The Death of Ivan Ilyich

by Leo Tolstoy

‘The doctors couldn’t decide. Well, they could, but they all decided differently. The last time I saw him I thought he was going to come through it.’

‘Well, we’ll have to go and see her. They live an awfully long way away.’ ‘For you they do. Where you live, everywhere’s a long way away.’ ‘Look at that. He can’t forgive me for living across the river,’ said Pyotr Ivanovich, smiling at Shebek.

the very fact of the death of someone close to them aroused in all who heard about it, as always, a feeling of delight that he had died and they hadn’t.

The only thing he was certain of was that in this situation you couldn’t go wrong if you made the sign of the cross. Whether or not you should bow at the same time he wasn’t sure, so he went for a compromise, crossing himself as he walked in and giving a bit of a bow as he did so.

Then, when the business of crossing himself seemed to be going on too long, he paused and took a close look at the dead man.

his head bowed for eternity on the pillow,

‘No whist for you, then. You won’t mind if we find another partner. We might make up a fivesome when you can get free,’ said his mischievous glance.

On the contrary, if anything can … I won’t say console me, but … take my mind off things, it’s seeing to what has to be done about him.’

‘Three days and three nights of horrible suffering, and then death. Just think, it could happen to me any time, now,’ he thought, and he felt that momentary pang of fear. But immediately he was saved, without knowing how, by the old familiar idea that this had happened to Ivan Ilyich, not him, and it could not and would not happen to him,

She made it seem as if she was asking Pyotr Ivanovich’s advice about getting a pension, but he could see that here she knew more than he did, she knew the finest details of this subject down to the last penny that could be screwed out of the Treasury in terms of death benefits. What she wanted to know was whether there might be some way of screwing a bit more out of them. Pyotr Ivanovich tried to think of some way of doing this but, having given it some thought and doing the decent thing by cursing the government for being so stingy, he said he thought there was no more to be had.

Ivan Ilyich’s schoolboy son, the image of his father, appeared from behind the stairwell. This was the little Ivan Ilyich that Pyotr Ivanovich remembered from law school.

‘Gerasim. How are you feeling, my boy?’ said Pyotr Ivanovich, who had to say something. ‘A bit sad?’ ‘ ’Tis God’s will, sir. ’Twill come to us all,’ said Gerasim, displaying an even white row of peasant’s teeth,

carving out the kind of career which brings people to a position from which, despite their obvious incapacity for doing anything remotely useful, they cannot be sacked because of their status and long years of service, so they end up being given wholly false and fictitious jobs to do for which they receive salaries that are anything but fictitious,

superfluous member of various superfluous institutions.

The third son was a failure. He had gone through a series of jobs, ruining his prospects in all of them, and he now worked for the railways. His father, his brothers and especially their wives not only hated meeting him but forgot his existence unless compelled to do otherwise.

sociable and convinced of the need to follow the path of duty – duty being anything so designated by higher authority.

Boy and man he had avoided toadyism, but from his earliest years he was like a moth to the flame in being drawn towards people in authority,

he had succumbed to both sensuality and vanity, and then in the top classes to liberal thinking, but always within limits unerringly set by his own instinctive feelings.

Incredible

He did his work, pursued his career and at the same time discreetly enjoyed himself.

he loved to let them feel that although he had the power to crush them he was being straight with them, treating them like friends.

now that Ivan Ilyich was an examining magistrate he felt that everyone without exception was in his power, even the most important and self-satisfied of people;

Far from abusing this power, he did his best to play it down, but his consciousness of that power and the very chance to play it down were what gave his new job its interest and appeal.

the new tone entailed mild dissatisfaction with the government, a degree of liberalism and a civilized man’s sense of public duty.

in his new situation he left his chin unshaven, allowing his beard to grow as and where it wanted.

‘Look, I may be part of the reformed system, and I’ve got as far as Grade 5, but if you want to see me on the floor I can show you that even in dancing I can be the best.’ So, just occasionally, he would take to the floor with Praskovya at the end of an evening, and it was actually while dancing like this that he won her heart. She fell in love with him. Ivan Ilyich had no clear and definite plans for marriage, but once the girl fell in love with him he began to wonder. ‘When all’s said and done, why shouldn’t I get married?’

Ivan Ilyich was horrified. He realized that married life – at least with his wife – didn’t always mean enjoyment and decency, but, on the contrary, it often disrupted them, and it was therefore necessary to guard against such disruptions.

His work was the one thing that impressed Praskovya, and it was through work and the commitments associated with it that he took on his wife and asserted his own independence.

the real and imaginary illnesses of mother and child, which demanded his sympathetic involvement even though he understood nothing about them, the need for Ivan Ilyich to safeguard his independence became even more urgent.

It didn’t take him long – no more than a year after his wedding – to realize that although married life did provide some conveniences, it was actually rather a complex and difficult business,

They moved, they were short of money, and his wife didn’t like the town they had moved to. His salary had gone up, but so had their living expenses. On top of that, two of their children died, and family life became even more unpleasant for Ivan Ilyich.

Most of the topics of conversation between husband and wife, especially about bringing up the children, led to questions that reminded them of past arguments, and new arguments were liable to flare up at any moment.

Great writing of how such fights with a partner happen.

This growing apart might have upset Ivan Ilyich if he had thought there was anything wrong with it, but now not only did he consider this state of affairs to be quite normal, he saw it as the whole point of his role in the family.

It was in the world of his work that the whole interest of his life came into focus.

This was in 1880. That year was the hardest he ever lived through. It was a year in which it transpired, for one thing, that they couldn’t make ends meet financially, and, for another, that he was a forgotten man and, whereas he saw himself as the victim of an outrageously cruel injustice, everyone else thought it was just the way things went.

Got damnn

In the country, with no work to occupy him, Ivan Ilyich had his first experience of not just boredom but unbearable anguish.

By now he had no allegiance to any particular ministry, faction or function. All he needed was a job, a job that would bring in five thousand a year,

2025

Ivan Ilyich described how honoured he had been in Petersburg, how his former enemies had been put to shame and were now licking his boots, how people envied him his new position, and, most of all, how popular he had been in Petersburg. Praskovya listened to all of this, pretending to believe it

Ivan Ilyich was delighted to see that her plans were his plans, they were together as one, and that his life, having hit a bad patch, was now getting back to its old way, its true path of happy enjoyment and respectability.

In court he found his mind wandering; he would be miles away, wondering whether to have plain or moulded cornices with his curtains. He became so involved that he often did the work himself, rearranging the furniture and rehanging the curtains.

‘I seem to have shed fifteen years,’ he wrote home.

But these were essentially the accoutrements that appeal to all people who are not actually rich but who want to look rich, though all they manage to do is look like each other:

A deep tissue burn Tolstoy!

his arrangements looked so much like everyone else’s that they were unremarkable, though he saw them as something truly distinctive.

as always happens with people who have recently settled in, they found themselves just one room short, and their new income wouldn’t quite run to it, though it was only a matter of five hundred roubles or so.

the trick was to eliminate the element of crude everyday life that always disrupts the smooth flow of official business; no relationships should be entered into beyond the official ones,

At the point where an official relationship breaks off, everything else breaks off, too.

compartmentalizing the official side of things and keeping that apart from his own real life was one that Ivan Ilyich possessed in the highest degree; long practice and natural talent had enabled him to refine it to such a degree that now he could act like a virtuoso performer, occasionally allowing himself to mix human and official relationships by way of a joke.

After dinner, if there were no guests, Ivan Ilyich sometimes read a book that people were talking about, and later in the evening he sat down to do some work, reading through papers, studying the law, comparing depositions and sorting them by statute.

What gave Ivan Ilyich real pleasure, though, was having little dinner parties to which he would invite ladies and gentlemen of good social standing and passing the time with them precisely as such people invariably do pass the time,

The row was a big one, very nasty, and it ended with Praskovya calling him a stupid fool while he clutched his head and muttered something about divorce. But he still enjoyed the party.

Pleasure derived from work was self-indulgence, pleasure derived from socializing tickled his vanity, but real pleasure came to Ivan Ilyich only from playing cards.

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