Tolstoy wrote many works of non-fiction, and professed a preference for these explorations of ethics and religion compared with his novels and short stories. The fiction writer in him, however, was hard to suppress. Tolstoy's late novel, Hadji Murad, was never published during his life; this fact suggests some of the author's ambivalence about the work, but Tolstoy could not resist writing it. Far from the near-didactic nature of his non-fiction, Hadji Murad is a short novel with the breadth and power of an epic, with vivid characterization and intense storytelling that sweep the reader away. While the reader senses the moral concerns of the tale's creator, the short novel is a far cry from the didacticism of Tolstoy's non-fiction. The gap suggests that Tolstoy sometimes had trouble reconciling Tolstoy the artist with Tolstoy the ardent and moralizing Christian. The Death of Iv?n Ilych is one of the works in which Tolstoy is able to bridge that gap.