✍ Scribed by Leo Tolstoy, Mark Pettus
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Written in simple and sometimes shockingly blunt prose, Tolstoy’s timeless novella is a masterpiece of his later work, combining relentless psychological observation with moral and spiritual urgency in its depiction of the death of an ordinary man, a certain Ivan Ilyich — a court official, husband, and father. Ivan Ilych is perfectly ordinary in the sense that his lifelong pursuit of outward decency in his work and family life — even home decor! — has obscured from him all deeper questions of life’s meaning — questions he must suddenly come to terms with as he confronts his own mortality. Alongside this existential struggle, Tolstoy — with both compassion and clinical objectivity — documents dying as a physical and psychological process, involving both loneliness and despair, unrelenting suffering, and unexpected glimmers of comfort, human contact, and hope. Ultimately, Tolstoy suggests that a life dominated by the conventions of the world as we know it is somehow deeply wrong — but that every life has the capacity for redemption, even at the very end.
Designed to help students of Russian begin to enjoy real Russian literature in the original without constantly reaching for a dictionary, this parallel-text edition features a new translation made specifically for this purpose, as well as detailed Russian vocabulary notes, including all the important forms you need (especially aspectual pairs and conjugation types for all verbs). The original Russian text is marked for stress, but is otherwise unedited and unsimplified.
📜 SIMILAR VOLUMES
This second volume of Chekhov’s best short stories includes the original Russian and a facing English translation, together with all the vocabulary notes and reference tables you need to enjoy Chekhov in Russian. Designed to help students of Russian begin to enjoy real Russian literature in the o
In a format designed to help students of Russian begin enjoying real Russian literature in the original, this volume includes two of Anton Chekhov’s timeless masterpieces of the Russian stage: “Uncle Vanya” (the tale of an epic existential meltdown on a country estate) and “The Cherry Orchard” (a sa