In The Death of Ivan Ilyich and The Master Builder, authors narrate and describe desires, fears, anxieties, and hostilities that influence specific characters' attitudes toward themselves and others. Which writer's aesthetic technique is more realistic and more accurately represents the dynamics of the human psyche?

The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Russian: Смерть Ивана Ильича) is an 1886 novel written by famed Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. It almost seems that the story is a biographical tale of sorts, of one determined, eager, and highly motivated Russian judge named Ivan Ilyich who chooses to focus on his legal career and disregard his personal relationships with his family and his friends. Unfortunately, just as he begins to think that he has succeeded in life and achieved some sort of stability, his health starts to rapidly decline, and he goes through all of the five stages of dying. He begins to reconsider all of the choices he made in the past, until he realizes that he paid attention to the wrong things in life, ultimately making peace with himself and accepting his fate.
The Master Builder (Norwegian: Bygmester Solness) is an 1892 semi-autobiographical play written in three acts by famed Norwegian playwright, poet, and theater director Henrik Ibsen. Much like Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, the main protagonist of the story—Halvard Solness, a middle-aged master builder and architect, decided to dedicate the majority of his life in building a successful a career, neglecting his personal life. However, he refuses to accept the fact that the younger generations of builders and architects might surpass him in both knowledge and skill, and he desperately tries to be “the best.” This overly ambitious and power-hungry outlook on life eventually results in his “demise.”
Both of these stories are, essentially, literary attempts made by Tolstoy and Ibsen to dive deep into the human psyche and explore people’s emotional and mental states. Their main characters go through similar psychological journeys; however, their reactions to them are rather different. Ilyich begins to question all of his previous decisions, reexamining his mistakes and understanding that what he did might not have been the right thing. When he finally faces death, he is an honest and free man who is ready to be redeemed and forgiven. In contrast, Solness chooses to remain the amoral, overconfident, and overdriven man that he was in the past. Thus, for him, death is a form of punishment and retribution, as he failed to learn from his past mistakes and understand life’s real values.
As far as the writers’ aesthetic techniques are concerned, in my personal opinion, Tolstoy and Ibsen present an equally realistic scenario of how people might act and express their state of mind, especially when they’re forced to face their own mortality.
Some people might behave like Ilyich and try to accept their fate; they will slowly and gradually come to the realization that life is not an infinite process. Thus, they’ll understand that the most important thing that they can do is focus on their happiness and the happiness of the people that they love and cherish. Others might behave similarly to Solness and feel anger and rage for not being able to achieve enough; they will strive for more, not realizing that they’re wasting away their last moments in vain, choosing to focus on irrelevant things, instead of paying attention to the things that will truly satisfy them.
The main difference between these two groups of people is that the first group will accept the fact that death is a part of life itself, while the second group will think that death is simply the end of it all, and they will most likely fear it.