The Death of Ivan Ilych

by Leo Tolstoy

Ivan Ilych is left alone with the awareness that his life is poisoned and is poisoning the lives of others, and this poison doesn’t grow weaker, but rather gets stronger and stronger in the pit of his being.

It occurred to him that those scarcely detected impulses to struggle against what the people of highest social rank considered good, those feeble tendencies that he barely noticed and immediately suppressed, might in fact be what was real, and everything else what was false.