What is Big Read?
From 30 March - 27 April 2008, the University of Illinois Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center, and the School of Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics, and --together with the Champaign Public Library, the Urbana Free Library and other partners--will bring the experience of reading Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich to Champaign-Urbana through the National Endowment for the Arts Big Read Program.
Tolstoy writes, "Ivan Ilyich's life had been most simple and commonplace--and most horrifying." This sentence lays out a strange and unexpected equation. On the one side, we have a simple, ordinary life, with its pleasures and disappointments, its ups and downs, nothing out of the way, no great crimes or sins-a life like you and I lead. On the other side, we have this outlandish, shocking evaluation of this quite ordinary life as "the most terrible." What does it mean to equate an ordinary life with something unspeakably horrible? Ivan Ilyich, an ordinary family man with a successful career as a judge in St. Petersburg, finds himself confronted by a fatal illness that begins on the day he finishes redecorating his apartment. A few unpleasant symptoms--a strange taste in his mouth and a nagging pain in his side--grow into unbearable pain and suffering. Ivan Ilyich's illness turns everything in his life upside down. He is compelled to re-examine his entire life according to a new, severe law of right and wrong. His illness and self-examination take him on a journey away from the world of work and social life, away from colleagues, friends, doctors, his wife, and children to an unfamiliar territory of the medical world, where he feels humiliated and alone, but where he also begins to find his inner self.
To assist in the communal reading of this evocative work, a variety of public programs are scheduled. Please check the calendar of events and mark your calendars to attend these events!
The Big Read is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts designed to restore reading to the center of American culture. Its purpose is "to bring the transformative power of literature into the lives of citizens" and to share a love of reading by providing them with the opportunity to read and discuss a single book within their communities. The NEA presents The Big Read in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services and in cooperation with Arts Midwest. To read more about the NEA Big Read program, click here.