Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.' - Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich The Death of Ivan Ilyich, first published in 1886, is a novella by Leo Tolstoy, one of the masterpieces of his late fiction, written shortly after his religious conversion of the late 1870s. The novella tells the story of the death of a high-court judge in 19th-century Russia.