The Problem of the Near-Death Experience: Leo Tolstoy and Andrei Platonov

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article demonstrates the perspectives on near-death experience in two works, Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Andrei Platonov’s Soul. The author examines the significance of the boundary situation of death as a breakthrough to true existence through the experience of loneliness and abandonment; through suffering, and overcoming it through struggle; through acceptance of responsibility and existential communication. Tolstoy uses his protagonist’s situation to pose the question of man’s vocation, the true meaning of his life, which is disclosed only at the verge of death, revealing a different retrospective of his being. The situation for Platonov’s Dzhan people highlights the problem of existence of a collective subject connected to nature and tradition, acquiring its self-identity and historicity on the border of death. These situations express the cultural–historical repletion of the universal themes of existential philosophy: man’s finite nature, the riskiness of his being, his personal feat of rebellion against the absurdity of existence.