Abstract
Heidegger’s analysis of the meaning of death in Being and Time has been widely claimed as his most important contribution to philosophy. Critics have suggested that his investigation incorporates traces from the thought of Rainer Maria Rilke and Karl Jaspers.1 In the death analytic, however, Heidegger himself mentions neither the poet nor the philosopher but references only Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich,2 significantly, the only prose fiction work mentioned in Being and Time. Clearly Tolstoy’s novella made a lasting impression on Heidegger because in it he could find dramatically illustrated most of the characteristic behaviors and evasive attitudes uncovered in his own phenomenology of death. The Death of Ivan Ilyich, then, is an illuminating supplement — specific, personal and emotional — to what Heidegger universalized in his philosophy.
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