The Denseness is the Absurd: The Life in the Death of Ivan Ilych

It is, perhaps, the problem of the so-called culture, or conventions of the bourgeois life at the heart of Tolstoy's story, which hides “the bitter, useless pain of a failed and ruined life” (Lukács, 1974: 56) from Ivan Ilych's eyes, and the problems aroused through it, encounter Ivan Ilych face to face with the absurdity of life, since “that denseness and that strangeness of the world is the absurd” (Camus, 1991: 11), and which way of life is denser than bourgeois life? However, in Ivan's case, it is his fatal disease that finally opens his eyes to the light which has been covered before. In this study, the researcher tries to investigate the meaning of life and death in Tolstoy's story, The Death of Ivan Illych, through Albert Camus' theory of Absurdism, defined in his The Myth of Sisyphus, alongside three other sources about bourgeois style, one by Vladimir Nabokov, and two by the prominent Marxist thinker Georgy Lukács.