The Death of Ivan Ilyich

The Death of Ivan Ilyich is probably Leo Tolstoy's best-known work after War and Peace and with good reason. The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the story of a worldly careerist, a high court judge who has never given the inevitability of his death so much as a passing thought. But one day death announces itself to him, and to his shocked surprise he is brought face to face with his own mortality. How, Tolstoy asks, does an unreflective man confront his one and only moment of truth?

The novella was acclaimed by Vladimir Nabokov and Mahatma Gandhi as well.