Yes, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a good book for starting to read Tolstoy: it is short, has twelve chapters and a plot that fits in one sentence, and it carries the themes he never let go of: death, lies, and the meaning of life.
The novella avoids what tends to intimidate readers of long Russian novels. It runs to about 68 pages, with few central characters (Ivan Ilyich, his wife, his daughter, his son, the colleague Pyotr Ivanovich, and the servant Gerasim) and a narrator who explains what each one thinks. It begins with the wake and then tells everything in order, so the reader does not get lost.
What requires attention is the vocabulary of his world: the Judicial Chamber, the examining magistrate, the School of Jurisprudence, vint, which is a card game, and the full Russian names, with first name and patronymic, such as Praskovya Fyodorovna. None of this requires prior knowledge, and the text explains it through use.
It is also a good point of entry because it was written in 1886, after the religious crisis in which Tolstoy came to reject his earlier novels, among them War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Those who read the novella see the writer after that change, in short form, and can then move on, if they wish, to the long novels.