Sunday Morning! The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

Rufus F.

Rufus is a likeable curmudgeon. He has a PhD in History, sang for a decade in a punk band, and recently moved to NYC after nearly two decades in Canada. He wrote the book "The Paris Bureau" from Dio Press (2021).

Related Post Roulette

11 Responses

  1. Marchmaine says:

    Great summation:

    “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.”

    Question, is it that he’s *average* or something else? I feel like average is a derivative term for something else? Accurate but not quite the point… oblivious? (too strong) what’s softer than oblivious?

    Somehow, life just sort of eluded him.Report

    • Rufus F. in reply to Marchmaine says:

      Thank you! I consider that high praise.

      I think Tolstoy does consider him the average man, but tragically so. He’s comfortable and disengaged. A bit deluded. Maybe living the unconsidered life. We all probaly do live by our lies, to some extent. Tolstoy insists that we not.

      He probably would find a better word for it, or something more piquant anyway. Maybe a modern euphymism would be to say that Ilyich is in his “safe space.”Report

    • Pinky in reply to Marchmaine says:

      There’s a Russian word “poshlost”. I won’t try to define it, but it’s the word you’re looking for.Report

  2. InMD says:

    I read the Death of Ivan Ilyich at the end of a Tolstoy binge I put myself through several years ago. I have no problem admitting I did this in part out of a deep sense of shame of not grappling enough with hard literature.

    Anyway I find it to be hands down one of the more disturbing reads I’ve done due to just how realistic it is. You can end up with a sort of bastardized reading where the message is ‘carpe diem’ but I think that’s wrong. I take it more as find a way to love something, or expose yourself to some type of vulnerability, but without any kind of idealizing of what that entails. Anyone who reads it is haunted by the possibility they might die that way, but Tolstoy really doesn’t give a prescription on how to avoid it. We never know if we’re doing it right and that’s the most terrifying thing of all.Report

    • Rufus F. in reply to InMD says:

      Anyone who reads it is haunted by the possibility they might die that way, but Tolstoy really doesn’t give a prescription on how to avoid it. We never know if we’re doing it right and that’s the most terrifying thing of all.”

      Oh yeah, that’s it exactly! The comparison that came to mind when I read it was Ingmar Bergman’s film Cries & Whispers, where it’s just an unvarnished depiction of a lingering death. I really appreciated too that the actual moment of death was so understated- we never know if there really was light instead of death, or if his brain was just blinking out.Report

  3. Chip Daniels says:

    I haven’t read it, but if they make it into a movie with Jason Isaacs and Steve Buscemi, I’ll pay money for it.Report

  4. I’m having the weird deja vu of reading a story and knowing exactly what’s going to happen (I’m 99% sure), because I must have read it before, decades ago.

    Details: the story is called Occam’s Scalpel, I am reading it in a volume of Theodore Sturgeon’s collected works that I got from the library because I wanted to reread The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff, and I suspect I originally read it in a Best of the Year anthology.Report