The Death of Ivan Ilyich

The success of the 2022 film Living (the screenplay for which, by Kazuo Ishiguro, has been nominated for an Academy Award—as has Bill Nighy’s lead performance) has sparked renewed interest in the works that inspired it. Ishiguro’s script reimagines Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film, which was in turn inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s classic novella from 1886, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. The most recent—and, many would say, the finest—English-language translation of that work is Kirsten Lodge’s 2016 translation for Broadview Press. The existing Broadview edition of The Death of Ivan Ilyich and two other works of short fiction by Tolstoy is published in the publisher’s standard academic format—with a scholarly introduction, extensive annotations, and appendices of contextual materials. Now, for those whose interest is simply in Tolstoy’s fiction itself, a special Trade edition—made up of Tolstoy’s work, with no extraneous material—is being made available. The Trade edition, released March 1, 2023, is published in eBook format only.