Ivan Iliitch
Who does not know that extraordinary Death of Ivan Iliitch? It is an achievement in realism: not the realism of externals and trivial details—though of this there is enough for art if not for the common Zolaphyte—but the higher and better sort, the realism which deals with mental and spiritual conditions, the realism of Othello and Hamlet. There are many deaths in literature, but there is none, I think, in which the gradual processes of dissolution are analysed and presented with such knowledge, such force, such terrible directness, as here. The result is appalling, but the final impression is one of encouragement and consolation. Here, as everywhere, Tolstoï appeals to the primitive nature of man, and the issue is what he wishes it to be. Not for him is the barren pessimism of the latter-day French rhapsodist in fiction, and the last word of his study, inexorable till then, is a word of hope and faith.