My doctoral thesis focuses on the subject of death in modern European literature, specifically in the novels The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy, Dying by Arthur Schnitzler, The Buddenbrook by Thomas Mann, Time Regained by Proust, The Years by Virginia Woolf, and The Leopard by Tomasi di Lampedusa. For this article, I will present an aspect of my research, namely the spiritual and existential implications of the hero’s death penalty in the novels of Tolstoy and Schnitzler. I will also demonstrate how The Death of Ivan Ilych represents not only Tolstoy’s spiritual legacy, but his literary legacy as well. Furthermore, I will discuss how Schnitzler’s first novel, Dying, sheds, as Françoise Derré says in The work of Arthur Schnitzler: Viennese imaging and human problems, “essential light on the idea that Schnitzler has conceived about death” (Derré 1966: 398, my translation).