Analysis of Leo Tolstoy and His Work "How Much Land Does a Man Need?"

And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false” (Tolstoy 32). Here, the third person omniscient indicates that what Ivan has been living his whole life to satisfy society and live according to society was a false thing to do. Tolstoy, the author, illustrates that Ivan has finally realized the truth. He has been living an artificial life, marked by shallow relationships, self-interest, and materialism. It is insular, unfulfilling, and ultimately incapable of providing answers to the important questions in life.

Tolstoy talks about a sort of scholarly emergency that he endured late in his life, and his recuperation from it. In spite of the fact that Tolstoy appreciated what might conventionally be viewed as a successful and agreeable life, he started feeling tormented by worries of unimportance. Specifically, he reports starting to question why he should think about things that he once thought about, or why he should do the things that he would choose to do. At last, he discovered it inconceivably hard to give answers to these inquiries. The outcome, he reports, is feeling as though his life were a doltish, pointless trap played someone has bestowed upon him. He felt as though every individual task he attempted, and also his life in its totality, were without importance.

Furthermore, in Leo Tolstoy‘s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and analysis will demonstrate that the character Ivan Ilyich struggles throughout his life to achieve the ideals of liberty, life and the pursuit of happiness. It is through Ivan’s death and his friend’s narration of Ivan’s life that the reader comes to the realization the the middle-class Ivan has few strength’s besides his hard work to drive him towards his ideals for wealth and property. Ivan lived his whole life with the purpose of enjoying himself. He did this through winning power at work, spending money, buying things to impress his friends, throwing parties, and playing bridge. His pursuit of happiness in material things and pleasures is so great that his deliberately avoids anything unpleasant. This means that when he settled down with a family, which was expected of him, he never grows close to them.

Tolstoy was a Russian Novelist who longed for a nontraditional lifestyle far from his noble lineage (“Leo Tolstoy”).

Tolstoy's emphasizes deeply with the Chechen people as he details their suffering at the hands of

On September 9th 1828 Leo Tolstoy was born. Tolstoy was the youngest of four boys. In 1830 Leo’s mother passed away. Seven years later his father died as well. Leo was taught mostly at home by French tutors. After failing out of school Tolstoy went back to his parent’s estate to become a farmer. He would soon fail at this as well. Tolstoy then joined the army in 1854 as a junker where he fought in the Crimean War. As a junker he lots of free time. He used this free time to

The Death of Ivan Ilyich was a short, but is one of the greates of fiction. Ivan was a successful member of the state bureaucracy. Through out his life he had to do arrange it without complication. He is the perfect example of conforming, such as ‘’other-directed’’ man because he discovers the lies behind his successful life. The story opens with a deeplu significant way. The reader later on talks about Ivans early years. First, Tolstoy presents the death of Ivan. He told his wife and closets friends, Pete Ivanovitch. They were really worry about Ivan’s life than any other could be. They also worry about their own affairs. They pretend that feelings of ehat they do not feel. Ivans life could be concern for him after

Leo Tolstoy wrote: The Death of Ivan Ilyich in 1886 to express his own view of how life should be lived and what truly matters most. According to Tolstoy, there are two ways of living life; first: by outer appearances a propriety; a decorum; and a standard of conduct. The second way is living by inner appearances and spiritual life in which he claims is “the real thing” that makes one’s life meaningful.

“How should life be lived?” This is a question that people repeatedly ask themselves during their life. Outside influences, such as the media, celebrities, and peer pressure force people to search for the answer to this question. As a result, many books have been written about how life should be lived, one of these being The Death of Ivan Ilych. In this novella, Leo Tolstoy tells the reader how to live a good life by describing the life and death of someone who lived “the simplest, the most ordinary, and the most awful” kind of life (95). Tolstoy achieves his purpose by using different figures of speech; specifically, he uses irony to demonstrate how Ivan, the main character, lived a bad life, personification to show why he lived a bad life, and rhetorical questions to explain how life should be lived.

The thought of death has probably crossed everyone’s mind at some point in life, how we perceive our lives before death is more relevant. We also learn that death is not something that we can control, it will happen one day or another. When reading the story, The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy, it brings to light the reality of life and death. In fact, I find this Novel intriguing in the aspect of how similar it is in the 21st century. Ivan Ilyich was an ordinary man that had mostly all the same desires we have today. He was a married man, had children, a home, and he had a job. We call that the American dream in today’s time. This is what makes us similar as well as, his approach to life and what he experienced in his last days of life.

Popular descriptions of Alexei Karenin label him as a cold and passionless government official who doesn’t care about his wife or family. Indeed, he is viewed as the awful husband who is holding Anna hostage in a loveless marriage. However, this is a highly exaggerated description, if not completely false, analysis of Karenin. Upon careful analysis of Karenin’s character and his actions, it is clear that he is not the person Anna makes him out to be. In fact, with thorough examination of the passage on pages 384 and 385 of Anna Karenina, it is clear that Alexei Karenin can be considered the hidden tragic hero of the novel.

Tolstoy started writing letters and notes to his family once he joined the military. This writing eventually turned into a hobby and then a career. Tolstoy wrote lots of literary works, most notable of which are, in no particular order, War

Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich tells the story of a modern lawman whose sudden mortality forces him to evaluate the worth of his life and the life choices he has. Throughout the novella, Tolstoy reveals social norms and practices blindly followed by those in the upper-middle class. These norms bring to light modernity’s core values, which Tolstoy critiques through the actions Ivan Ilyich takes before his death, Ivan Ilyich’s revelation as he lies on his death bed, and the way Ivan Ilyich’s family, friends, and colleagues react to his illness and eventual death. In fact, The Death of Ivan Ilyich provides a critique on modernity as a whole; Tolstoy condemns the shallow, superficial lives the higher-ups in society lead, spurred on by the idea of modernity.

We will begin with an analysation of his family situation. Praskovya, his wife, had been a love constructed from the start of an economic and sociological expectation rather than that of a true courtship. The happiness therefore of the union was derived solely of a necessity to fulfill a desire on the part of others for a “success” of sorts, surely her desire as well. “Ivan Ilyich could have counted on a more illustrious match, but even this one was quite good. He had his salary, and her income, he hoped, would bring in an equal amount. (Tolstoy, 56)” Tolstoy goes on to make several remarks on the benevolent nature of the relationship between he and his wife. The arrival of his children creates no great marker in his life, and proves to be little more than a factor in his ever-lengthening retreat into his life of solitude and work.

One of the main themes of War and Peace is the irrational nature of human behaviour. A clear example of this is the scandalous affair between Natasha Rostov and Anatole Kuragin. Natasha Rostov was happily engaged to Prince Andrey Bolkonsky, but suddenly ended the engagement because she fell in love with Anatole within a 3-day span and wished to elope and run away with him. Her cousin Sonya, upon learning of the affair directly from Natasha, commented “Natasha, I can’t believe you, you’re joking. In three days to forget everything, and like this…” (659). To this, Natasha responds “It seems to me as though I have loved him for a hundred years… You can’t understand that” (659). This relates to how irrational impulses are logical to an individual, but seldom to anyone else. To Natasha, following her heart means finding happiness, but her desires also blind her from reality and concrete truth.