Let's dig up that little green stick

On the road to nowhere

Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian novelist (War and Peace), died on this day in 1910. Near the end of his life he wrote:

"The meaningless absurdity of life is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man."

In his later masterpiece, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy tells the harrowing story of the slow, and then rapid, decline of Ivan Ilyich, a judge who has never before given death a second thought. Ilyich the materialist, forced to confront the stark truth of his inevitable passing, turns metaphysical: Will his death be his destruction?

"Death is over; there is no more death," are Ivan Ilyich's last words.

Tolstoy himself, as he neared death, resolved to find a more spiritual life on earth – at the age of 82, he ran away from home. He contracted a chill on the train, forcing him to disembark at a station along the way. The chill turned to pneumonia, and he died in the stationmaster's room, surrounded by journalists, who recorded his last words:  "But the peasants – how do they die?"

As he had requested, Tolstoy was buried on his estate, at a spot where his brother once claimed to have buried a little green stick on which was written the secret of universal love and understanding.

Read Ivan Ilyich's story: