Excerpt from The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"But there is a matter I wish to discuss with you."

Pyotr Ivanovich bowed his head in response, taking care not to allow the springs of the ottoman, which immediately grew restive, to have their way.

"He suffered terribly the last few days."

"Did he?" asked Pyotr Ivanovich.

"Oh, frightfully! He screamed incessantly, not for minutes but for hours on end. He screamed for three straight days without pausing for breath. It was unbearable. I don't know how I bore up through it all. You could hear him three rooms away. Oh, what I've been through!"

"And was he really conscious through it all?" asked Pyotr Ivanovich.

"Yes," she whispered, "to the very last. He took leave of us a quarter of an hour before he died and even asked us to take Volodya away."

Despite a distasteful awareness of his own hypocrisy as well as hers, Pyotr Ivanovich was overcome with horror as he thought of the suffering of someone he had known so well, first as a carefree boy, then as a schoolmate, later as a grown man, his colleague. Once again he saw that forehead, that nose pressing down on the upper lip, and fear for himself took possession of him.

"Three days of terrible suffering and death. Why, the same thing could happen to me at anytime now," he thought and for a moment felt panic-stricken. But at once, he himself did not know how, he was rescued by the customary reflection that all this had happened to Ivan Ilyich, not to him, that it could not and should not happen to him; and that if he were to grant such a possibility, he would succumb to depression which, as Schwartz's expression had made abundantly clear, he ought not to do. With this line of reasoning Pyotr Ivanovich set his mind at rest and began to press for details about Ivan Ilyich's death, as though death were a chance experience that could happen only to Ivan Ilyich, never to himself.

Excerpted from The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy. Copyright © 1981 by Leo Tolstoy. Excerpted by permission of Bantam Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.