The Death of Ivan Ilyich

by Leo Tolstoy

“Well, isn’t that something—he’s dead, but I’m not,” was what each of them thought or felt.

In actuality, it was like the homes of all people who are not really rich but who want to look rich, and therefore end up looking like one another: it had damasks, ebony, plants, carpets, and bronzes, everything dark and gleaming—all the effects a certain class of people produce so as to look like people of a certain class.

Nothing did so much to poison the last days of Ivan Ilyich’s life as this falseness in himself and in those around him.

But the person who had experienced that happiness no longer existed. It was as though he were recalling the memories of another man.

“It’s as though I had been going steadily downhill while I imagined I was going up. That’s exactly what happened. In public opinion I was moving uphill, but to the same extent life was slipping away from me. And now it’s gone and all I can do is die!

Perhaps I did not live as I should have,” it suddenly occurred to him. “But how could that be when I did everything one is supposed to?”

And the image of a stone hurtling downward with increasing velocity became fixed in his mind. Life, a series of increasing sufferings, falls faster and faster toward its end—the most frightful suffering.

“There is no explanation. Agony. Death. Why?”

The doctor said his physical agony was dreadful, and that was true; but even more dreadful was his moral agony, and it was this that tormented him most.

“What if my entire life, my entire conscious life, simply was not the real thing?”