The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy

I read Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice last week. The edition I have is included in a book that’s been on my shelf for years called, Short Novels of the Masters edited by Charles Neider. Along with the Mann it includes this work of Tolstoy and eight others. I wouldn’t call any of them novels, maybe novellas or short stories.

Tolstoy wrote The Death of Ivan Ilych over a few years, completing it in 1886. His great, long novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina were completed in 1869 and 1877, respectively. In 1879, after completing Anna Karenina, he published an autobiographical work titled, Confession, which is an account of his spiritual development. Based on his reading of Schopenauer, Tolstoy embraced a spirituality of Buddhist-like self-abnegation allied with a primitive Christianity following the moral teaching and examples of Jesus. He denied the efficacy of the church and its scheme of personal salvation through ritual, embracing instead corporate salvation through acts of charity and compassion. Tolstoy’s religious conversion changed his life. He was ex-communicated from the church. He dismissed his earlier novels. After Anna Karenina he wrote only short fiction such as this, much of it on moral themes, and he devoted his life to charity and political work on behalf of the poor. He died in 1910, age 82.

The Death of Ivan Ilych deals in fiction with the spiritual questions Tolstoy had confronted in Confessions: the psychic enormity of death, the meaning of life in the face of death, the proper way to live. Where Tolstoy faced the questions as a man in his 50s and then lived another 30 years, his character Ivan Ilych wrestles with the questions only months before his death at age 45.

The novella begins with Ivan dead. The news of his death reaches a few of his colleagues in the court where Ivan had worked as an administrative Judge until falling ill a few months previously. One colleague, Peter Ivanovich who also thinks of himself as Ivan’s best friend, visits the house. He views Ivan’s body displayed in his coffin. He meets with Ivan’s widow who inquires about her husband’s pension. We learn that Ivan had suffered greatly, that for the last three days of his life Ivan had “screamed unceasingly.” Briefly, he meets Ivan’s daughter and young son and the house staff. After paying his respects he says goodbye to Ivan’s servant, Gerasim, and then leaves, considering whether there’s still time to join his friends that evening for a game of bridge.

After this prologue, the novella jumps back to narrate Ivan’s life. Ivan is the middle son of three. Like Goldilocks, Tolstoy says that “He was neither as cold and formal as his elder brother nor as wild as the young, but was a happy mean between them–an intelligent, polished, lively and agreeable man.” He studies at the School of Law, graduates, and joins the civil service. He is assigned to a province where he makes connections and enjoys success. He meets a woman and they marry.

When children arrive the marriage disintegrates. His wife turns disagreeable. Ivan spends more time at work with colleagues, and at home he prefers to work in his study rather than socialize with his wife. With the growing family, money becomes an issue. He accepts a new job in another province because it pays more but there’s also a higher cost of living so the money troubles continue. Moreover, the loss of his social connections make he and his wife more isolated, and the loss of his business connections results in him being passed over for further promotions. At a crisis, but only a year, now, before his death, he travels to St. Petersburg to demand a better job, and miraculously he is successful. He gets the salary he asks for plus generous moving expense to resettle in the town of his new assignment.

He moves in August, his wife, children and the household to follow in September. As he is hanging new curtains in a room of the apartment he has secured, the chair he is standing on slips and he bangs his side as he comes down. He tells his wife when she arrives, “It’s a good thing I’m a bit of an athlete. Another man might have been killed, but I merely knocked myself, just here; it hurts when it’s touched, but it’s passing off already–it’s only a bruise.”

But the new living situation doesn’t resolve the former issues. He squabbles with his wife and avoids her. He performs his bureaucratic duties at the court well but by rote. His real pleasure is playing bridge. “He acknowledged that whatever disagreeable incident happened in his life, the pleasure that beamed like a ray of light above everything else was to sit down to bridge with good players…”

The pain in his side worsens. It seems to be especially bad when he attempts to eat a meal. He fights with his wife. After a few weeks of suffering he visits a doctor. The doctor treats Ivan with the same bureaucratic coldness with which Ivan treats the petitioners he sees in his court. The diagnosis is vague, “a floating kidney, chronic catarrh, or appendicitis.” Medicine is prescribed. Ivan seeks a second opinion, equally unsatisfying. He takes his medicine, but not dutifully, and to no effect. His wife scolds him, blames him. The pain makes him even more irritable.

After the brief prologue and a telescoped telling of Ivan’s professional life to this point, the rest of the novella follows the course of Ivan’s illness over the last three months or so of his life. The diagnosis remains vague. The medicine is ineffective. His family is unsympathetic. Although they perform the duties of attending to him, it’s clear his wife and daughter see Ivan as a bother. Ivan despairs. He begins to imagine and then accept that he will die, and he believes that his family and the doctors know this but are willfully lying to him when they say he will recover.

Ivan confronts his death. First he faces the fact that he is mortal, that this death is happening to him, not someone else. Death frightens him. He questions the judgment that he, a man who had done all the right things in life, should be punished this way, with pain and then death. And then he begins to ask whether it is true that he has done the right things in life. He longs for someone to tell him the truth about his dying. He agrees to his wife’s suggestion that a priest come to visit, but the priest only gives him communion when what he really needs, I kept thinking, was conversation with a chaplain.

Ivan’s only comfort, and it is an important comfort and part of Tolstoy’s answer to the spiritual questions he poses, is the servant Gerasim. Gerasim shows compassion for Ivan. He cares for Ivan, including cleaning his chamber pot, accepting that illness and death are a normal part of life and doing for Ivan what he hopes someone might do for him if required. Gerasim is a peasant: honest, kind, simple. Ivan’s pain eases when Gerasim elevates Ivan’s legs. Gerasim even allows Ivan to rest his legs on his shoulders.

Finally, Ivan realizes that his joy in life ended after his childhood and that every step since then has been false, leading away from happiness. This is the question he wrestles with until the moment of his death, “What is the right thing?” On his death bed he is visited by his young son and his wife. Flailing, he strikes his son’s head, but the son catches his father’s hand and kisses it, beginning to cry. His wife looks at her dying husband, despairing. He feels compassion for them, the compassion that he had longed wished from others for himself and that only Gerasim would give. Compassion is Tolstoy’s answer to Ivan’s question: a life connected to others, through compassion and simple acts of care and concern; a careful life that makes considered choices, not following automatically the social stream: education, career, money, a marriage by “mere accident”, a family. “It is as if I had been going downhill while I imagined I was going up. And that is really what it was. I was going up in public opinion, but to the same extent life was ebbing away from me. And now it is all done and there is only death.”

In the final sentences he looks at death directly and sees that it is nothing. He continues to feel his pain greatly, this is when the “unceasing screaming” has begun, but he detaches from the pain emotionally. Inwardly he transcends his illness and his clinging to life. “In place of death there was light. ‘So that’s what it is!’ he suddenly exclaimed aloud. ‘What joy!'” Outwardly though, “For those present his agony continued for another two hours.” In the middle of his final breath, he dies. As in Death in Venice, the death in the title occurs in the final sentence.

Despite the darkness of the theme this is an enjoyable and even humorous story in places. It is quickly read. I read it in the bathtub while the water cooled. I read Anna Karenina in college, which took a lot longer than a single bath. I have yet to read War and Peace. I think I’ll read some of the other short novels in this collection next, perhaps, Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground.