Her husband may have been in his sixth decade, but he was obviously not written out or even declining in literary ability. Third, this piece would nicely enhance the Collected Works that she was working on. Finally, practical woman as she was, Sonya could hardly have been indifferent to the prospect of new royalties coming in.

There is something unusual about this story from the outset. The title of the tale announces its ending. To emphasize this, we are barely a hundred words into the narrative when we are told, ‘Gentlemen, Ivan Ilyich is dead.’ So much for suspense. At no stage in the succeeding pages are we going to entertain doubts about the protagonist’s fate, which has been settled and sealed. Clearly, no time will be lost worrying about whether a sick man is going to die or survive; the interest must be elsewhere - in the process of dying, and the life that is being left behind. And that is how things turn out; what is at stake is the life of Ivan Ilyich. And by shifting the emphasis of his story like this Tolstoy lays down a benefit for himself as narrator; he can now allow himself to get right into the nasty details of dying, death and decomposition without facing a charge of prurience. An author who has renounced suspense cannot be said to be gratuitously milking gruesome material for every last drop of horror.

The idea for this story came from real life. In Tula, the nearest town to Tolstoy’s estate, a judge by the name of Ivan Ilyich Mechnikov had died from stomach cancer the previous year (July 1881), young and in mid-career. Tolstoy had been used to meeting some of the wretches sentenced by him to long years in Siberia, sometimes for fairly trivial reasons, and he had wondered about the kind of man who could sit in judgement over them, dispatch them and then return to his family and continue his happy lifestyle. Mechnikov’s brother told Tolstoy about the judge’s death in some detail, and the general shape of the narrative seemed obvious. A man of privileged background and good education, accustomed to sentencing others, would find himself under sentence of death; the reader would follow his struggle and be persuaded to look with contempt at the empty life of the declining man. An early idea to put this in diary form under the title Death of a Judge was abandoned as too shallow a vessel for all the ideas that the author wanted to include. In other respects there was no reason to depart from what had happened in real life. For instance, even the man’s first names could be kept, since they had a kind of Jack Robin-son ring to them, suggesting ordinariness and general applicability. The surname of Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich is Golovin, from the Russian word golova, meaning head, a rather obvious indication of the man’s cerebral rather than spiritual attitude to life and death.

Ordinariness is the currency Tolstoy chooses to deal in. We are invited to see this man as unfortunately typical of most people - small-minded, self-centred, materialistic. He has gone through law school, drifted into marriage, acquired two children almost incidentally and developed his career successfully, using every decent contact and opportunity to better himself. Like many of the upwardly mobile, he continually overreaches himself, but each promotion brings more money and he reaches a stage where he can manage fairly well. As his family life declines into indifference, because he and his wife are unsuited to each other and their small stock of affection is soon used up, Ivan Ilyich turns for satisfaction to his professional duties and to a small circle of male friends who like to play cards for small stakes. And now, on the brink of middle age, he is struck down by an illness that starts out as something trivial, though we know from the title and the opening that it is going to prove fatal.

Before looking at the illness itself it is worth considering the lifestyle of Ivan Ilyich, which Tolstoy depicts, subtly but insistently, as arid, unimaginative and useless, a matter for retrospective regret and for contempt if viewed from outside by a thinking person. Many people would object to this charge if it were put to them more directly. The judge is a successful man rather than a nonentity, and he is scrupulous in his dealings. He likes the feeling of power that he wields over the miserable people who come before him, but he never exploits or misuses it. He has made no serious mistakes and has no hidden crimes on his conscience. He is good to his children and faithful to his wife. Even his one besetting peccadillo, a penchant for cards, is kept under control; only small amounts of money are at stake, and there is no danger of addiction because the pleasure comes more from playing skilfully and exploiting any good luck than from significant winnings. This ‘weakness’ in the character of Ivan Ilyich is no worse than, say, watching too much television in the present era, except that it has the advantage of getting him out of the house and enjoying the company of other people.