In On The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Azarov imagines himself exchanging personalities with Tolstoy's great character, Ivan Ilyich, who - as the story progresses - becomes more and more introspective and emotional while he ponders the reason for his own agonizing illness and death.

In On The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Azarov imagines himself exchanging personalities with Tolstoy's great character, Ivan Ilyich, who--as the story progresses--becomes more and more introspective and emotional while he ponders the reason for his own agonizing illness and death. In doing so, Azarov enlarges his personal experience by giving the most simple and most ordinary, and therefore most terrible, death of a close friend a mythic dimension... Azarov's fear of death leaves him, and as Tolstoy suggested, the terror attached to death itself disappears.