I selected the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation -- I enjoyed their translation of Master and Margarita earlier this year, so decided to stick with it!

This novella really resonated with me, largely because of the recurring concept of 'comme il faut' haunting Ivan Ilych and his cohort. When forced to come to grips with whether his life had any meaning towards its end, Ivan repeatedly falls back to the idea that his life aligned with societal expectations as a cop-out. I'm at a stage of life where the pressure to fall into what is 'expected' of you is all-surrounding, and that pressure is newly bolstered by modern gameification rituals -- a personal finance flowchart methodically walking you through what accounts to invest in and at what amount, a bombardment of beige and warm neutral family pictures on any social media outlet, an algorithmically-picked moodboard and associated recommendations for any desire or trajectory imaginable. Little tidbits on social class struck me as holding as true today as they did in Tolstoy's Russia...

"It was the same as with all people who are not exactly rich, but who want to resemble the rich, and for that reason only resemble each other."

This is presented in the context of furnishings, but it's also true for the specific style of upward climbing that characterises Ivan's cohort.

Slight tangent, but this book reminded me a lot of a paper I read for a philosophy class a while ago -- Susan Wolf's The Meanings of Lives. I highly recommend it as food for thought.