The Riddle Of Life And Death : Tell Me a Riddle and The Death of Ivan Ilych

On the surface, these two stories have seemingly little in common, apart from the facts that the marriages portrayed are quarrelsome, a main character in each dies at its close, and the Americans in Olsen's story came originally from a village in Russia.

Most profoundly, of course, these two literary classics dare to pose difficult existential questions: What is the meaning of life?

Was my life of value? Why am I dying? The narrative employed in Tolstoy's novella is linear and realistically detailed.

The style of Olsen's story, set in the United States about a century later, is allusive, moving in psychological time, from the senses, voices, and scenes in the present to memories of the past.

Other differences are sharper still: Tolstoy's Ilych is a self-satisfied Czarist official; Olsen's protagonist Eva, is a 69 year-old dissatisfied working-class housewife, mother, and grandmother.

Tolstoy focuses entirely on the life of a 'model' man of his generation, who is successful professionally, though less so in his private life. Olsen often freeze-frames the views of various family members as each considers the grandparents Eva and David, whose quarrels send out concentric emotional ripples.

Unlike the ending of Tolstoy's story, in which only the dying Ilych comes to a moment of illumination, the denouement of Olsen's story is shared by those around the dying Eva, especially her husband David and her nurse/granddaughter Jeannie.