The Death of Ivan Ilyich

by Leo Tolstoy

Apart from the speculations aroused in each of them by this death, concerning the transfers and possible changes that this death might bring about, 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.

He was the son of an official who had worked his way through various ministries and departments in Petersburg, 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,

He being Ivan Ilyich.

But there came a time when his wife started shouting at him so furiously, using such foul language, determined to keep on yelling at him when he failed to do what she wanted, obviously with every intention of keeping it up until he came to heel, stayed in and went through the same anguish that she felt, that 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. And Ivan Ilyich began to seek ways of doing this. 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.

As his wife grew more and more irritable and demanding, Ivan Ilyich gradually shifted his life’s centre of gravity on to his work.

He required of it whatever domestic conveniences it could provide in terms of meals on the table, a good household and a bed and, most important, the outward show of respectability that society required. Beyond this, he required some enjoyment and pleasure, and if he found this he was very thankful, but if he was met with rejection and crabbiness he immediately took himself off into his own separate, carefully guarded world, the world of work which gave him pleasure.

Other children were born. His wife was becoming more and more bad-tempered and crabby, but the new attitude established by Ivan Ilyich towards his home life made him all but impervious to her crabbiness.

They were left with a few short periods of amorousness that came over them as husband and wife, but these did not last long. These were nothing more than little islands where they could anchor for a while, only to plunge back into a sea of hidden hostility as they grew further and further apart. 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. His role was to distance himself increasingly from all the unpleasantness and give it an air of harmless respectability; this he achieved by spending less and less time with the family, and when he was forced to be with them he sought to safeguard his own position by ensuring the presence of others.

They were left once again with nothing more than those little islands, all too few of them, on which husband and wife could come together without an explosion.

And the deadliness of his working life, and those money worries, going on for a year, two years, ten, twenty – always the same old story. And the longer it went on the deadlier it became. ‘It’s as if I had been going downhill when I thought I was going uphill. That’s how it was. In society’s opinion I was heading uphill, but in equal measure life was slipping away from me … And now it’s all over. Nothing left but to die!

There’s something wrong. Maybe I didn’t live as I should have done?’ came the sudden thought. ‘But how can that be when I did everything properly?’ he wondered, instantly dismissing as a total impossibility the one and only solution to the mystery of life and death.

Life, a series of increasing sufferings, flies ever faster towards its end, the most terrible suffering.

His spiritual suffering took the form of a thought that had suddenly struck him that night

.c1

‘What if I really have been wrong in the way I’ve lived my whole life, my conscious life?’

.c2

‘But if it’s like that,’ he said to himself, ‘and I am leaving this life knowing I have ruined everything I was given, and it can’t be put right, what then?’

This was the very moment when Ivan Ilyich had fallen through and seen a light, and it was revealed to him that his life had not been what it should have been, but that it could still be put right.