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.