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

The relation between husband and wife in The Death of Ivan Ilyich leaves room for improvement. What is the source of the gap between them? Research Tolstoy’s personal life and his writings having to do with marriage in the 1880s. Based on your research and your analysis of the novel, play Dr. Phil to Praskovya Fyodorovna and Ivan Ilyich. Archive your project.

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.

Tolstoy wrote a great deal about marriage in his own novels and essays. There have been compilations of his letters and his wife's in the past. It is possible to get an overview of their relationship even by reading some of the extensive reviews of books such as Leo and Sonya.

If you want to see what kinds of materials have been written on the subject you can start with any of the databases listed on the "Searching Guidelines" page. Some other suggestions for searching this topic are included on this page.

The search you see below was performed in the Periodicals Contents Index (PCI), a.k.a. Periodicals Archive Online. A simple search on the terms "Tolstoy" and "wife" brings up over 1800 matches. Keep in mind that this database has articles from the beginning of the century and will include a great deal of material from around the time of Tolstoy's death.

While this search brings up a large number of matches, most are full text and easy to browse through. One of the first matches here is to the article "Tolstoy's Letters to his Wife" originally published in 1914. This article includes the text of some of the correspondence between Tolstoy and his wife.

One way to narrow such a search would be to limit to one of Tolstoy's works on marriage. Perhaps his most famous discussion of the subject appeared in "The Kreutzer Sonata," another of the author's novellas, first published in 1890 and almost immediately censored. You could construct a search in Periodicals Contents Index as shown below:

This search will provide a much more limited set of matches that makes the task more straightforward. The articles will still be drawn from everything published during Tolstoy's lifetime to 2000.

If you are interested in finding more contemporary views of Tolstoy's marriage, you might limit the dates in your search, or try a database that focuses on more current publications. Academic OneFile is a good example of such a database. It has some very useful features. One is that when you search "Tolstoy" you will get a list of subject subdivisions, one of which is "Tolstoy--Family". Clicking on this heading brings up the following item.

Notice that this is a "Multimedia" resource, as it is radio broadcast transcript. An embedded link in the record will allow you to listen to the broadcast.