SOURCE: Hustis, Harriet. “‘Three Rooms Off’: Death and the Reader in Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych.” LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 11, no. 3 (2000): 261-75.

In the following essay, Hustis examines the relationship between death and Tolstoy's narrative, contending that The Death of Ivan Ilych allows readers to circumvent the subjectivity of death and view it in aesthetic and more participatory terms.

Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych overtly casts the crisis of human death in textual form. This affinity between death and narrative is by no means unique; in fact, many nineteenth- and twentieth-century novelists and theorists have likened the finality of death to the conclusion of a narrative insofar as both seem capable of endowing a life, whether real or fictional, with retroactive significance. As Peter Brooks argues in Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, deathbed scenes offer a particularly striking example of the...