Sunday Morning! The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

“Lev Tolstoy in Yasnaya Polyana”, 1908, the first color photo portrait in Russia. via Wikimedia Commons

When he was at the halfway point of his life, Leo Tolstoy became deeply concerned about its endpoint. It was somewhat reasonable, albeit morbid, because at forty-one, he had already reached the normal life expectancy for a Russian male. It was a bit unexpected that he would go on to live another forty-one years. But, Tolstoy was a robust man, large and full of life. He had just completed War and Peace, one of the enduring masterpieces of world literature and was generally happy with things; it was a perfect time to start thinking about the possibility it would all be taken away. And he was reading Schopenhauer, which could do it to anybody! At last , the crisis came to a head one night as he lay awake; it seemed as if the room went black, and Tolstoy felt he heard the voice of death saying “I am here.”

His writing was never quite the same. But Tolstoy’s writing is frequently concerned with death. To some extent, nearly all fiction is concerned with death, because it’s always concerned with time. But, Tolstoy was a particularly intense man, driven to live a good life and live it up to the hilt. He was interested in all aspects of existence. Yet, he was accutely aware that many of us would prefer to avoid the matter altogether.

His classic short story The Death of Ivan Ilyich is about avoiding both life and death until the last moments. The actual death of Ivan, a typical official of the Court of Justice, actually comes before the start of the story; right in the first paragraphs, his colleagues read that he has died in the paper and are not particularly devastated by it. Ivan had been sick for some time, so everyone knew this was coming. They will have to select his replacement- something that has been already decided- and attend his funeral; but they would really prefer to be playing whist. And at the funeral, his wife is most concerned with pulling one of the colleagues aside and finding if he can help her increase the amount of money she will be recieving from the state after her husband’s death. When it seems he cannot, she loses interest in him as well. These aren’t exactly malicious people, but they’re not particularly pleasant. We don’t get the sense they will be grappling with Ivan Ilyich’s death after the story has ended.

But, then, most of us are a little… so-so. Ivan Ilyich’s life, Tolstoy tells us, “had been straightforward, ordinary, and dreadful in the extreme.” The son of a minor official who became a minor official himself, he was the lukewarm bowl of porridge in the middle, neither as uptight as his older brother, nor as profligate as his younger. With the 1864 judicial reforms of Alexander II, new opportunities had opened up for the “new man,” a type that Ivan fits perfectly, and he found his bureau; he is sober-minded, atuned to a pleasant bourgois life, enjoys steady work, and the sense of power he has over the poor clients he deals with, given to no particular passions or ambition, and overall a totally mediocre individual; perfect for a sinecure.

Next, he needs a wife. He meets Praskovya, the loveliest girl in his social circle, who “comes with a little money,” and is overall a “decent catch.” Even here, he seems to be selecting furnishings for his home. They have two children, and she soon comes to detest him, for reasons he can’t understand, but we take it she’s a bit self-absorbed. As a result, however, Ivan has more incentive to work late and play whist with his colleagues. Overall, his preconditioned life proceeds pleasantly and steadily:

This was how things went, nothing changed and everything was fine.

Family favorite “Mr. Death” by: ManWoman, circa 1996.

Until everything falls apart. One day, Ivan falls while hanging curtains and hurts his side. For reasons we never quite understand- there’s no sufficient medical explanation- he starts to get worse and worse. The pain increases until he can no longer work, he often a terrible taste in his mouth, is irritable and incapacitated, and the doctors, who are as officious and mediocre as himself, only pretend to know what is killing him. Indeed, everyone around him would rather pretend that he is not ill and will soon recover. The peasant who attends to him becomes the only man Ivan respects because he is the only one who does not insist on living out a lie. And, Tolstoy tells us,

It was this living a lie, all around him and within him, that did the most to poison the last days in the life of Ivan Ilyich.

Ivan has never considered death, but now he is dying. His family refuses to admit it and isolate themselves from him, but he gradually comes to terms with the horrible and inevitable truth: if Caesar is a man and all men are mortal, they he is mortal too. But he still fights off the thoughts.

Yes, Caesar is mortal and it’s alright for him to die, but not me, Vanya, Ivan Ilyich, with all my feelings and thoughts- it’s different for me. It can’t be me having to die. That would be too horrible.

In order to escape these thoughts, he looks back over the pleasant moments in his life and realizes that the only time he was truly happy was childhood, or at least he thinks so. What has happened since? Where did he go wrong? Yes, Ivan cherished the power and authority of his position, but he never abused them. Yes, he married badly, but so do many people. Overall, he steered a middle course, neither terrible nor wonderful; and so, he squandered his life.

As death approaches, the prose becomes shorter and more compact. The numbered sections smaller. The sentences tigther. Ivan’s dread turns to panic and he finally accepts his fate. But why is there all this pain? What does it all mean? Why does he have to go through all this? Why do we all? The story was written soon after Tolstoy’s famed religious conversion, but there are no choirs of heavenly angels here. There is only a brief moment before dying in which Ivan is at peace. And then it’s over.

Instead of death there was light.

Leo Tolstoy’s grave

It is perfectly understated. As with most of Tolstoy’s later stories, we feel there is a moral lesson here, but he isn’t didactic about it. Any relief we might feel only comes after an accute and harrowing psychological portrait of the death bed. It is hard-earned, in other words. To an extent, the structure mirrors another of Tolstoy’s classic short stories, Master and Man, also about two long and drawn-out deaths. But that ends with an imperious authority figure finding last-minute salvation through an act of self-sacrifice. Here, Ivan remains typical and he dies an ordinary death, and he is saved anyway. If philosophy is the art of dying, as Socrates put it, then Tolstoy seems to say: Give your life some thought before it reaches its endpoint. The bourgeois life is such a wretched lie because it avoids all the facts of life and death, and the two are inseparable.

Death comes anyway. The tragedy of Ivan Ilyich is his life never came. He is not a wretched sinner, nor a good and pious man. Instead, he is us; he is average, and that’s all the more terrible.

So, on that morbid note, what are YOU watching, pondering, playing, reading, creating, or otherwise using to avoid thoughts of your morality this weekend?