Tolstoy wrote his short novel The Death of Ivan Ilyich after a dark night of the soul that led him to question his entire life, and eventually to find comfort in Christianity and peasant simplicities. The book is a coded version of his suffering and makes tough, but ultimately deeply rewarding listening. Oliver Ford Davies, the philosopher and actor fresh from a memorably gruff rendering of Diogenes Laertius for the Naxos audiobook Ancient Greek Philosophy, makes the dying Ilyich touchingly human.

Painfully and slowly, Judge Ivan Ilyich is dying and, as he does so, he comes to recognise the truth about his impeccable life. For all his propriety and success, it has been meaningless and empty. Ilyich loathes his wife and realises his ‘concerned’ colleagues are merely waiting to step into his shoes. And he recognises the selfless devotion with which he is cared for by the peasant boy Gerasim as the only real truth in the whole of his own shallow life. Only at the end, when Ilyich breaks through the ‘black sack’ of death, is he absolved. Ford Davies’s leisurely narration and the passages of Russian music complement Tolstoy’s serious theme and his presentation of Ilyich’s anguished emotions is masterly.

Enough of these homegrown comedies of manners. There aren’t many jokes in this relentless novella about a cold, calculating, materialistic minor member of the St Petersburg judiciary, whose only ambition is to keep up with the Ivanovs. Until, that is, he falls ill with a mysterious terminal disease that opens his eyes to the shallowness of his friends, his family and, most of all, himself. Tolstoy’s prose is majestic, his pace measured, his characters unflinchingly true to life, his message bleak. If you’ve never read any Tolstoy, best not start with this one – you might top yourself before you get round to Anna Karenina.

In the lovely, low tones of a fine storyteller, Oliver Fox Davies guides us through the stages of Tolstoy’s mini masterpiece. Davies’s skill with inflection, even within words, heightens the social satire of the early section and shifts with Ilyich’s slide into ever increasing pain and irritability. With the terror and anguish of approaching death, his voice grows convincingly hoarse. Until his illness, Ivan Ilyich had never reflected on his life. But he slowly comes to see his life as ‘a terrible, huge deception which had hidden life and death.’ As he lays dying, his lifelong friends think of the promotions that may come their way, and his wife ‘began to wish he would die, but she didn’t want him to die because then his salary would cease.’ He has always avoided human connection, but through the tender ministrations of a peasant he comes to recognize the ‘mesh of falsity’ in which he’s lived. Written more than a century ago, Tolstoy’s work still retains the power of a contemporary novel.

Tolstoy’s novella offers a penetrating examination of the Christian faith and the nature of life and death. Listeners will also be sure to delight in Tolstoy’s sharp and sometimes satirical eye for the very modern-sounding details of the life of a nineteenth-century Russian bureaucrat. With masterful ease, a warm tone, and conversational pacing, British actor Oliver Davies captures Ivan Ilyich’s preoccupation with interior decorating and debt and his avoidance of family weddings and home remedies. Then the shadow of death wipes away all trivialities and pretence. This work’s prose and performance are so vivid, so human, and so listenable that there’s no doubt why Tolstoy stands as one of the giants of world literature.