Three stories of suffering - Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich and others

Back to Tolstoy - another great Pevear-Volokhonsky translation (nothing will stop those guys!), this time of "The Death of Ivan Ilyich and other stories" - remembering again what a pleasure it is to read Tolstoy, with his nearly transparent prose, as if you are living right within the story, the narrator himself, the novelist, seems to vanish, to disappear from the process. It's the opposite, say, of Proust - an equally great writer, but when you're reading Proust you're constantly aware of the writer and the writing (Dostoyevksy, too, though in his case you're aware of the narrative as well, yet always conscious that D is telling the tale in his own hyperdramatic manner). The first three stories in the collection are all, each in its own way, about suffering: Prisoner of the Caucasus (supposedly a true account) about a soldier held captive and his escape, very powerful tale, today would be told as a buddy movie, guy gets out of captivity with help from a young girl (whose dad is one of the captors), another prisoner physically unable to escape - is ransomed, last haunting line of the story is that when they got him home he was all but dead; Diary of a Madman (unfinished) is a very revealing story about Tolstoy's own life, as main character suffers from severe paranoia or trauma of some sort and when he realizes that he should give his belongings to the poor he feels a return of peace an sanity, though he knows others will believe him insane - an allegory of Tolstoy's last days (at least as T would like to see them). Am still reading the title story, but I'd forgotten how the opening section is about the reaction to the deathly - all of Ivan's friends and coworkers wondering how this will affect them/their careers and thankful it's not they who'd died.