He reads the books everybody else reads, goes to the same plays, socializes with the right sort of friends, does exactly what is required of him when he becomes a judge. When things aren t easy, pleasant and agreeable fight with the wife, trouble with the children he runs off to play cards with his buddies, who know enough not to talk about unpleasantries. One day, while putting up curtains in his new dream house, he bumps his side. When the pain doesn t go away, he goes to doctors, who don t know what s wrong and can t help him. The pain gets worse.
Specialists mull over treatments without success.
Ivan can no longer work, play cards or otherwise enjoy the agreeable life he s partitioned off for himself. He loses weight and sees what looks like a corpse in the mirror. Forty-five years into his life, Ivan Ilych, seemingly for the first time, realizes that he is mortal. This despair goes on for more than half the length of the novella, and Tolstoy s eye is steady, grueling and relentless. And that, conversely, avoiding thoughts about mortality your whole life makes it impossible to live life with full consciousness and feeling.