Death of Ivan Ilych

I spell Mr. Ilych's name wrong in a previous post...but here is the link to Tolstoy's classic novel...

The President's bioethics council has a book where they use exerpts from classic literature to discuss bioethics...one of the excerpts is from this novel...another is the harrowing childbirth scene from Kristin Lavransdattir, where she almost dies of childbirth...The Kristin Lavransdattir triology is not well known in the USA, partly because the translation was so archaic that it discouraged readers. But now it has been newly translated, and republished...it is essentially a story of a medieval housewife, and if you think that sounds boring, think "Dallas" or "Falcon Crest" in medieval Norway.

Part one was made into a movie, but tell you the truth, the movie was not made as "Dallas" but as a clone of Wild Strawberries or the Seventh Seal: Artsy, with all the plot based on sexual repression...they miscast the pudgy but loyal boyfriend (think John Candy) as a handsome young man, and miscast the Clinonesque lover as a quiet repressed but not very sexy young man (in the book, he is Tom Cruise, in the movie, a klutz). And Kristin's father, an upright man greatly loved by all, is played in the movie as the usual ogre...

Oh well....so much for "multiculturalism"...