Back Next
The Death of Ivan Ilych Study Guide
Leo Tolstoy: A Concise Biography
Leo Tolstoy, born on September 9, 1828, in Yasnaya Polyana, Russia, was a renowned Russian author and philosopher. He hailed from an aristocratic family and received his education at Kazan University, although he left without completing his degree. Tolstoy's early years were marked by a series of personal and financial difficulties, which influenced his later works.
Tolstoy gained literary acclaim with his semi-autobiographical trilogy, "Childhood," "Boyhood," and "Youth." His monumental novels "War and Peace" (1869) and "Anna Karenina" (1877) solidified his reputation as one of the greatest novelists of all time. Beyond his literary achievements, Tolstoy was a moral thinker and social reformer. He advocated for nonviolence, simplicity, and Christian anarchism, which later influenced figures like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
In his later years, Tolstoy experienced a profound spiritual crisis, leading him to renounce his wealth and adopt a more ascetic lifestyle. He died on November 20, 1910, at the age of 82, after fleeing his home in an attempt to escape the pressures of his life and family.
Historical and Literary Context for "The Death of Ivan Ilych"
"The Death of Ivan Ilych," published in 1886, is one of Tolstoy's most profound novellas, written during a period of intense spiritual and philosophical exploration. This work emerged in the aftermath of Tolstoy's existential crisis and conversion to a radical form of Christianity, which rejected the materialism and superficiality of Russian aristocratic society.
The novella reflects the social and intellectual currents of late 19th-century Russia, a time of significant social change and intellectual ferment. The Russian Empire was grappling with modernization, industrialization, and the aftereffects of the Emancipation Reform of 1861, which freed the serfs. These upheavals brought about a questioning of traditional values and a search for new social and moral frameworks.
Literarily, "The Death of Ivan Ilych" is a masterpiece of psychological realism. It delves into the existential themes of mortality, the search for meaning, and the alienation of modern life. The story follows the life and death of Ivan Ilych, a high-ranking judge who, upon facing a terminal illness, confronts the emptiness of his existence and the superficiality of his social relationships.
Tolstoy uses Ivan Ilych's journey to critique the shallow values of the upper classes and to explore deeper philosophical questions about life, death, and the possibility of spiritual redemption. The novella's stark portrayal of the human condition and its moral introspection resonate with Tolstoy's own spiritual beliefs and his dissatisfaction with contemporary society.
Overall, "The Death of Ivan Ilych" stands as a powerful testament to Tolstoy's literary genius and his profound engagement with the existential dilemmas of human life.
Want to generate unlimited academic essays?
Unlock endless possibilities for your academic writing! 
Our tool helps you craft high-quality, original essays in no time. Whether you're tackling complex topics or need help structuring your thoughts, we've got you covered. Start creating with ease and elevate your academic performance today!
About Rephrasely
Getting your wording just right
Paraphrasing is a natural part of the writing process as it helps you clarify your thinking and suit your words to your audience. Using a Rephrasely helps structure and streamline this work, and our paraphrase tool offers 20 modes, many of them free, for accomplishing just this. The 20 modes we offer are diverse, including a summarize tool, a free grammar checker, a mode to simplify text, and a sentence shortener. There are sentence rephrasers and paraphrase rephrase tools, and we pride ourselves on having both, since our reword generator accounts for context at both the sentence and paragraph levels.
When you google paraphrase you will get a variety of results, from a free Rephrasely, to an article spinner, to a general phrase tool, and it can be hard to determine which of these rephrase tools will best help you complete your work. If you simply need to get a word rephrase, that is, reword only small elements within the sentence, many tools will suffice, but there is the risk that you end up with a tool that does not consider context and produces very awkward and ungrammatical sentences. Rephrasing is very much an art, and we’ve built our paraphrase bot to produce the most correct results in 20 modes in over 100 languages, making it the best paraphrasing tool at an exceptionally low cost. So whether you need to paraphrase deutsch, paraphrase greek, or paraphrase bahasa melayu, the next time you think, I need something to paraphrase this for me, you’ll know where to turn.
From keywords to paragraphs
Generating paragraphs with unique ideas can be challenging, and too often writers get stuck at this stage of the writing process. With our paragraph tool, you can enter keywords and let our AI generate paragraphs for you, so that you can have something to work with, refine the output, and become more engaged in your writing.
A paragraph generator creates links between your ideas, such that the output is sensible, unique, and stimulating, very close to what you would expect a thoughtful human paragraph writer to produce.
Paragraph makers are nice, but what about a short story generator? Because our AI is generalized, it serves a story generator, an essay generator, a poem generator, and much more. To generate compelling stories, you should provide the story generator with useful keywords from which it can develop plot elements, including characters, setting details, and any situational information. To generate reasonably good essays, you should likewise provide the essay maker with details around argumentative positions and any other pertinent ideas. If you more specifically want an introduction paragraph generator or conclusion paragraph generator, you can provide starter text and keywords that will best enable our essay creator to produce them.
You may well ask, “is this essay generator free?” Everything on this site is free within a 3-day trial, so you can test and develop confidence in our products. You may also be wondering where this is an essay automatic writer or if it will take a while to get results. All results appear within a matter of seconds, so you can move through your work as quickly as possible.
You may have professional needs for creating paragraphs as well, such as those needed for cover letter. Most of the time a cover letter template includes information that is not relevant to you; by using your own keywords, we can produce cover letter examples that are relevant to your use case and often require very little editing. By using this service, you can also learn how to write a cover letter and achieve the cover letter format you need.
Plagiarism checker free
Like everything else on our site, you can check plagiarism free within a trial, which is a great opportunity for those who want to check a paper for plagiarism without committing to paying before they see results. This free plagiarism checker is great for students and clearly indicates how to check for plagiarism by highlighting areas of similarity between the two texts. Just to be sure you are not accidentally plagiarizing, be sure to check all of your paraphrases as well.