Question

Which themes are portrayed in this excerpt from Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich? Praskovya Fedorovna came of a good family, was not bad looking, and had some little property. Ivan Ilyich might have aspired to a more brilliant match, but even this was good. He had his salary, and she, he hoped, would have an equal income. She was well connected, and was a sweet, pretty, and thoroughly correct young woman. To say that Ivan Ilyich married because he fell in love with Praskovya Fedorovna and found that she sympathized with his views of life would be as incorrect as to say that he married because his social circle approved of the match. He was swayed by both these considerations: the marriage gave him personal satisfaction, and at the same time it was considered the right thing by the most highly placed of his associates. So Ivan Ilyich got married.

Answer 1

The themes that are portrayed in this excerpt from Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich are the following:

criticism of a middle-class lifestyle

the destructive impact of loneliness

the necessity of companionship

To add, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is considered one of the masterpieces of his late fiction, written shortly after his religious conversion of the late 1870s.