other protagonist Konstantin Levin, which is itself a transcription from the real-life demise of Tolstoy’s own brother. This occurs in Part Five, Chapter 21, the only one out of the 734 chapters that make up the three longest novels of this author to be given a title, Death. The Kreutzer Sonata (1889) examines sexual passion that has culminated in a gruesome murder. ‘Master and Man’ (1893) ends in the self-sacrificing death of a man who has hitherto been the epitome of calculating egoism. In Resurrection (1899) the story hinges around another murder, the poisoning of a prostitute’s client. In a play of 1886, The Power of Darkness, there is another poisoning, though this is transcended in awfulness by a rare example of nothing less than infanticide on stage. It is all there - death in every conceivable guise: murder, accident, suicide and natural causes, finishing off the young, the old and everyone in between. Even from this kind of brief overview it is clear that Tolstoy’s obsession with death and dying is something out of the ordinary; few serious writers come near him in persisting with this difficult subject and presenting it from so many different angles.

THE LIFE OF IVAN ILYICH

It is ironical that The Death of Ivan Ilyich, one of the world’s most penetrating fictional examinations of the sick room and the deathbed, was handed to the author’s wife as a pleasant surprise on her birthday. Far from being disturbed by the shocking content of the story, Sonya was delighted. First, she welcomed this new work, handed to her when she returned from a stay in Moscow, in 1882, because of its symbolic value. According to her perceptions, her husband had been indulging himself ever since Anna Karenina three years earlier by fiddling around with second-rate works of philosophy, morality and religion that no one wanted to read. The appearance of a new work of fiction, even if it had death in its title, seemed more like a resurrection to her. Second, she was a sensitive critic of her husband’s work, and she knew a masterpiece when she saw it.