APPRECIATION OF FICTION 
Project   
SUBMITTED TO- MR Rajiv Dwivedi 
 

SUBMITTED BY- 
Name-Amit Kumar Jha 
Roll no-2K19/CO/053 

 
 1 
 

Q1) Detailed critical analysis of any one character from 

the death of Ivan Ilych 
 

ANSWER:- 
The most interesting character I feel in this novella is Ivan Ilych. 
Ivan Ilych is the main character of the novella. The critical analysis 
of Ivan Ilych is given below:- 
 
“The Death of Ivan Ilyich” is a novella written by Leo Tolstoy, known as 
one of the masterpieces of his late literature, written shortly after his 
religious conversion in the late 1870s. The Death of Ivan Ilyich, generally 
considered to be one of the finest novels ever published, tells the story 
of a high-court judge in Russia in the 19th century and his suffering and 
death from a terminal illness. The detailed analysis of the prominent 
character is given below. 
 
The main theme and key shortcoming of Ivan are that he lives his 
life according to the dictates of others. Ivan blindly adopts the 
principles and ideals of aristocratic society rather than relying on 
his own reason and common sense to guide his moral life. Ivan is 
attracted to those of high social status, like a fly to bright light. He 
assumes that if he only imitates their actions and lifestyle, his own 
life will advance according to Plan and he will find purpose and 
satisfaction if he only runs on the prescribed tracks of high society. 
Ivan is fascinated with the etiquette of the upper class, the values 
 2 
 

of property, and decorum. He is beginning to behave as one 

should act in his place. He takes a wife because a wife should be 
taken by a young legal gentleman with secure means. Since a 
cultured aristocrat should have a material status mark, he Buys a 
house in the town and furnishes it with highbrow trappings. ​Ivan 
becomes more intolerant of all that threatens his comfort and 
material well-being as Ivan accustoms himself to ownership. From 
any painful impact, he fences himself off. When Praskovya 
presents her pregnancy with something unseemly and disgusting, 
Ivan retreats from his wife and loses himself in his official job. Ivan 
adopts a rigid, contractual stance toward his family when married 
life becomes rough. In every domain of his life, Ivan's technical 
capacity to reduce complex cases to mere forms on paper, to deal 
with potentially emotional man personal circumstances in terms of 
cold externals, is mirrored. He reduces his relationships to 
superficial, self-preserving simulations as Ivan scrambles to escape 
the negative. Ivan isolates himself from the rest of the world by 
following the ideals of aristocratic society, therefore, rather than 
using his purpose to explore what is genuinely important in life. 

Ivan, however, is more than just a misguided character. He is a 

representative figure in a broader moral scheme. The bourgeois 
sensibility that Ivan represents, the aristocratic type replete with its 
crass materialism and self- interest, is shown through Ivan's 
example to be inappropriate and utterly unfulfilling. Just as Ivan's 
demise makes him conscious of the error of his life, so too, it 
conveys the message to the reader that a life devoid of 
compassion and empathetic human connection will lead to a 
similar unfulfilling end. 
 3 
 

The disease of Ivan, then, can be seen as a healing​ force. It brought 

him face to face with his loneliness by pressuring Ivan to confront 
the possibility of his death. Ivan is frightened by the loneliness, 
prompting severe existential thought. And as Ivan starts to analyze 
his life, he gradually started to see that his life was not as it might 
have been, as he doubts his nature and the rationale behind his 
suffering. Ivan's condition reveals the true essence of life to him. 
When Ivan enters into the presence of the light at the climactic 
moment of the novel and discovers that compassion and love are 
the true ideals of life in which to live, the immense joy he feels is 
evidence of the excellence of such a life. 

In the novella “The Death of Ivan Ilych” nearly all the characters in the 
novel belong to the middle class, and he uses them to show in their way 
of life the vanity, pettiness, artificiality, selfishness, and uselessness that 
he sees. "Ivan Ilych himself is the embodiment of all these things, the" 
most plain and ordinary "man with the" most bad "life. To bring the 
middle-class world to life, Tolstoy fills the plot with details, from the 
furniture in Ivan's house to the correct etiquette everyone is so 
obsessed with. It is telling that a farmer is the only actual character in 
the novella​.- 

 
 
 
 
 4 
 

Q2) ​Detailed critical evaluation of any one theme from 

either of the texts ; 
a)The death of Ivan of Ilych and 
b)The man who died.  
 
Answer:- 

Meaning and Mortality (The death of ivan Ilych) 

 

 
Leo Tolstoy studies the human impulse to grasp meaning in the face of 
mortality in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a novella detailing the gradual 
death of a rich man. He begins to review his life as Ivan Ilyich succumbs 
to an ailment that is mysterious and incurable at the time , eventually 
concluding that he has wasted his energies focusing on his career and 
social status. To that end, he decides that nothing matters in life, 
because all he's ever believed in now seems empty and vain. In other 
words, all he has concentrated on has done nothing but distract him 
from the basic reality of life, which is that death is inevitable. From this 
thought, Ivan derives some satisfaction because he thinks the thought 
itself gives meaning to life. In reality, however, death's inevitability does 
not actually give life a sense of meaning or purpose; rather, it simply 
spells out an undeniable truth, one that Ivan can apparently only 
embrace by experiencing the death process. Consequently, Ivan Ilyich's 
Death does not reveal the purpose of life, but solely brings attention to 
a human willingness to squeeze out of presence a sense of greater 
 5 
 

significance. Tolstoy does not clearly show whether or not this is 
actually possible, either in a meaningful or religious way. 
​ For his entire life, by committing himself to his career and searching 
for ways to improve his social status, Ivan Ilyich has kept thoughts 
about death at bay. Ultimately, these activities blinded him from 
evaluating his own mortality. Then, when he falls ill and realizes that he 
is dying, he discovers it hard to understand this brutal truth. Of course, 
Ivan understands that he is mortal, however, this idea has always been 
denied at some stage. As a sick man, he believes in a popular syllogistic 
that helps people understand the fact that everyone dies, no matter 
who they are: "Julius Caesar is a man, men are deadly, so Caesar is 
mortal." However, when he considers this, he can not help but feel that 
he has "always been a special being, totally different from all others." 
get used to happiness. And that feeling is going to go numb. The 
pleasure of seeing the sunrise after the end of a frightening night will 
disappear. Pain does not only do it help us to learn and grow, but it also 
gives importance and sweetness to our happiness, it increases the 
value and pleasure of our happiness. In Ivan's narrow focus on his new 
experience, he had already accidentally come to see himself as 
immortal, successfully convincing himself that his life would be too 
unique and meaningful to ever come to an end. The specific way he 
moves through the world, his air of highly qualified gravitas, his 
subjectivity.  
 
However, at a certain point in his illness, Ivan can no longer ignore that 
he is going to die soon. The knowledge that everything he has done will 
save him from his fate comes with this realization; there is, he thinks, 
"nothing left but to die." Therefore, he cynically evaluates his life and 
recognizes that he has wasted it by concentrating on inconsequential 
issues such as power, status, and his career. This, in turn, causes the 
whole meaning of life to be challenged, wanting to know what really 
 6 
 

matters if not the superficial things that he used to hold dear. In 
addition, he asks, "Why all this horror?" the point of the painful 
suffering he endured throughout his illness. What's the reason behind 
this? It is worth pausing to consider who Ivan is addressing, exactly, at 
this moment.  
 
Although he hasn't shown any interest in religion, his big questions 
seem to be directed toward God, or at least toward something with an 
unknowable understanding of life and death, ultimately implying that in 
the face of death he is desperately grasping for answers. More 
significantly, however, his questions underscore his assumption that 
existence in the first place must have some sort of inherent, 
overarching meaning. When he decides that everything he has focused 
on in life has been a mere distraction from the inevitability of his own 
death, the closest Ivan gets to wringing meaning out of existence 
comes. He senses that these distractions have been nothing but "gross 
deception[s] obscuring life and death" once he acknowledges that he 
has squandered his life obsessing over meaningless things. Thinking 
this way, he embraces the only tangible truth about human existence, 
which is that everyone dies. This comes to him as something of an 
epiphany, suggesting that Ivan can only derive meaning from mortality 
by experiencing death for himself. And yet, this thought doesn't really 
add purpose or meaning to life and death, but it just gives him a bit of 
clarity about the inevitability of death.  
 
Nevertheless, Ivan experiences this moment of realization as filled with 
meaning, and in the final minutes of his life, he even appears to have a 
spiritual awakening, as death turns into "light" while he fades away 
from the material world himself. This religious awakening makes it 
possible for him to embrace his own death further, but in reality, it 
 7 
 

does not imbue his life with a sense of meaning, or at least not one that 
Tolstoy gives to readers. Instead, the understanding of Ivan only 
changes his connection to the fundamental dichotomy between life and 
death that people assume to be at the core of existence. He sees death 
turn into "light" when Ivan dies. The two states seem to join as one, 
demonstrating that death is part of life, not separate from it. And 
although this is perhaps somewhat profound and could strike Ivan as 
an epiphany, it is difficult to argue that it actually gives a sense of 
meaning to readers.  
 
The Death of Ivan Ilyich is deeply empty of any actual conclusions about the 
purpose of existence for a novel in which the protagonist thirsts to 
understand the meaning of life, rather than simply gathering a portrait of 
human desperation and uncertainty in reaction to shocking emotional facts.  
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 8 
 

Q (3) Write a Critical note on anyone 

a) Leo Tolstoy as a novelist 
b)D.H. Lawrence as a novelist 
 
 
Answer-  
a) Leo Tolstoy as a novelist:- 
   
Leo Tolstoy was a Russian writer who is considered to be 
one of the greatest writers of all time. He received numerous 
nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature each year from 1902 to 
1906 and nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1901, 1902, and 
1910, and it is a huge dispute that he never won. He was Born in 1828 
to an aristocratic Russian family, he is best known for the War and 
Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877) novels, also referred to as 
realist fiction pinnacles. With his semi-autobiographical trilogy, 
Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth (1852–1856), and Sevastopol Sketches 
(1855), he first gained literary acclaim in his twenties, based on his 
experiences in the Crimean War. Dozens of short stories and several 
novels are included in Tolstoy's literature, such as The Death of Ivan 
Ilyich (1886), Family Happiness (1859), and Hadji Murad (1912). He 
wrote plays and various philosophical essays as well. 
 
The literary works of Leo Tolstoy might be seen as 
repeated assaults on Romantic conventions. His opinion, expressed 
many times in his journal, was that both writer and reader. His aim was 
 9 
 

therefore to create a new, prosaic, matter-of-fact style, but sharp and 

full of contrasts, like life itself. The basic artistic approach of Tolstoy is 
to show everything in motion, the inner world of people and the life 
around them. By eliminating the veneer of tradition, he tried to expose 
the truth underneath. For precisely that purpose, with all its 
movements, inconsistencies, and ambiguity, Tolstoy was able to write 
War and Peace, a work portraying the everyday life of an entire period 
of history. Through art, Tolstoy, ever the moralist, sought to attain the 
truth. Art is the great unmasker in his conception; as he wrote in his 
diary on May 17, 1896, "Art is a microscope that the artist aims at the 
mysteries of his soul and that reveals these mysteries common to all." 
The microscope focuses on the telling detail, the seemingly 
meaningless gesture, the simplest expression. To Tolstoy, in some 
physical detail, every inner thought, sense, and emotion was reflected; 
the resulting psychophysical technique was to have a profound 
influence on later writers. Characters are reduced to one or two 
physical characteristics throughout Tolstoy's fiction; the palpable, the 
perceptible, the visible, the universe of Tolstoy.  
   
In this regard, Tolstoy's first artistic work, 'A History of Yesterday,' is 
telling. In the course of a day, it is simply an account of uninteresting 
things that occur. The problem of Tolstoy was to write down an 
accurate account of a full day: as he follows his mental associations and 
perceives how one thing leads to another, he leverages on the stream 
of consciousness. To explain something, one must go back in time to 
clarify its causes; the rational analyst is Tolstoy. In addition, what verbal 
expression does to what it describes is the problem. Thus, Tolstoy is a 
dual creator: he is not only the writer's writer but also the writer's 
analyst. He makes remarks continuously, interrupts them, questions 
himself. The analyst, Tolstoy, is also a creator who seeks to impose 
rational order on a series that is nothing more than a random 
 10 
 

succession of human acts. He pushed the analysis to extremes, and 

because he realizes that causation has no time limit.  
Thus, Tolstoy was experimenting with viewpoint and literary recreation 
of consciousness even at the beginning of his career. His filmography 
runs through this intense self-awareness. A life that goes by without 
awareness is a life that has not been lived, as he said in his diary on 
February 29, 1897: "The premise of life is freedom and awareness-the 
freedom to be aware." To promote such awareness, Tolstoy sought to 
present things in a new way. He was obliged to distort in order to do so, 
to make the familiar strange. "It is no accident that he turned first to the 
works of Tolstoy, perhaps the supreme practitioner of this device, as in 
the famous opera scene in War and Peace or the church service in 
Resurrection, when the Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky wanted 
to illustrate the technique he called ostranenie" (making strange, "or" 
defamiliarization). In such passages, the reader, for the first time, sees 
familiar experiences. Art has become a path to reality.  
This way of looking at reality, Tolstoy never abandoned: he portrayed 
cause and effect, in the pattern. He chose the facts to be described first; 
then he arranged them. Before him, and even in a novelist such as 
Dostoevski, the technique of the artist was to show the outcome and 
then explain how it came to be after representing the present, to go 
back into the past. The reverse was Tolstoy's method: to demonstrate 
the cause and then the outcome.  
 
Hence, the uniqueness of Tolstoy is how his imagination was 
never daunted. His world is large, and his characters have their own life 
and are not his puppets – even the ones he set out to disapprove of, 
such as Anna Karenina. His descriptions – of battlefields or 
mushroom-picking or meals – are full of exactly the right amount of 
idiosyncrasy and detail. He gives us more than enough information and 
 11 
 

still leaves space for the reader's imagination. He is the only writer I am 
not bothered by reading in translation: I don't notice what I might be 
missing as he sweeps me along. Celebrating him, we should also 
celebrate Constance Garnett, who changed the English novel and the 
English reader by translating the great Russians.