SOURCE: “Master and Man and The Death of Ivan Ilych,” in Critical Essays on Tolstoy, edited by Edward Wasiolek, G. K. Hall & Co., 1986, pp. 175-79.

In the following essay, initially published in 1904, Mikhaylovsky contrasts Tolstoy's approach to death in The Death of Ivan Ilych and Master and Man.

How does one preserve life without the thought of death that poisons one's existence? How does one burn out, destroy this fear of death that, as we have seen, “is put into everyone?” This is Tolstoy's main task lately. Although it concerned him before, now he is exclusively concerned with it, and all his writings are merely peripheral to it, connecting the various points of his outlook with this fear of death at its center.

All of his discussions of physical labor, about “harness,” pure air of the fields and woods, and other hygienic features of his moral doctrine belong...