Living life to the design of society, a formulaic lifestyle based on proprietary, will inevitably lead to regrets on the death bed. Without any spice, the meal of life becomes a drab state of affairs, lacking meaning or substance. In Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, the title character lives such a life. For instance, Ivan only marries his wife, Praskovya Fëdorovna, only because it would be the proper thing to do. As Tolstoy writes, “[the marriage] was considered the right thing by the most highly placed of his associates” (821). Almost immediately, Ivan starts to loathe his wife because she begins to “disturb the pleasure and propriety of their life” (821), the very thing that makes his life so dull in the first place. Later, due to