It is, and for reasons that are confirmed on reading. It is a novella of twelve chapters, without parts, which grow shorter toward the end; the story fits in a sentence (a judge falls ill and dies), and from it comes a question that the novella answers through scenes, in the order it narrates: what the correct life has to do with death.
What it offers is a way of reading different from suspense. The book begins with the wake, and the reader knows from the first page how it ends; so one watches the path, and the question becomes what death reveals about the life that came before it. The time of the novella shrinks along with the sick man: years, months, a day, a night, weeks, three days, and an instant. And the characters are few and sharply drawn, from the colleague who crosses himself and goes off to play vint to the servant Gerasim, the only one who does not lie.
Some scenes stay with the reader: the colleagues who think of promotions and feel joy because it was he who died and not I; the doctor who puts on, before the patient, the air the patient used to put on before the accused; Caius's syllogism, correct for Caius and for no one else; the servant who says we shall all die, why should I not make an effort?; the light in place of death. The ending admits two readings, religious and moral, and the text supports both, so the book gives rise to conversation after it is read.
It 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. Those who read it see the writer after that change, in short form.