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The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Hesperus Classics)

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There are so many levels upon which this story can be read, yet they are woven so inextricably into this masterpiece that the complexity is staggering. The premise sounds simple: a man who is about to die realizes he has never fully lived. We've all heard this before--in fact, Hollywood likes to drum such messages into our heads on a regular basis. But rarely, if ever, is it portrayed with the exquisite mastery which Tolstoy employed upon writing "The Death of Ivan Ilyich".

Paradoxically, this story is just as much about the life of Ivan Ilyich as it is about his death. This is in order to fully appreciate who he is and the man he has made of himself before disaster strikes. It is also to highlight both the tragic deterioration of his life and the gradual enlightenment of his inmost soul.

In portraying Ivan Ilyich's character, Tolstoy's subtle but inexorable condemnation is devastating. Not a detail is gratuitous: every point further serves to illustrate what is essentially a life without ideals and without purpose. Yet the author does not beat us over the head with this, rather than allowing the clear and unembellished facts to speak for themselves. And the way Tolstoy knew exactly which facts to accentuate creates a psychological depth which is unparalleled.

Many seem to be under the impression that Ivan Ilyich was some sort of villain, and that the story is a warning against corruption and bad behavior. My personal view is that Ivan Ilyich is no worse--although no better--than many people. Perhaps he is of a slightly lesser moral calibre than most, but that does not make him completely evil. To believe that he is evil is to miss the whole point, for this story was meant to be universal, to depict a reality which exists for us all. This is obvious from the way the story begins, with Ivan Ilyich's friends' and relatives' reactions to his death. Like him, they see death as something that can never happen to them, and like him they lead lives which are shallow and superficial in an attempt to avoid the unpleasant realities of life. By the time he dies, Ivan Ilyich has risen above these people by at last coming to the realization of the worthlessness of his life. This has elevated him above the common man, who avoids the reality of death and the effort it takes to make life worthwhile. In Tolstoy's own words, "Ivan Ilyich's life had been...most ordinary and therefore most terrible."

Therein lies the impact of this story: Ivan Ilyich is Everyman, and the message he represents is applicable at every moment in our lives.

Tolstoy's novella makes rewarding and unsettling reading. Surely, I can think of no novel that treats dying as boldly. Death is a fact. In this story Ivan Ilyich's life and death are plainly represented in a fashion that remarkably resembles the times I have been aware of other, near people dying. What the novel puts on display in so satisfying and disconcerting a fashion is the remarkable inability or reluctance of most people (I ashamedly include myself in this group) to take part in the life of a person who is inevitably and rather immediately dying. Only one character in the novel has the goodness, humility and patience to care for a dying man, the rest scurry about and take care of their anticipated needs in the face of losing a loved one.

I find that I read this book again every year and that it remains such a fine portrait of a bureaucrat whose family life does not entirely satisfy him and whose pursuit of a more meaningful life fails to cease even in sickness, when he understands that his mortality is soon to be demonstrated. There are few works of this nature that I can set in the company of this short novel. Despite many readings, I feel I still don't entirely understand it, but later in life I imagine I will do better. This book is so excellent and the edition here lends itself to portable and pleasant reading.

...so I could read this story in the original. This novella is an absolute masterpiece. It made me think about things my jaded self had long since given up on, like God, purpose of life, death, fear. Tolstoy has an absolute deadpan sense of humor, which was so subtle it took me a while to catch on (for example, Ivan's fatal injury occurs while he is hanging expensive drapery out to impress his friends--what a beautifully ironic, even funny way to point out the meaninglessness of his life?).

If you're like me, and don't have the time to slog through "War and Peace" but are interested in Tolstoy, try this book. It's outstanding.

This book changed my life. No kidding. After reading it, I realized I was trapped in a loveless marriage, slave to a meaningless job, and listing towards a dark oblivion. In other words, I was your average middle-class, middle-aged married white guy. This book is a terrifying wake-up call to such guys--and I suppose to their female counterparts--to the life-not-well-lived, alas, the path most-taken.

The premise is simple. A solid career guy with all the trappings of `success'--secure job, nice house, presentable wife--lifts his arm one day and feels something go `twang' inside him. No big deal, he thinks. Probably tweaked a muscle or something. Except the little pain doesn't go away. Its not ever going away. It's a message--a message of mortality. The Grim Reaper is at the door. Time's up.

Now this is bad enough news, for sure. But that's only the beginning of this novel of existential horror. For as our hero lies a-dying he sees the life around him--the carefully tended garden of his years--as if for the first time. That is, he sees how bitter, fraudulent, and full of decay and vermin it truly is. From his fair-weather friends and business associates to his vain and self-centered wife who fritters about the inconvenience attendant upon her husband's impending death as if it were a personal affront and the greatest of injustices--to her, *The Death of Ivan Ilych* offers a bedside view of the cruel absurdity of the inhuman comedy. For as the protagonist lies suffering on his deathbed and reviews his life and how it has--and hasn't--added up, he endures a torment that is almost Christ-like in its intensity and resulting in a revelation as immense in its profundity. But whether one of heaven or hell, truth or pacifying illusion is up to each reader to decide.

Said to be the result of Tolstoy's own middle-aged spiritual crisis, *The Death of Ivan Ilych* manages to say in a scant 100 pages what most novels don't begin to say in 500. Timeless and archetypal, this novel reads with the power of a myth--a cautionary myth to wake up this very moment and begin to live an authentic life before it's too late.

Because at any moment, it may suddenly be too late.

This shattering double novel on the awakening of the soul amidst the decay of the body is one of the rare summits of the world literature.It is, along with a few short novels of Dostoevsky, Melville, Faulkner or Conrad, life altering reading experience of this particular genre. Suffused with what one might term as the Christian spirit, the novelette is astonishingly free from any suffocating dogma or orthodoxy. The parable on mediocre sufferer Ivan Everyman could have been written in Sumer, Iran, China or Greece. It could have been dated 2000 B.C. or 2000 A.D. Wherever human 'pneuma' is thrown against void within & without, wherever shrieking fear of extinction is submerged by terrible cognizance of life lived respectably and meaninglessly- Tolstoy will be there.

Tolstoy's novella "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" tells the story of a man confronting his own imminent death. Dying is a deterministic process in that there is an infinite number of ways it can be done, but the result is always the same. The way Ivan Ilyich does it is slow and painful, but this is not by choice; indeed, he had never considered the way he would die or even that he would die at all, and when the burden is finally thrust upon him, he is unable to handle it. In Jean-Paul Sartre's "Nausea," written half a century later, the protagonist is horrified by the knowledge of his own inexplicably created existence; Ivan Ilyich is horrified to realize his existence is about to come to an inexplicable end.

Ivan Ilyich is a middle-aged man who has played it safe throughout his life, following all the rules of society, studying law, becoming a judge, marrying a lady from a good family, raising his kids properly, and enjoying evenings of whist with his colleagues. One day, while working in his apartment, he has an accident and injures his kidney, which though at first seeming trivial, soon cripples him with pain and confines him to bed. He notices with bitter irony that the doctors who treat him (to no avail) play God with his fate similarly to the way he has played God with the fates of men on trial.

His affection for his family cools as his thoughts become obsessed with death. His wife, who has always been little more than an accessory to his public image, and daughter consider the physical demands of his terminal illness more an inconvenience to their lifestyle, a clamp on their freedom, than a cause for lamentation; his friends find the social obligations of dealing with funerals and condolence calls tedious. His only comfort, small as it is, is his loyal servant Gerasim, who nurses him compassionately until the very end.

Ivan Ilyich's scream of despair is the swansong of a man who can't believe the life he has cultivated so lovingly is so soon going to end on a sudden whim. As one who was born dying, he failed to heed Marcus Aurelius's words to disdain the flesh, and now flesh is all he can treasure. Tolstoy could have written this story as a spritual or metaphysical meditation on death, but instead it is simply a brilliant dirge for a man embarking on a journey--the one we all have to make--into the final unknown.

This is a simple story of a ordinary man, who lives a respectable life as a judge, father, and husband. In the course of the story it becomes clear that, though he believes himself to be happy and successful, his life is an empty fraud, arranged solely on the basis of what society expects of him. He has no real connection to his wife and children. At work, he takes pride in adhering strictly to what protocol requires of him. And the closest he comes to actual passion is when he wins a game of cards.

In the prime of his life he falls ill. Gradually he becomes aware that he will soon die. In the light of approaching death, he is forced for the first time to examine the way in which he lived, and comes to a horrifying conclusion.

Tolstoy confronts us with the ultimate question: how should a man live, given that he must die? Ivan Ilyich's story is frightening because it is our story too. No matter how hard we try to evade it, when we are face to face with oblivion, we too will be forced to ask ourselves the terrifying question: have I lived meaningfully, or wasted my time on this earth?

Volumes have been written about death and the ways in which we confront it, but Tolstoy's slender little book cuts right to the heart of the matter in a way that no other work has.

Tolstoy's short novel starts with the aftermath of Ivan Ilych's death. His colleagues gather to execute the polite formalities before moving on with relief to their regular whist game. "Well isn't that something--he's dead, but I'm not."

Ivan Ilych is a self-satisfied high court judge who injured himself in a fall, and later fell ill with a vaguely diagnosed disturbance of his organs. At first the pain is an offensive intruder to his smug routine but it becomes worse and eventually it's clear that he is dying. Clear, that is, to him, though his family and colleagues infuriate him by living the lie that he will recover if he just follows the doctor's advice.

Tolstoy makes it plain to the reader in the early part of the story that Ivan Ilych's life is hollow and calculating. His marriage was undertaken casually and for convenience, not love. He takes pride in the trappings and petty powers of his position as a prosecutor and a judge. When he falls ill and consults a physician, he takes umbrage at the impersonal formalities and the patronizing air of the doctor--a mirror image of his own demeanor in his court.

Tolstoy himself was plagued by the idea of death, its inevitability and unfairness, and he wrote all his rage against death into this short piece. Critics believe that he also wrote his conversion to Christianity into it as well. Ivan Ilych denies the importance of his pain as long as he can, then pours out his anger at the unfairness of it all, becoming "difficult" at home and work. One moment he believes the medicines and positive thinking will put things right, the next he's overwhelmed with despair that life could all come down to this.

Near the end Ivan Ilych realizes that his life may not have been a good one, a real one, and he thinks back to his childhood when things WERE real. His wife, son and daughter are no more real--only the kitchen boy who cheerfully tends to his physical needs is honest about life and death. In his last hour of life Ivan Ilych feels his son's kiss on his hand and breaks free of the pain and despair to an understanding of the transformative power of love and acceptance. His dying was the death, and at the end of his dying there was only light.

The Death of Ivan Ilych is a powerful work, a template for much of our modern literature on dying. It's also as much about life as about death, if we can read the road map that way.

Linda Bulger, 2008

If you have ever asked yourself what is really important in your life--this book is a must read. In todays fast-paced, modern day society, Ivan Ilyich appeared to have it all--a high-profile job, a beautiful wife, a well-educated child, and a future son-in-law that most parents would be proud to have in the family. When Ivan Ilyich realizes that he is dying all that he thought he wanted in life is put into question. This book is descriptive, evoking powerful and provacative questions that cause the reader to reflect on one's own life.

This is not a lengthy book, but Tolstoy has managed to discuss the subject of death and create a concise, philosophical piece. This is one of those works that could be read several times, at different stages of one's life, as the answers to the questions it creates will most likely change.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) is the easiest to read of Tolstoy's great works. It is only about 150 pages and is about as powerful as his two great novels in the questions he raises in the novel, questions that haunted him throughout his 83 year life...the question which has plagued man for millions of years, "What happens when I die, and where will I go? What if I'm not ready?"

Count Leo Nikolayovich Tolstoy was, as the great introduction to the Bantam Classics volume, "a lifetime death watcher." (I don't know if that's exactly what the introduction said so I had to paraphrase). Death was something that upset Tolstoy more than most people. For one thing, he served in the Crimean War of 1854-'56 (I don't know how long he served in that war particularly), but he served long enough to be exposed to the horrors of war and death.

This short novel, which Nabokov referred to as "The Greatest work of Russian Literature," (Nabokov was probably right) was the culmination of Tolstoy's great philosophical epiphany after he finished writing Anna Karenina in 1877. During that time, he sank into a deep depression in which he comtemplated very deep philosophical questions and rethought his behavior and outlook on life. It was during this time that he wrote A Confession (1879), which he wrote about this crisis and what he thought about life and religion. He went into this period as the aesthetic Leo Tolstoy, the great novelist who was responsible for the two great novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and emerged from this period as the most known and recognizable Leo Tolstoy, the shaggy, long haired, bushy eyebrowed peasant social activist.

This great work is the culmination of that period. It is a great allegory of how fragile life is and how small man is. The main irony Tolstoy presents in this novel is "the death of a judge." Ivan Ilyich is a judge, immersed in his work, which is the only thing which gives him pleasure. He hates his wife and spends a lot of time playing cards with his friends when he is not working. After he hurts himself when he falls on the side of table, he begins to fall ill. The main drama of this story is Ivan Ilyich's agonizing reaction to his slow death. We all die and we will be judged by a higher being. The death of a judge, someone who judged others and condemned criminals to death dies after a long illness. That is the basic plot. In between, Tolstoy weaves an unforgettable story with very deep questions, and powerful dramatic scenes which never fails to leave a great impact on every reader.