Leo Tolstoy and The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Scope: In the large novels by Tolstoy, the reader often feels as if he or she is entering an entire universe. Although this is undoubtedly an exaggeration, there is something God-like about the massiveness and the life-giving quality of Tolstoy's writing. His life spans almost the whole period of highest Russian literary creativity. His opinions cover a vast range of Russian and human affairs, yet he can also be concerned with the smallest and most banal details of everyday family life.

This dichotomy is perhaps best summed up in the beginning of his second great novel, Anna Karenina: "All happy families resemble one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. All was confusion in the Oblonsky household." This literary giant lost his mother at an early age and his father not much later. He was thrown out of the University of Kazan', and he partook in the fighting of the Crimean War in 1854-1855. His first work was a remarkable account of childhood, adolescence, and youth; shortly thereafter, he published an account of the long and bloody battle for the city of Sevastopol', which controls the sea access to Crimea.

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A Siberian prisoner was deeply impressed by the writing of the young man. That prisoner's name was F. M. Dostoevsky. From the 1880s onward, Tolstoy became more and more engrossed in the moral and religious problems he saw within and around him. He even went so far as to renounce and condemn his own masterpieces as vain incense burned at a false altar.

In 1886 came The Death of Ivan Il'ich · [and] in this period, we see Tolstoy as he was masterfully described by Gorky: "Tolstoy and God are like two bears in the same den." His home life became increasingly acrimonious, as his wife and most of his seven children started to do battle with the previously great literary artist, who now seemed to be running for the office of God Almighty. The climax came in 1910, when he secretly ran away from wife and home, contracted pneumonia on the train, and died in the stationmaster's office at the station in Astapovo in biblical language: "Zekher Tsaddik L'v'rokhoh" ("The memory of the righteous is for blessing").

I. In 1886, Tolstoy published The Death of Ivan Il'ich, a story that deals with one of the author's two main obsessions. In this case, it is the inevitability of death, no matter how hard we struggle against it.

A. The story juxtaposes, almost diagrammatically, the life and death of a seemingly comfortable St. Petersburg legal bureaucrat, whose death announcement is read in the beginning of the story by his colleagues and friends.

B. Their thoughts are all centered on what positions they may gain as a result of his absence, just as the widow's thoughts are all concentrated on how much money she can get from the government, a scheme that she has very cleverly and earnestly tried to work out.

C. No one, it seems, has been willing to concentrate on the topic so important to the author of the tale: What is the nature of death itself, and how is it connected to the life of the formerly living human being?

D. Tolstoy takes us back to the life and career of the title character: how he made himself respected through observance of all the conventions of his social class everything was done in accordance with the expectations of a career and of a family whose real feelings and desires were always kept at arm's length.

E. Just as Ivan Il'ich seems to have solved his financial problems and to have established his ideal comfortable home with its beautiful furniture, he slips while setting up a curtain and falls with considerable force on his side.

F. The initially minor pain gradually takes on an intensity that can no longer be ignored, and Ivan must face the fact that he is dying. What Tolstoy describes, in agonizing and precise detail, is death by cancer.

G. Nothing is able to bring relief, most especially not the agents whom Tolstoy has held in contempt for his whole career: doctors and lawyers. None of them can face the fact of death; they hid behind jargon like "floating intestine" and "binary state pensions."