The Death of Ivan Ilyich

I liked this book written by Leo Tolstoy. Ivan Ilyich’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible. Indeed, Ilyich’s driving ambition was to live an easy, agreeable, gay, and always decorous life. For the most part, he succeeded unspectacularly. But when he lay on his death bed, he began to question the nature of existence and long for greater meaning and comfort from those nearest him.

This novella was first published in 1886. Russian photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky took a color photo of Leo Tolstoy at his estate in 1908 (two years before his death caused by pneumonia). Tolstoy believed that in order to follow the teachings of Jesus you must be a pacifist.