This story stands as one of the most effective memento mori statements in world literature. And the real reason for this is that, for all his implicit condemnation of Ivan Ilyich’s way of living, Tolstoy warms to his man as he dies. Far from transmitting a sense of individual schadenfreude, he writes with the kind of compassion that unites us all in confronting the terrible predicament of our mortality.

THREE DEATHS AND MORE

The reason for the success of The Death of Ivan Ilyich is that its didactic purpose (an instruction for us to reappraise our lives and to promote love as the only standard to live by) is thoroughly integrated into a compelling narrative. Tolstoy varies in his ability to pull off this trick, as is demonstrated by the other stories in this collection. All of them are strong in narrative interest, all of them have an inner message to convey, but the emphasis changes from story to story. An early tale, ‘Three Deaths’ (1859), has very little purpose other than to tell us how to die. An aristocratic lady, an old peasant and a tree perform this deed for us, and the message is clear: stay close to nature and the dying will be easy; deathbed agony awaits the educated sophisticates of modern society who have left nature behind. This is Tolstoy at his most simplistic, but the tale has its positive qualities - striking portraiture, natural dialogue, touching descriptions of the natural world, a succinct style of writing - and they make for a half hour of pleasurable reading.

Two other early stories, ‘The Raid’ (1853) and ‘The Woodfelling’ (1855), foreshadow later works by Tolstoy that will look realistically at warfare and cast doubts on its glory; the former is particularly strong in its depiction of soldiers doing what they are paid to do, which includes killing and being killed. These tales have a painfully enduring relevance because they describe military events in an area on the border between Europe and Asia which for generations has known nothing but a feuding and tribal conflict that is still alive today. The region was then, and is now, also at the interface been two great religions, Islam and Christianity. We are speaking of Chechnya, that arid, mountainous enclave which could be a beautiful homeland to take pride in, but for the warring antagonism that no one seems able to transcend or dispel. The military town of Grozny, a fearful name even in today’s newspapers, was at the centre of things in Tolstoy’s two stories, though they both take place in the same nearby countryside. In each case an order is received by a military detachment, which marches off to do its duty, taking with it a shrewd and articulate observer who will give us the atmosphere and tell us what happens. The assignment is achieved, but at severe cost; lives are lost on both sides, and particularly poignant are the deaths of two young men, Alanin in the former story and Velenchuk in the latter. The individualized tragedies of these youngsters, so poignantly described, are more eloquent than the piles of corpses littering the field on Tolstoy’s broader military canvases (The Sevastopol Stories and War and Peace). These small narratives are among his masterpieces. They both tell a compelling story, filling it out with topographical detail from mountains to midges, warm portraiture based on close psychological observation, and a modicum of gently delivered moral instruction. There are strong underlying contrasts between brutality and civilization, youth and maturity, simple local people and more sophisticated intruders, the beauty of the natural scene and the horrors of soldiery, but these are not pressed upon us by too earnest a teacher. You will take pleasure from the telling of the story, but you will probably also be persuaded to think over some serious ideas, about honour and glory, self-dramatization and sincerity, egoism and courage - the whole meaning of going to war, and how it affects both the guiding political minds and the lads who do the fighting and dying. Our present-day war correspondents still tell the same tales, some of them set in the same region.

The preoccupation with violence and death shown in these early stories is still in Tolstoy’s mind half a century later, as we can see in two very late works, ‘After the Ball’ (1903) and ‘The Forged Coupon’ (1905). The first of these is a remarkable story that was written in a single day. The critic A. N. Wilson ranks it with the very greatest things Tolstoy ever wrote.5 Its power is drawn from the shocking contrast between two opposite personalities displayed by an elderly colonel, seen first at a ball dancing serenely with his daughter and charming the company, and then, the following morning, enthusiastically directing a gruesome ceremony in which an army deserter is made to run the gauntlet, and beaten so viciously that his death seems certain. Needless to say, the narrator’s love for the colonel’s daughter does not long survive this ghastly experience. ‘The Forged Coupon’ is a morality piece with strong narrative interest, in which a small transgression - the forging of a banknote — leads inexorably to a series of much more serious crimes, including multiple murder, and then, less convincingly, to salvation for the main characters. The neatness of construction and the simplicity of Tolstoy’s writing are strong features of this work; it has been disregarded not for any real faults, but because its posthumous publication went largely unnoticed.

One of Tolstoy’s most accomplished and moving novellas is Polikushka, written in 1863, at the end of the long literary apprenticeship that was about to produce two of the world’s greatest novels. It tells the story of Polikey (also known as Polikushka), a peasant horse doctor given to drunkenness and petty crime, who reforms himself with great effort and is rewarded by his mistress when she excuses him from the military conscription that he seems to deserve. But he then loses a large sum of money entrusted to him, and the results are catastrophic. The build-up of suspense in this tale is painful because there is so much at stake for so many people. The village is required to provide men for military service, and Polikey ought to be sent because he has a bad record.