Ivan Ilyich Golovin has lived a perfectly respectable life—a good career, a suitable marriage, a comfortable home, all chosen for how they would look to others rather than how they would feel to him.

Then a minor fall brings a pain that will not go away, and Ivan is forced, for the first time, to confront the one fact his whole life was arranged to avoid: that he is dying, and that he has never really lived.

Tolstoy wrote The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories as a reckoning with mortality itself, and nearly a century and a half later, it remains unmatched in its power to unsettle.