Please remember that you are permitted to create your own blog topics on subjects related to what we have been studying – if these topics don’t suit!

Tolstoy: The Death of Ivan Illych & Master andMan

Tolstoy brings us to one of the high points of 19th Century Literature. He explores with such uncompromising depth, issues of profound human concern. What we have explored in Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, Matthew Arnold and others here comes into focus with a white heat. Life and death and the ultimate meaning of all our lives on earth are here brought powerfully into focus. How can we read about Ivan’s death or the death of Brekhunov and not be stirred into an examination of the way we are living our own lives? It is this kind of direct confrontation that Tolstoy produced for himself in his writing and inevitably for all his readers…