Use these text as reference for this prompt: Leo tolstoy: The death of ivan Ilyi

Use these text as reference for this prompt: Leo tolstoy: The death of ivan Ilyich, Ivan Turgenev: Fathers and Children, and Lenin’s Brother by Pomper. 
During the second half of this course we have encountered several fictive—and non-fictive—characters confronting death. These characters include Bazarov, Ivan Ilyich and Gerasim, the narrator in “The Meek Woman,” and Alexander Ulyanov. Semyonova also discusses the peasants’ views on death. (And you might also include Nechaev, who certainly expected, in the abstract, to die, and whose theories on the necessary mind-set of a revolutionary entail, at the very least, an implicit understanding that one will be likely to die as a consequence of one’s commitment.) There are a variety of questions to ask. For instance, do the peasants have a different understanding of death than the educated / creative class (the intelligentsia) or the revolutionaries (Bazarov, Pisarev, Nechaev, Ulyanov)? Feel free to formulate your own thesis on the topic of death, but make sure you strike a balance between the literature and the historical/ethnographic readings in the second half of the course.
You may also consider the wealthy authors’ views on death (Tolstoy / Turgenev) and their characters’ approaches to their own mortality (e.g., Bazarov’s, Ivan Ilyich’s vs. his servant Gerasim’s), as well as the revolutionaries’ (e.g., Alexander Ulyanov’s) and the peasants’ views on death (e.g., in Semyonova’s ethnography).
When you write your essay, please do not focus entirely on examples of death in the various texts and cultural artifacts (e.g., there is death in “The Meek Woman,” there is death in the painting of the battlefield by Vereshchagin). The question presupposes our awareness of a preoccupation with death and themes of mortality, so providing examples is insufficient. What we want to see are your explanations (plural) as to why Russian artists, architects, authors, students, political leaders in the second half of the 19th century gave so much thought to death and to themes of mortality. Your paper should be structured around your several explanations (which is analysis), and decidedly not by subject matter (which tends towards a summary-based format).