SOURCE: Engelberg, Edward. “Tolstoy's ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’: The Dying Life, Chekhov's ‘A Dreary Story’: The Living Death.” In The Elegiac Fictions: The Motif of the Unlived Life, pp. 87-96. University Park, Pa.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989.

In the following excerpt, Engelberg establishes parallels between Tolstoy's novella, Anton Chekhov's tale “A Dreary Story,” and Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis.

Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich preceded in date of publication Chekhov's less well-known “A Dreary Story” by three years: 1886 and 1889. Chekhov's tale has been called a response to the challenge laid down by Tolstoy's. Certainly both stories are sufficiently similar and dissimilar to be discussed together (as they have been), for each author explored a common problem from a somewhat different aperture.¹ It is worth knowing that, like Chekhov's story, Tolstoy's was originally planned as a first-person-narrative memoir, that is, Ivan telling his own story by means of...