It's been too long since my last Russian novel, and my brother's suggestion that I try Ivan Ilyich was a welcome push back into the wonderful world of Tolstoy. In addition to the title story, this collection also included Family Happiness and The Cossacks, and they were all very enjoyable.

Family Happiness was an intriguing, if rather depressing and pessimistic, study of the disintegration of a marriage. The moral of the story seems to be that romantic love has the shelf life of a banana; and that men should logically turn their passion to polite indifference and women should sublimate theirs into obsession over their children. There were some interesting shadows of Anna Karenina in this story.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich was really all it's cracked up to be. I don't know that I have anything original to say on it, but it is certainly the most in-depth look into a dying man's mind that I can recall reading. His whole life seems so wasted and vainly-spent that it's painful to realize he won't have the chance to fix any of it. And I remember feeling betrayed after initially feeling so bad for the wife, who turned out not to care in the least about him except for how his death would effect her own comfort.

Finally, The Cossacks, which was the longest of the short stories/novellas in the collection had a wonderful foreignness about it. In my experience with Russian lit - which is admittedly limited to Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, a handful of anarchist writers, and a smidgen of Bely - the focus almost always has been on St. Petersburg and Moscow. The Cossacks is almost entirely set in the Caucuses and most of the characters are far removed from the European-ness I've come to expect. The plot centers around the love triangle among the Muscovite Olenin, the Cossak Luka, and the Cossack girl they both want Maryanka. But more so, it is about Olenin's desire to escape the city rat-race and to find a more naturalistic life - which, as I recall, was something that Tolstoy himself was deeply concerned about. I found that aspect of the story fascinating as Tolstoy doesn't give his fantasy a fairy-tale ending, as I would think most authors would be wont to do.

Great collection. I've resolved to officially dive into War and Peace during the two weeks James is going to be on an externship in Alberta later this year. Seems like a good use of an empty house - wish me luck!