The greatest sin, Ivan realizes on his deathbed as his son kisses his hand, is to cause others to suffer. In great physical pain, Ivan feels a release of mental anguish as he repents of the misery he has inflicted on his family. For Tolstoy, at this stage in his life—and yet the idea is already there in Anna Karenina—selfhood emerges most fully through serving and helping others.

It would be hard to imagine two works more different than Pride and Prejudice and The Death of Ivan Ilyich. As many critics have noted, there is very little death in Austen. All of that little bit occurs off-stage, such as Mrs. Churchill's death in Emma, which is reported after the fact. There is no death in Pride and Prejudice. Of course, in contrast, death is central to Ivan Ilyich. We hear Ivan's nighttime screams of agony. We experience the dying Ivan getting relief by draping his legs over his servant's shoulders.

Austen's notion of selfhood has less to do with serving others (though Pride and Prejudice admires that trait, such as when Mr. Darcy saves Lydia) than in being true to oneself. Elizabeth Bennet has a great deal of life and selfhood in the novel because she constantly fights to maintain her integrity. For example, she won't marry to help her family, though a union with Mr. Collins would be beneficial. She won't marry Mr. Darcy when she feels belittled and degraded by him. She won't subject her will to Lady Catherine's when that woman tries to forbid her to marry Darcy. One can easily imagine that Elizabeth is not the self sacrificial woman Tolstoy would approve of.

We could say that the characters in Pride and Prejudice are living firmly and solely in the pre-death material world that also preoccupies many of the characters in Ivan Ilyich, who are more concerned with pensions and advancement than suffering or their souls. Suffering in Austen involves not finding the right husband, not having enough money to live in the style to which one is accustomed, and being insulted in the drawing room. It never gets to the contemplation of the intense existential suffering that Tolstoy examines.

In the later stages of his life and career, Tolstoy devoted himself to a form of Christian rationalism which was both a rejection of some of the attitudes expressed in his earlier work, for which he is best known, but at the same time an extension of the themes in those great books, War and Peace, and Anna Karenina.

In The Death of Ivan Ilyich,Tolstoy stresses that his protagonist's story is not in any way unusual and that it is therefore "all the more terrible." Ivan Ilyich is a basically good, decent man who lives for the material world. In this, he's no different from the vast majority of people. It is only with the onset of his illness that he begins to see a disconnect between himself, suffering with the disease that has now become the center of life, and the earthly world around him, including his wife and children. A major point made by Tolstoy is that those who are not facing imminent death generally act as if death is so remote that it has no bearing on us and that the reality of it can be safely ignored. Ivan Ilyich is suddenly plunged into a world of physical pain in which all the material values of his life—those values which all of us hold—are suddenly made irrelevant. Until this point, the spiritual world and the preparation for the next life have been of no concern to him, and until the final three days before his death, he still does not grasp that his preoccupation with the material world is the ultimate error, the ultimate sin.

One can relate this to the themes of Jane Austen's fiction, but only in the general sense that in Pride and Prejudice the issue is centered around the question of whether one should marry primarily for money, or for deeper reasons. Tolstoy's philosophy is much more radical. Both his life and work underwent a steady transformation from his youth to old age. In War and Peace and in Anna Karenina he celebrates earthly life, while at the same time being critical of the amorality of the Russian upper classes. In his own life, Tolstoy spent his youth as a ladies' man before settling down and marrying, but in later middle age he increasingly rejected the materialistic life. He wore a peasant's blouse and went to work in the fields, doing the plowing, mowing, and harvesting alongside his farm workers. He became (or tried to become) an ascetic, wishing to avoid normal marital relations with his wife. And he renounced the copyrights to his books. The literature he continued to produce became scaled-down, simplified parables with a religious message. All of this was a rejection of normal earthly existence, which he regarded as sinful. "Normal earthly existence" and the devotion to the material world, after all, is the lifestyle that Ivan Ilyich, amid the agonies of his death bed, realizes has been his ultimate error.