On The Death of Ivan Ilyich [Paperback]

In On The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Azarov imagines himself exchanging personalities with Tolstoy’s great character, Ivan Ilyich, who – as the story progresses – becomes more and more introspective and emotional while he ponders the reason for his own agonizing illness and death. In doing so, Azarov enlarges his personal experience by giving the most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible death of a close friend a mythic dimension... Azarov’s fear of death leaves him, and as Tolstoy suggested, the terror attached to death itself disappears.

This is a bilingual book, with English text pages following cover in English, and Russian text on the flip side following cover in Russian.

Vladimir Azarovis an architect and poet, formerly from Moscow, who lives in Toronto. He has published Three Books, Of Archtecture (with illustrations by Nina Bunjevac), Seven Lives, Broken Pastries, Mongolian Études, Night Out, Dinner With Catherine the Great, Imitation, Of Life and Other Small Sacrifices, The Kiss from Mary Pickford: Cinematic Poems, and Voices in Dialogue: Dramatic Poems – and with Barry Callaghan, Strong Words, translations in an English/Russian bilingual edition, of Anna Akhmatova, Alexander Pushkin and Andrei Voznesensky.