This chapter sketches the shape of Tolstoy’s oeuvre by focusing on a key text from each decade of his long and varied career. In Childhood (1852), his first published work, Tolstoy had already begun both to draw upon and to distrust the powers of realist fiction. This tension is palpable in his great novels War and Peace (1865–9) and Anna Karenina (1875–8), and it motivated his sporadic turns away from artistic literature during the years he was writing them. Confession (1879–82), which marked the most dramatic of these crises, is a conversion narrative that ends with a call to rethink the edifice of Christianity. In the second half of his life he pursued this task in a range of genres. Lavishing his gift for evocative description on polemical accounts of social atrocities, in his fiction he now reached for emblematic universality. The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), a celebrated short story, and “The First Step” (1892), a treatise on vegetarianism, exemplify these divergent styles. However, they stirringly reconverge in posthumously published works like the historical novella Hadji Murat (1896–1904), where Tolstoy represented escape from the mortal body in paradoxically vivid realist detail.

In chapter 9 I use Ivan Ilyich’s life, as told by Leo Tolstoy in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, to answer the question of the chapter, how should we live so as to die well? One answer is to be open to knowing our inner lives, to what is good, and to God. Another is to develop character traits opposite to those of Ivan Ilyich, which were delight in the power to crush his inferiors, pleasure in trivialities, and excessive self-regard. The chapter also describes the moral agony that Ivan Ilyich experienced as a result of his dying, his resistance to examining his life, and the openness he needed to have to be aware of his inner life. The chapter ends with a conversation between an imagined, transformed Ivan as he lay dying and a friend of his.