James Wood

This was a period of great turmoil in the novelist's life.

The big novels were behind him, War and Peace, 1869, Anna Karenina, 1878.

And he was in the midst of what we might call nowadays a midlife crisis.

Around the age of 51, 52, he wrote a book called A Confession, in which Tolstoy asked the question, why do I live?

Why do I wish for anything or do anything?

Is there any meaning in my life, he continued, that will not be annihilated by the inevitability of death which awaits me?

He continued that reason doesn't have the answer.

It arises in a relationship between the finite and the infinite.

How to live?

Well, according to God's law, says Tolstoy, in a way that will be somewhat familiar to readers of Anna Karenina.

According to God's law, to live is to love God.

In order to live according to God, one must renounce all the comforts of life, work, be humble, suffer, and be merciful.

But essentially, if we cut away a lot of that Tolstoyan pedagogy, we might say that what he really comes to understand in the course of writing a confession is that he will die.

And the death of Ivan Ilyich, this story of a most ordinary and in some ways therefore most terrible man, and his inability to understand that he will die, is the tale he takes up in The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

Elif, you have written...

brilliantly, precisely about this period in Tolstoy's life, in your first book, The Possessed.

You went to a conference, I think, at Jasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy's estate, and you were really looking at the last 20 or 30 years of

Tolstoy's life, its madness, its religious fanaticism.

And you were interested particularly in how he came to die.

That's a story of its own.