The Death of Ivan Ilych
By Leo Tolstoy

A long short story or novella, this was the first major fictional work Tolstoy undertook after he finished Anna Karenina. In its most basic form, the book is a discussion of the meaning of life after a man's death. Like many of his longer works, this one is marked by Tolstoy's realism and philosophical point of view—yet because of his crisis of faith, the shorter work is also much more stark in its questionings of a life worth living.