Ivan Ilyich Essay

One of many themes, in Leo Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych”, is the Latin parable Respice finem—look before you leap—that is inscribed on a medallion attached to Ivan Ilych’s watch-chain. At first glance, this parable seems to appear quite incidentally; its significance, nonetheless, is paramount. Respice finem is not only reflected in the narrative’s physical structure, it augments Tolstoy’s didactic message of one’s mortality and the importance of abiding by the ‘golden rule’. Ivan Ilych’s life presents the reader with an example of the consequences one may face in the absence of foresight and without heed to the emotions of others. His life was imbued with the need to conform to those around him and deficient in both foresight and empathy,

The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate is about Ivan, a silverback gorilla who is raised by a human and lives in captivity at the Exit 8 Big Top Mall and Video Arcade. Ivan is brought to the Exit 8 after being captured and separated from his family while living in the wild. Ivan considers his new habitat a “domain” and refuses to admit that he is living in a cage. However, when Stella, an elephant, dies as a result of neglect, Ivan is forced to accept his situation. Moreover, he has to fight to keep the promise he made to save Ruby, a young elephant, from going down the same path as the rest of them. In her novel, The One and Only Ivan, Applegate uses characterization, setting, and plot to convey Ivan’s determination to become a protector.

A story, of any type, is greatly affected by the characters’ outlook on life. A bright, hopeful main character will give the narrative a more lighthearted feel, and cause the reader to feel encouraged and satisfied. If the character has a negative perspective, however, it can elicit sadness, pity, or even irritation from the reader. In Voltaire’s Candide and Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich, two characters with very different worldviews are displayed. The lighthearted Candide maintained an attitude of cheerfulness and perseverance even through the hardships of his life, which stems from his deep love and care for others, while the coldhearted despair of Ivan Ilyich is only intensified into anger by the feigned optimism of those around him.

In his novella, The Death of Ivan Ilych, Leo Tolstoy offers his audience a glance into the life and death of an ambitious man, Ivan Ilych. Tolstoy uses the death of Ivan Ilyich to show his audience the negative consequences of living the way Ilych did. Ivan Ilych followed society and made decisions based on what others around him conformed to and not so much about what he genuinely wanted until he was on his deathbed. As death approaches Ilych he realizes that he wrecked everything that should be meaningful in his life in order to work and make money and in the end his friends did not really care much about him. Ilych’s desire to conform made him live a miserable life and led him to darkness. Ivan Ilych attained everything that society

The author describes medicalized mortality as the natural process of aging/dying that has been altered by medicine. People die in the hospital in the name of receiving treatment. Lives are prolonged using medicine & technology. By the use of medicine/technology to prolong life, we inflict more harm and suffering to people and deny them their comfort of dying naturally in their homes. The death of Ivan illustrates suffering. He described his situation as torture, only him will understands the kind of pain he goes through. The modern medicine failed him since his health professionals were unable to diagnose him, and was denied compassionate care. Ivan also described his situation as depressing; he continues to live in anguish and fear of death.

Vladek went through the various Nazi genocide stages as brought out by Raul Hilberg. According to Hilberg, the four distinct phases of the Holocaust were identification, economic discrimination, and separation, concentration, and extermination. Although Vladek was not eventually exterminated, his close relatives and friends did not survive the lethal last stage through the various sugar-coated tactics employed by the Germans. The essay will scrutinize these Holocaust stages and relate them to the life events of the Vladek, the main character in Maus 1 and 2 written by Art Spiegelman. The works of other scholars in predicting the impacts of the Holocaust will also be looked at.

Ivan IV was a complicated man, with a complicated past, in a complicated country, in a complicated time; his story is not an easy one. Ivan the terrible, the man, could never be completely understood in a few words, nor in a few pages, and only perhaps in a few volumes. A man of incredible range his dreadfulness could only be matched by his magnificence, his love by his hatred.

George Dasch, was a German saboteur during WWII, and the leader of a four man group dropped by a U-boat off the coast of Long Island in June 1942. A second team was also dropped off the Florida coast. The saboteur's were recruited and trained in Germany in the use off explosives and sabotage. The intended long term objective was to cripple American infrastructure in areas of war time production. Upon landing and burying their explosives for use in a two year operation, Dasch's group was compromised by a Coast Guard patrol officer who immediately alerted his superiors. Still, Dasch and his colleagues safely made their way off the beach to Manhattan, New York. It was Dasch who defected and alerted FBI authorities as to his team's whereabouts,

I’m doing my report on Ivan the Terrible. Ivan Vasiljevich the Terrible was born in 1530 and died in 1584. He was the son of the Grand Duke Vasili III. His mother Helena Glinsky was the daughter of a Luthuanian refugee who had found asylum in Russia. She was young, vivacious, intelligent, and beautiful. Vasili had married her after he tried to have an heir for 20 years with his first wife Salome.

Imagine being captive in a concentration camp for over eight years. Ivan Denisovich Shukhov has experienced just this. In analyzing only one day of Ivan’s life in a concentration camp, he displays many traits that show that he is a hero. Hero, can be defined in many different ways. The definition from Webster’s dictionary states: Hero- a man of distinguished courage or ability, admired for his brave deeds and noble qualities. Shukhov definitely portrays courageous characteristics. He also has gained many abilities that people do not have, due to his experience in the concentration camp. Shukhov shows emotional, physical, and moral strength throughout this book. I believe this alone makes him a hero.

Though it may seem natural to desire a better place in society, this improvement may come at a price. In Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto, Marx discusses the various problems that arise in society to due capitalism and how to solve these problems through communism. Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich focuses on a man whose capitalistic desires end up causing his own downfall. Tolstoy and Marx would argue that some of the biggest problems with capitalistic societies are that they cause individuals to put on a façade and display a false persona for society while also prioritizing the more superficial aspects of life such as material goods and social status over family relations. The result of such a society is a working class that is

The elegant image of a bourgeois society with its emphasis on wealth and property, is only a mirage. Underneath it all is a different world of oppression—specifically, for women in the bourgeois class. In Henrik Ibsen’s play Hedda Gabler and Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, both works depict female characters in the bourgeois class who face the societal oppression and cope with it in their own way. These oppressions are often set off by the male characters, constructed by the bourgeois society.

Existentialism is a philosophical train of thought that examines the futility and absurd nature of life, and it is something I find myself struggling with more and more as I grow older. Solutions of religion, money, and power are all believed to be the remedy to what ails the mind, but the author Leo Tolstoy had a different interpretation, as seen in “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” This tale follows the events surrounding the last days before and after the death of middle class family man, Ivan Ilyich. This story is not about what caused his death or who avenged his death, but rather a story about finding acceptance in our own existence. By examining the final moments of Ivan’s life, Tolstoy uses Ivan’s death as a cautionary tale of what an aimless life can lead to and how to avoid it.

In 1908, the leaders of Russia and Austria-Hungary arranged to make an agreement that would help both nations achieve their international goals. Foreign Minister Alexander Izvolsky of Russia was looking to re-establish his country’s authority in Europe, which had been damaged after defeat by Japan in a previous war in the Far East (Trueman C. N., 2015). One goal for Baron Lexa von Aehrenthal, Foreign Minister of Austria-Hungary, was to gain better control of his nation’s Balkan territory. After the revolt in Constantinople by a group called the Young Turks in which they took control of the city, Austria-Hungary feared that Bosnia-Herzegovina would be the next to revolt (Schmitt, 1970; Hamilton & Herwig, 2003). Aehrenthal was also looking to prove that his nation was more than just a “satellite of Germany” (Trueman C. N., 2015). To achieve the goals of both parties, Russia agreed to support Austria-Hungary in annexing Bosnia-Herzegovina and, in turn, Austria-Hungary was to support the Russian use of the Bosporus and Dardanelle Straits, which had previously been barred. The latter part of this agreement was significant in that it would give Russia the ability to mobilize its navy from the Black Sea and, as previously mentioned, gain access to the British dominated Mediterranean. However, this part of the agreement was never carried out.