📚Hard Times
✍🏻Author: Charles Dickens
💬Language: English
🗓DOP: 1854
🌬Genre: #realism

📝Summary:
"My satire is against those who see figures and averages, and nothing else," proclaimed Charles Dickens in explaining the theme of this classic novel. The story concerns one Thomas Gradgrind, a "fanatic of the demonstrable fact," who raises his children, Tom and Louisa, in a stifling and arid atmosphere of grim practicality.

🔮Interesting Facts:
It is by far the shortest of Dickens's novels, barely a quarter of the length of those written immediately before and after it. Also, unlike all but one of his other novels, Hard Times has neither a preface nor illustrations. Moreover, it is his only novel not to have scenes set in London.

🔎Background:
One of his reasons for writing it was that sales of his weekly periodical "Household Words" were low, and it was hoped the novel's publication in instalments would boost circulation – as indeed proved to be the case.

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📚The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Russian: Смерть Ивана Ильича)
✍🏻Author: Leo Tolstoy
💬Language: Russian
🗓DOP: 1886
🌬Genre: #fiction #philosophy #novella

📝Summary:
Hailed as one of the world's supreme masterpieces on the subject of death and dying, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the story of a worldly careerist, a high court judge who has never given the inevitability of his dying so much as a passing thought. But one day, death announces itself to him, and to his shocked surprise, he is brought face to face with his own mortality.

🔮Interesting Facts:
The Death of Ivan Ilyich is considered one of the masterpieces of his late fiction, written shortly after his religious conversion of the late 1870s Widely considered to be one of the finest novellas ever written.

🔎Background:
This short novel was an artistic culmination of a profound spiritual crisis in Tolstoy's life, a nine-year period following the publication of Anna Karenina during which he wrote not a word of fiction.

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