The Death of Ivan Ilyich

by Leo Tolstoy

Simone de Beauvoir states that the reason why death fills us with anxiety is that it is the inescapable reversal of our projects.

“the death of a close acquaintance evoked in them all the usual feeling of relief that it was someone else, not they, who had died.

Everyone until recently knew the actual smell of death.

“Three days of terrible suffering and death. Why, the same thing could happen to me at anytime now,” he thought and for a moment felt panic-stricken. But at once, he himself did not know how, he was rescued by the customary reflection that all this had happened to Ivan Ilyich, not to him, that it could not and should not happen to him;

a capable, cheerful, good-natured, and sociable man but one strict to carry out whatever he considered his duty, and he considered his duty all things that were so designated by people in authority.

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.

And so they began to live in their new quarters which, as always happens when people get settled, was just one room too small, and on their new income which, as is always the case, was just a bit less—about five hundred rubles—than they needed.

And he raged against misfortune or against the people who were causing him trouble and killing him, for he felt his rage was killing him but could do nothing to control it.

Caius really was mortal, and it was only right that he should die, but for him, Vanya, Ivan Ilyich, with all his thoughts and feelings, it was something else again. And it simply was not possible that he should have to die. That would be too terrible.

He saw that the awesome, terrifying act of his dying had been degraded by those about him to the level of a chance unpleasantness, a bit of unseemly behavior

There were moments after long suffering when what he wanted most of all (shameful as it might be for him to admit) was to be pitied like a sick child. He wanted to be caressed, kissed, cried over, as sick children are caressed and comforted.

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

Strong, healthy, and obviously in love, she was impatient with illness, suffering, and death, which interfered with her happiness.

Way back in his childhood there had been something really pleasant, something he could live with were it ever to recur. But the person who had experienced that happiness no longer existed. It was as though he were recalling the memories of another man.

And the farther he moved from childhood, the closer he came to the present, the more trivial and questionable these joyful experiences appeared. Beginning with the years he had spent in law school. A little of what was genuinely good had still existed then: there had been playfulness and friendship and hope.

Innocence? Simple joy?

“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?”

What one is supposed to do. The simple path.

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

It occurred to him that those scarcely perceptible impulses of his to protest what people of high rank considered good, vague impulses which he had always suppressed, might have been precisely what mattered, and all the rest not been the real thing.