In what ways is Tolstoy commenting on society?

Ivan Ilyich's family, his work associates, and his doctor all show a kind of indifference to his illness and death. Significantly, however, they are not "bad" people. Tolstoy stresses that Ivan Ilyich's life was "most simple and ordinary and therefore, all the more terrible." It is Tolstoy's implicit comment on society and the behavior of people in general that even a basically decent man like Ivan Ilyich is left in the cold to suffer alone when personal tragedy strikes.
Several key episodes in the novella illustrate this. The story opens with Ivan Ilyich's wake and is then told in flashback. At the wake his work friends feel awkward and uncomfortable and want to get away as quickly as possible. This is not so much Tolstoy's condemnation of "society" as an observation that people are isolated in life in spite of having many casual friends or associates at work. When a man becomes ill and dies, others simply go on with their lives. For those not facing imminent death, the assumption is somehow "it's not me" and, therefore, "I" am exempt from death.
In the main flashback story line, when Ivan Ilyich returns home from his initial visit to the doctor, his wife and daughter appear more interested in the shopping they're planning to do than in what the physician has told him about his illness. When his brother-in-law comes to visit and is shocked by Ivan Ilyich's wasted appearance, he asks his sister (Ivan Ilyich's wife), "But what is it that is wrong with him?" She answers, "Nobody knows" and tells him calmly that one specialist says one thing and another says something different. The one person who shows genuine empathy is Ivan Ilyich's footman Gerasim. Because Gerasim is of peasant background, Tolstoy implies, he sees the reality of illness and death more readily than middle- and upper-class people do in their deluded, pleasure-seeking perspective.
In this story and in other later writings of his, Tolstoy was devoted to a kind of religious rationalism based on a rejection of earthly, materialistic values. It is not until he faces imminent death that Ivan Ilyich sees that his concerns, like those of his family and associates, have always been based on material things and earthly life, as if these were permanent and would never pass away. In the last three days of his agonizing illness he sees that this attitude was a mistake, that earthbound life is transient and meaningless, and that the "only reality" is death.