| The Death of Ivan Ilyich | |
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Title page of the 1895 Russian edition. |
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| Author(s) | Leo Tolstoy |
| Original title | Смерть Ивана Ильича, (Smert' Ivana Ilyicha) |
| Translator | Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (2009) |
| Illustrator | Oto Antonini |
| Country | Russia |
| Language | Russian |
| Genre(s) | Fiction, Philosophy |
| Publication date | 1886 |
| Pages | 114 p. (Paperback) |
| ISBN | 9780307268815 |
The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Russian: Смерть Ивана Ильича, Smert' Ivana Ilyicha), first published in 1886, is a novella by Leo Tolstoy, and is considered to be one of the masterpieces of his late fiction, written shortly after his religious conversion of the late 1870s.[1]
Contents |
Ivan Ilyich Golovin is the protagonist of the story. He is a highly regarded official of the Court of Justice and is described by Tolstoy as, “neither as cold and formal as his elder brother nor as wild as the younger, but was a happy mean between them—an intelligent, polished, lively, and agreeable man."[2] As the story progresses; however, Ivan becomes more and more introspected and emotional as he ponders the reason for his agonizing illness and death.
Praskovya Fëdorovna Golovin is Ivan’s unsympathetic wife. She is characterized as self-absorbed and uninterested in her husband’s struggles unless they directly affect her personally.
Gerasim is the Golovin’s young butler assistant. He takes on the role of sole comforter and caretaker during Ivan’s illness and death.
Peter Ivanovich is Ivan’s longtime friend and colleague. He studied law with Ivan and is the first to recognize Ivan's impending death.[3]
Lisa Golovin is Ivan’s daughter.
Fëdor Petrishchev is Lisa’s fiancé.
Ivan Ilyich Golovin, a high court judge in St. Petersburg with a wife and family, lives a carefree life that is "most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible." Like everyone he is aware of, he lives a life spent almost entirely in climbing the social ladder, and his life begins to amass more hypocrisy as it goes on. Enduring life with a wife whom he often finds too demanding, he works his way up to be a magistrate owing to the influence he has over a friend who has just been promoted, focusing more and more on his work as family life becomes more miserable.
While hanging curtains for his new home one day, Ivan Ilyich falls awkwardly and hurts his side. Though he does not think much of it at first, he begins to suffer from a pain in his side. As Ilyich's discomfort increases, his behavior towards his family becomes more irritable. His wife finally insists that he visit a physician. The physician cannot pinpoint the source of his malady, but soon it becomes clear that his condition is terminal. Confronted with his diagnosis, Ivan attempts every remedy he can to obtain a cure for his worsening situation until the pain grows so intense he is forced to cease working and spend the remainder of his days in bed. Here, he is brought face to face with his mortality, and realizes that although he knows of it, he does not truly grasp it.
During the long and painful process of death, Ivan dwells on the idea that he does not deserve his suffering because he has lived rightly. If he had not lived a good life, there could be reason for his pain; but he has, so pain and death must be arbitrary and senseless. As he begins to hate his family for avoiding the subject of his death, for pretending he is only sick and not dying, he finds his only comfort in his peasant boy servant Gerasim, the only person in Ivan’s life who does not fear death, and also the only one who, apart from his own son, shows compassion for him. Ivan begins to question whether he has, in fact, lived a good life.
In the final days of his life, Ivan makes a clear split between an artificial life, such as his own, which masks the true meaning of life and makes one fear death, and an authentic life, the life of Gerasim. Authentic life is marked by compassion and sympathy; the artificial life by self-interest. Then “some force” strikes Ivan in the chest and side, and he is brought into the presence of a bright light. His hand falls onto his nearby son’s head, and he pities him. He no longer hates his daughter or wife, but rather feels sorry for them, because he has found at last a joy in authentic life and they will continue their artificial lives, fearing death. In the middle of a sigh, Ivan dies.
In his 1997 publication in Cambridge Journal’s Ageing & Society, psychologist Mark Freeman writes:
Tolstoy's book is about many things: the tyranny of bourgeois niceties, the terrible weak spots of the human heart, the primacy and elision of death. But more than anything, I would offer, it is about the consequences of living without meaning, that is, without a true and abiding connection to one's life.[4]
Indeed, the mundane portrayal of Ivan’s life coupled with the dramatization of his long and grueling battle with death seems to directly reflect Tolstoy’s theories about moral living, which he largely derived during his sabbatical from personal and professional duties in 1877. In his lectures on Russian literature, Russian-born novelist and critic Vladimir Nabokov argues that, for Tolstoy, a sinful life (such as Ivan's) is moral death. Therefore death, the return of the soul to God is, for Tolstoy, moral life. To quote Nabokov: "The Tolstoyan formula is: Ivan lived a bad life and since the bad life is nothing but the death of the soul, then Ivan lived a living death; and since beyond death is God's living light, then Ivan died into a new life – Life with a capital L."[5]
“The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” therefore, is more than a story about death. Death permeates the narrative in a realistic and absorbing fashion but, interestingly enough, the actual physicality of death is only passively mentioned in the early chapters during Ivan’s wake. Instead, the story leads the reader through a pensive, metaphysical exploration of the reason for death and what it means to truly live. Tolstoy was a man who struggled greatly with self-doubt and spiritual reflection, especially as he grew close to his own death in 1910.[6] In his book, A Confession, Tolstoy writes:
No matter how often I may be told, "You cannot understand the meaning of life so do not think about it, but live," I can no longer do it: I have already done it too long. I cannot now help seeing day and night going round and bringing me to death. That is all I see, for that alone is true. All else is false.[7]
This personal epiphany caused significant spiritual upheaval in Tolstoy’s life, prompting him to question the Russian Orthodox Church, sexuality, education, serfdom, etc.[8] The literature Tolstoy composed during this period can be considered some of his most controversial and philosophical, among which falls “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” and other famous short stories such as “The Kreutzer Sonata” and “The Devil.” From a biographical standpoint, therefore, it is possible to interpret “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” as a manifestation of Tolstoy’s embroilment with death and the meaning of his own life during his final years. In other words, by dramatizing a particular sort of lifestyle and its unbearable decline, Tolstoy is able to impart his philosophy that success, such as Ivan Ilyich’s, comes at a great moral cost and if one decides to pay this cost, life will become hollow and insincere and therefore worse than death.[9]
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