sinful life (such as Ivan's) is moral death. Therefore, death, the return of the soul to God, is, for Tolstoy, moral life. To quote Nabokov: "The Tolstoyan formula is: Ivan lived a bad life and since the bad life is nothing but the death of the soul, then Ivan lived a living death; and since beyond death is God's living light, then Ivan died into a new life – Life with a capital L." Death permeates the narrative in a realistic and absorbing fashion, but the actual physicality of death is only present in the early chapters during Ivan's wake. Instead, the story leads the reader through a pensive, metaphysical exploration of the reason for death and what it means to truly live. Tolstoy was a man who struggled greatly with self-doubt and spiritual reflection, especially as he grew close to his own death in 1910. In his book A Confession, Tolstoy writes: This personal epiphany caused significant spiritual upheaval in Tolstoy's life, prompting him to question the Russian Orthodox Church, sexuality, education, serfdom, etc. The literature Tolstoy composed during this period is some of his most controversial and philosophical, among which falls The Death of Ivan Ilyich and other famous short stories such as The Kreutzer Sonata and The Devil. From a biographical standpoint, therefore, it is possible to interpret The Death of Ivan Ilyich as a manifestation of Tolstoy's embroilment with death and the meaning of his own life during his final years. In other words, by dramatizing a particular sort of lifestyle and its unbearable decline, Tolstoy is able to impart his philosophy that success as it is judged by society, such as Ivan Ilyich's, comes at a great moral cost and if one decides to pay this cost, life will become hollow and insincere and therefore worse than death. Martin Heidegger's magnum opus, Being and Time (1927), refers to the novella as an illustration of Being towards death. English translations Aylmer and Louise Maude Constance Garnett (1902) Rosemary Edmonds (1960) Ian Dreiblatt (2008) Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (2009) Kirsten Lodge Adaptations Film Ikiru (1952) directed by Akira Kurosawa A Simple Death (1985) directed by Alexander Kaidanovsky Ivans Xtc (2000) directed by Bernard Rose The Last Step (2005) directed by Ali Mosaffa Living (2022) directed by Oliver Hermanus Opera Death of Ivan Ilych: A Full-Length Chamber Opera in One Act (2021) Composed by John Young with