Even the least introspective of us have likely thought back to a moment in our lives and questioned whether we lived that moment as we ought. Some of us have reflected on seasons of life, evaluating and reevaluating certain branch-point decisions that nudged us on our various life trajectories. In The Death of Ivan Ilych, Leo Tolstoy takes the reader into the internal dialogue of a dying man who must come to terms with his mortality as he muses on his life. Literary criticism aside, I took this brilliant 1886 novella as an illustration of how living a meaningless life can be tantamount to a living death.
Ivan Ilyich is a successful judge on the Russian Court of Justice. He is a well-respected member of society, has a stable marriage, healthy children, and reputable friendships. By most external appearances, all his affairs are in order. One day during some home renovations, he falls off a ladder and hits his side. While it is never directly stated whether this led to an internal process of decay or simply unmasked an insidious disease that was already lurking, his health takes a downward spiral from that point on.
He visits a physician, and it is implied that his condition is terminal. He becomes more irritable and withdrawn as the pain intensifies over the subsequent days and weeks. Most of the story consists of his ruminations while lying on a couch or bed in a private room. While reclining, he finally concludes that something is terribly wrong. Herein he decides, “I must calm myself and think it through from the beginning.”
The reality dawns on him that, “it isn’t a matter of caecum and kidneys, it is a matter of life.. and death”. He realizes that where there was once life, it is now slowly passing away and that this process is inevitable. His ability to reverse or even slow the process is in vain, and there is no point in deceiving himself otherwise.
He contrasts the light of life with the darkness of death, the here with the there. He begins to grapple with questions of afterlife or even nonexistence. This throws him into an anxiety spiral as the only thing that he knows with certainty is that he does not want to die. Not being able to imagine existence apart from himself, he makes a pointedly ontological assertion that perhaps nothing will exist once he ceases to exist.
This burden of death anxiety unmasks the flimsy nature of his familial relationships. As his doting wife bends down to kiss his forehead, Tolstoy reveals that “he hated her with his whole heart when she kissed him, and it cost him a great effort to keep from pushing her away”. It is quite clear at this point that Ivan is not coping well at all with his new position of being mortal. “In his heart of hearts he knew he was dying, and it was not simply that he could not get used to the idea; he could not grasp it.”
Ivan recounts the following syllogism that he previously knew while studying logic:
Caius is a man, men are mortal, and therefore Caius is a mortal.
Tragicomically, Ivan holds this as being true “in respect to Caius, not to himself”. He views Caius as an abstraction, but “Ivan Ilyich was not Caius, and not a man in the abstract sense”. In his own eyes, he had always been “quite, quite different from all other men”. Caius was mortal, and it was proper that he should die. However, “Ivan Ilyich, with all of his thoughts and feelings – it was quite a different matter with him; and it could not be right and proper that he should die”. One can almost read between the lines with this point, that to think of oneself as unique and other men as abstractions is a universal experience.
Ivan soon comes closer to the realization that this experience is “more than a thought, it was reality itself,” and that it would keep coming back to confront him until he faced it or succumbed to it. What made the experience more harrowing is that it is an experience that he must face alone. He even begins to refer to it as the capital It. He asked whether It is the only truth, demanding all his attention without asking him to do anything but just stare at It, stare it straight in the eye and suffer unspeakable torment. “It had the power of penetrating all things and nothing in the world could shut it out”. Ivan resigned himself to lay down in his study alone.
He does make a feeble attempt to involve others in his despair. At the insistence of his wife, she sends for various doctors to make house calls for Ivan. The passage describing the physician’s physical exam certainly strikes a chord. At first cheerful and pleasant, the doctor throws off his playfulness and then “puts on a serious face” to begin examining his patient. He takes his pulse, temperature, listens to his chest and heart. All the while, Ivan “knew very definitively and without question that this was all nonsense, empty deception”. However, when the doctor got down onto his knees in front of Ivan and leaned over him, “placing his ear now lower, now higher, and went through all sorts of contortions with the gravest mien in the world,” Ivan admits that he almost fell under his spell [even though he knew very well he was lying]. For obvious reasons, this candid exchange between patient and physician makes me uncomfortably self-conscious.
Ivan knows astutely that the physician can do nothing for his condition, no matter how well-rehearsed his physical exam. His attempt to involve a physician in his battle with death was met with disenchantment. Additional falsehood comes from his own family. Tolstoy continues, “he suffered most of all from the lie… adopted by everyone for some reason, which said that he was only ill and not dying.” This same lie whispered to him that “everything would be all right if he just kept quiet and did what the doctors told him to do”.
I have personally seen this dynamic play out too many times between patients and their families. The patient can always see right through the charade, as remarked that Ivan “knew perfectly well that no matter what was done, nothing would change except that his sufferings would increase and he would die”. It is at this point that maintenance of the façade because almost a selfish act on the part of the family, more for their comfort than for that of the patient. Ivan retorts that this lie, which was “forced upon him on the eve of his death” served to degrade the solemnity of death to the level of social mores and pleasantries that are more designed around the comfort of everyone except for the individual passing away.
The only reprieve that Ivan receives is from the butler Gerasim. He is described as youthful, vivacious and unpretentious – the exact characteristics that Ivan was looking for unsuccessfully in others during his dire hour of need. At heart, Ivan was most pained that “no one felt sorry for him as he would have liked them to”. Despite being ashamed to admit it, there were moments after long suffering when what Ivan most wanted was “to be fondled pityingly, like a sick child.” His self-indulgence continues: “he wanted to be petted, kissed, cried over, as sick children are kissed and comforted”. He found something like this in Gerasim, who afforded him this meticulous and gentle care.
Most upsetting to Ivan regarding the response of his direct family members is that their responses seemed feigned or contrived. His wife developed an attitude towards him “that he was doing what he ought not to do” and that to the core “he himself was to blame for his condition.” She continues that “her only recourse was to reprove him lovingly for it – though she could not change his attitude.” I have again seen this interaction too many times, where the family ends up victimizing the patient, placing the burden of their illness on them when they can shoulder it the least. His daughter Liza, recently engaged, simply becomes annoyed that her father’s predicament “should cast a shadow upon her happiness.” Both familial portrayals are so deep and honest to how shallow our daily interactions can be when put to the test, even with those we hold most dear.
Following these interactions, the death spiral of Ivan Ilyich takes on a more Biblical flavor. As this novel was written many years after Tolstoy’s conversion to Christianity in the 1870s, it is easy to see the Christian symbolism that follows. Realizing how flimsy his closest earthly relations are, he turns in anger towards God. He cries out “because of the heartlessness of people and of God, and because of the absence of God.” Ivan Ilyich did not expect an answer, and he “cried because there was not and could not be any answer.” Perhaps Tolstoy was attempting to evoke imagery of Christ on the cross feeling the absence and even abandonment of God the Father in his hour of greatest suffering. Like Job in the Old Testament, he questions why God has brought this illness on him and even why he was brought into the world at all.
Unlike the majestic repose of Christ on the cross, Ivan devolves into petulance. He screams out against God to hit him harder even than before. He then sobs and asks what He ever has done to God in the first place. He grows quiet, stops breathing, and a stillness envelops him. He begins to listen intently to “the voice of his soul, to the stream of thought flowing through him.” He asks that key question – “what do you want?”. The answer echoes back to him, “not to suffer.. to live”.
Possessed with the desire to live, he must resolve for himself the way he is to live. He decides to live as he did before, a good and pleasant life; however, this causes him to question whether the life that he lived before was so good and pleasant after all. What were the best moments of his pleasant life? All of them no longer seemed to be what he considered them. In fact, only the earliest memories of childhood held these good and pleasant qualities for him any longer. During that time, there had been something “really pleasant, something worth living for,” but of course it could never be brought back again.
A devastating awareness then takes place, that the person who had been experiencing this pleasantness “was no more.” In the most painful line of the whole novella, Ivan “seemed to be calling up memories of someone else.” What a shattering awareness for someone on their death bed, that the person they are in the present is unrecognizable as the one who experienced their last pleasant memory. As soon as he returned to his present person, “all that had once seemed joyful dissolved under his fixed attention and turned into something worthless and even disgusting.”
At this revulsion, he first allows himself to consider the possibility that he did not live as he ought. Deeply conflicted, he immediately pushes this thought away as an impossibility. With infantile sulking, he returns to the belief that he is not to blame for anything. In fact, he believes that to claim that he did not live as he ought would be “preposterous.”
I could not help but contrast Ivan’s question of “what am I to blame for” with the lecture to Alyosha from the Elder Zosima in Brothers Karamazov. In that lecture, Zosima reveals the secret to true enlightenment comes only when a man knows “that each of us is undoubtedly guilty on behalf of all and for all on earth, not only because of the common guilt of the world, but personally, each one of us, for all people and for each person on this earth.” The profundity of this statement would take pages to expound but suffice it to say that Ivan was barely ready to admit even his own guilt at this point in his death bed journey. I do return once again to the likelihood that Tolstoy would highlight the inability of a self-centered man to admit his own guilt against that of Christ the innocent one assuming the guilt of all, as Zosima preached.
Not surprisingly, Ivan plunges into a deep solitude. His final days are spent lying on the sofa and facing the wall. Although he was amidst a populous town, among friends and relatives, his solitude “could not possibly have been more complete at the bottom of the sea or in the bowels of the earth.” During these last days, Ivan “lived only in the past”. He fully succumbs to introverted brooding, as “one by one pictures of bygone days passed through his mind”. He would begin with something more in the immediate past and then go backwards to a more remote place in his mind until he met his childhood memories, where he would linger. He found more vitality and goodness in his life the further backwards he went. He did this to the point that his early life seemed to be the only bright spot in his entire life, all the way back to the very beginning, and everything afterwards was blackness accelerating towards inevitable death.
He grasps for “the real thing” in the face of the farce that his life had become. I was reminded of the Gospel passage in which Pontius Pilate asks Jesus that crowning inquiry of cynicism, “what is truth?” This scramble for truth was agonizing for Ivan. “More dreadful than his physical suffering was his moral suffering; in this lay his real torment.” He was confronted with the thought that though he previously deemed it preposterous, it might be true that his life had not been spent as it ought to have been. In a very subtle rebuttal to his own life, he states that “those scarcely perceptible impulses to struggle against what people in high position considered good… which had always been suppressed, might be the real thing, and all the rest might be aside from the real thing.” He lays out those “scarcely perceptible impulses” as his “official duties, manner of living, family, social and professional interests” and admits that they might all be “aside from the real thing.”
The great high-court judge Ivan Ilyich goes on trial against himself, and while he attempts to make a defense of his life, he becomes aware of the “worthlessness” of what he was defending. Emphatically, he states that “there was nothing to defend.” He sees the “black hole” that his death spiral is heading for, but he is unable to even crawl into it and end his misery. He was prevented from crawling into it by the last tendrils of his mind hanging on to the belief that his life had been a good one. This belief was the hindrance that kept him from moving ahead, and it caused him more torture than anything prior.
What transpires next is reminiscent of the anxiety-inducing ending of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I always took as a metaphor for death. Ivan “plunged straight into the hold” and found there at the end of the hold a glimmer of light. He then has this sensation that reminds him of a prior experience while riding a railway carriage. He had thought that the carriage was moving forward but he then realized that it was moving backward, and he suddenly became aware of the true direction. Ivan comes to the realization that “it is all aside from the real thing, but that is alright.” He still has time to make it the real thing, if only he can find out what it is.
His young son comes to visit him on his death bed, and he touches his head and pities him. It becomes clear to him that what he was being tortured by and unable to throw off was now falling away of itself, first on two sides, then ten, and then all sides at once. He makes a clear distinction between the self-interested artificiality of all that he has engaged in to ward off and fear death against the authentic life that is marked by sympathy and compassion. He releases the hate that he held for his wife and his daughter, and he pities them with hopes that his death will release them from their own artificiality and give them a chance to live authentically.
Ivan cries out: “Where is death?”. He perceives that there was no more fear because there was no death. Instead of death, there was light. “All of this took place in an instant, but the significance of that instant was lasting.” His final thought in the novella was: “Death is over. There is no more death”. And next, “he drew in a deep breath, broke off in the middle of it, stretched out his limbs, and died.”
This work was profoundly moving for me for a variety of reasons but foremost for the lucidity of thought inside the mind of a dying man. I do not know that every individual who has a slow death goes through these stages to that final instant, but this work has informed how I engage others in their process of dying. Despite the armor of civility that we dress ourselves in daily, a man wants to feel fully loved and known in the way that he did as a child when things were the most vital. He wants his loved ones to grieve with him rather than for him. He wants to know if he every truly made “the real thing” during his life, even if for a moment. He longs to surrender to the pull of that black hole and let all ten sides fall away. And then, instantaneously light can flood in to blind his view of death. My hope for us all is to experience “the real thing” throughout our lives, rather than bargain for just a taste of it at the end.
Written by Cal Wilkerson
Brains and Brawn 