Big Read: The Death of Ivan Ilyich  Tags: slavic literature  

Ivan Ilyich’s illness forces him to divest his interest in his career, his card-playing, his social ambitions, and his fashionable purchases. His illness and death compel him to “simplify” his life. Research Tolstoy’s efforts to simplify his life, including his vegetarianism. Identify any “simplifying” trends in our own contemporary culture. Devise and carry out one to two exercises in which you simplify your life, archive them, and interview each other about the experience. Archive your investigation.

Research tips: Be sure to check the suggestions under "Searching for Tolstoy", "Google Books", "Another Approach", "Media", and "Biography and Bibliography" if you are having trouble getting started.

From Tolstoy's essay "The First Step", originally published in "Voprosy Filosofii i Psikhologii", 1892.

Tolstoy followed a number of paths to simplicity, many of which were documented in his letters and his diaries. There are many who wrote about Tolstoy's attempts to simplify his life, and it is possible to find works in Google Books and in any number of databases. Some of these are mentioned below.

A good place to look for Tolstoy's own writings on this topic is in the American Periodicals Series. A large number of articles about Tolstoy's life and philosophy can also be found through JSTOR.

The difficulty with this search, in general, is finding the correct terminology. Possible terms would be:

• Tolstoy and philosophy
  Tolstoy and biography
  Tolstoy and pragmatism
  Tolstoy and peasantry
  Tolstoy and simplicity
• 
  

You should be able to find articles on Tolstoy's method of simplifying his life in any number of sources using these headings. For example, a search in JSTOR on "Tolstoy and philosophy" will yield some 678 articles. To limit the numbers, the most effective strategy is to limit the "Disciplines" to just a few. For this search, the disciplines were limited to History, Philosophy and Religion. This reduced the matches to 278.

The advanced search in JSTOR will save you a great deal of time. The search interface will also identify images in the articles, which are available through the ArtStor database.

For this search, a quick scan of the first few matches will immediately show articles of interest. Among these was an article that appeared in an entire journal issue devoted to Tolstoy's life and works, which can be a very useful thing: