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TITLE DEED HOW THE BOOK GOT ITS NAME

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From: The Sunday Telegraph London
Date: 20080106
Author:Solzhenitsyn in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) he presented him as a disconcerting Everyman. GARY DEXTER

'The death of

Ivan Ilyich'

By

Leo Tolstoy

The simplicity and power of this novella, the story of the terrible encroachment of death

on a shallow man spiritually unprepared for it, has staggered millions (on reading it in 1886, Tchaikovsky feverishly recorded in his diary: 'I am convinced that the greatest author-painter who ever lived is Leo Tolstoy.') The tale's original title was The Death of a Judge. It was inspired by events surrounding the death of a judge at the court of Tula in 1881, Ivan Ilyich Mechnikov, which Tolstoy had heard about from Mechnikov's brother, and began as a diary ...

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