Publication
The date of the novella and its relation to Tolstoy's religious change:
The novella was published in 1886, after the religious crisis in which Tolstoy came to reject his own novels, among them War and Peace and Anna Karenina.
The two novels Tolstoy came to reject are War and Peace and Anna Karenina.
The religious crisis, and the disagreement about the date
The year of the religious crisis varies according to the account: 1878, 1879, or simply the decade of the 1870s. The novella of 1886 comes, in any case, after the crisis.
The time of the fiction
The text itself dates the story. The death notice in ch. I gives the death as February 4, 1882; ch. III calls 1880 the most difficult year of Ivan Ilyich's life, the year of being passed over and of going to Petersburg; and ch. II says that, as an examining magistrate of the new judicial institutions, he was one of the first to apply the statutes of 1864 in practice. The judicial career the novella recounts thus unfolds in the two decades following the 1864 statutes, and the protagonist is one of the new men they called for.