Books |
Leo Tolstoy: The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Leo Tolstoy
By
Published: Feb 20, 2023
Category:
Fiction
The most frequent request in my mail this winter has been for the link to a video. Specifically, for the first 3 minutes of that video, which appears in my appreciation of the Irish philosopher and writer John O’Donohue. In the video, O’Donohue compares the death of a “bandito” who’s had an eventful life with the deaths of people who never really lived. They’re surprised to be dying, and they die with regret and longing. I know this video well; when I feel sad and need my ass kicked, I watch it. Today, I finally connected it… to Tolstoy.
He’s dead. And Ivan Ilyich’s associates are saying the usual things. No need to repeat them here — we’ve all mouthed cliches after the death of a colleague. Tolstoy just took the trouble to write them down.
The visit to the widow? Textbook. Viewing the deceased? Nothing new there. Mourners rushing off to their own affairs as soon as possible? Been there, done that.
And then Tolstoy begins to tell the story of Ivan Ilyich’s life — “the simplest, most ordinary and therefore most terrible.” Know that Tolstoy is writing in 1887. “War and Peace,” with its 580 characters, is long behind him. “Anna Karenina” was published almost a decade earlier. In the last few years, Tolstoy has renounced fiction; he has been fixated on thinking his way to a new kind of Christianity, indeed a new kind of existence. So we may expect that his view of Ivan Ilyich’s unexamined life will be brutally penetrating, a lacerating indictment of bourgeois life. [To buy “The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories” from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
But here is Ivan, as a youth, making his way as a man and a careerist. Sensuality, vanity, liberalism on one hand. On the other: Law school, a position obtained for him by his father, and then, five years in, the expansion of the judiciary and the need for more men, new men. Nothing lacerating in all this.
Marriage follows, to “the most fascinating, clever and brilliant girl in the set in which he moved.” New furniture, new linen. Not to mention those “conjugal caresses.” But then Praskovya gets pregnant, and her mood changes. “Without any sort of justification, she began to be jealous, demanded that he should devote his whole attention to her, found fault with everything and made disagreeable, ill-mannered scenes.” Ivan’s response is not novel: He fences off a private world for himself. In, of course, his work.
And thus he rises. Makes more money. Moves into better quarters. Children are born; some die. Seventeen years pass. He is now a power in the Ministry of Justice. One day he is showing a workman how he wants some curtains draped. He falls from a stepladder, gets a bruise. And that bruise becomes cancer.
Of course no one knows what ails him; Ivan sees doctors who treat him in the same way as, in his courtroom, he treats others. Life and death are not the issue; the correct diagnosis is. And meanwhile Ivan feels worse and worse.
He looks different. No one says it, but sometimes a look betrays them. Ivan retreats to his mirror, to see what they see. Suddenly he understands that it’s not about his kidney or his appendix — the question is whether he will live or die. And, it goes without saying, he has given not a thought to death.
Now, as he looks at death, he’s completely alone. No one will acknowledge that he is dying; everyone lies to him. “The awful, terrible act of his dying was, he saw, being reduced by those about him to the level of a fortuitous, disagreeable and rather indecent incident — and this was being done in the name of the very decorum he had served all his life long.”
Dying, he feels he is bring thrust into a “narrow, deep black sack.” Why these agonies? His inner voice tells him: “For no reason.” He looks further, deeper; he reviews his life. And learns nothing.
Death comes closer. He asks himself: “What if in reality my whole life has been wrong?” At last, the right question. He realizes “that those scarcely detected inclinations of his to fight against what the most highly placed people regarded as good, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing and all the rest false.” He tries to defend his choices. But “there was nothing to defend.”
As he dies, what hope can he cling to? None. But he fights death anyway, knowing he can’t save himself. The end comes closer. A light appears — and I must stop here, because I don’t want to spoil the experience of the final page for you. Indeed, everything I’ve said is by way of a lure, an advertisement, a way to make you read this story.
“The Death of Ivan Ilyich” is just 60 pages long. It’s a snip to finish — the pages fly by. I know wise people who make it a point to re-read “Ivan Ilyich” every year or so, just as a reminder. Of what? Read the book.
