playbill vip

Tolstoy lived and died in search of spiritual enlightenment. The legendary writer, an international celebrity in his own time, had his own death publicized. On his last legs, he traveled out to a train station where news crews with cameras from major publications (including the New York Times) captured his final moments on film. Tolstoy had asked his handlers to ask him a series of questions at the moment of death, so his findings about the next world could be recorded: did he see a light, did he hear a voice, what was revealed to him? By that time, Tolstoy had worked through many religious revelations and conversions, studied the faraway practices of Buddhism, and spent bouts living with the honest peasantry in order to get closer to God. In his final moments, as he passed from this world, the people instructed to ask him the specially chosen questions were distracted by the commotion of the news crews, and they forgot. Sonja, his beleaguered wife, peered in through the station window (she was not allowed inside) as pneumonia overtook him. No one knows what he discovered in his last moments.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich is not about a man like Tolstoy, deeply invested in matters of the soul. Ivan is much more like the rest of us — caught up in the throes and minutiae of his own life, career, marriage. But death comes to us all, and in the final moments, Ivan Ilyich has to grapple just as Lev Nikolayevich did, as we all will, with letting go of this world and all he holds dear in it. People say that when you die, your life flashes before your eyes. No one says how long that lasts, what moments you see, or in what order. Maybe all those incredible thoughts, sufferings, and realizations happen in one instant that lasts a century, a lifetime. We didn’t get to ask Tolstoy. We do get to ask Ivan. 

Leo Lion

Coming This May - Tickets Now On Sale 

Phoenix Theatre Ensemble At The Sheen Center