The Death of Ivan Ilyich
In 70 pages Tolstoy does what most writers cannot do in 700: he makes you feel what dying is actually like. Ivan Ilyich lived a perfectly ordinary, perfectly respectable life — and in the moment of death discovers it was all wrong. The most devastating novella in any language.
The illness eats up half the book, and some readers find that stretch oppressive rather than moving: one complains flatly “half the book was the guy dying.” The explicit religious resolution in the closing pages strikes a chunk of readers as tacked on rather than earned, and Cioran himself is on record as one of the doubters, the book simply “didn't please Cioran.” Translation quality is its own gripe; readers on older or cheaper editions call the prose stiff, one admitting “the translation wasn't the best thing.” Others wanted the ending's spiritual dimension made concrete instead of symbolic, saying it “would have been more spiritual” if Tolstoy had committed further.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
