Tolstoy, Leo Nikolayevich. Hailed as one of the world’s supreme masterpieces on the subject of death and dying, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” is the story of a worldly careerist, a high court judge who has never given the inevitability of his death so much as a passing thought–until death announces itself to him, and to his shocked surprise he is brought face to face with his own mortality.