The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy (suggested reading .TXT) 📕

“Then what does it mean? Why? It can’t be that life is so senseless and

horrible. But if it really has been so horrible and senseless, why must I

die and die in agony? There is something wrong!

“Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done,” it suddenly occurred to him.

“But how could that be, when I did everything properly?” he replied, and

immediately dismissed from his mind this, the sole solution of all the

riddles of life and death, as something quite impossible.

“Then what do you want now? To live? Live how? Live as you lived in the law

courts when the usher proclaimed ‘The judge is coming!’ The judge is coming,

the judge!” he repeated to himself. “Here he is, the judge. But I am not

guilty!” he exclaimed angrily. “What is it for?” And he ceased crying, but

turning his face to the wall continued to ponder on the same question: Why,

and for what purpose, is there all this horror? But however much he pondered

he found no answer. And whenever the thought occurred to him, as it often

did, that it all resulted from his not having lived as he ought to have

done, he at once recalled the correctness of his whole life and dismissed so

strange an idea.

Another fortnight passed. Ivan Ilych now no longer left his sofa. He would

not lie in bed but lay on the sofa, facing the wall nearly all the time. He

suffered ever the same unceasing agonies and in his loneliness pondered

always on the same insoluble question: “What is this? Can it be that it is

Death?” And the inner voice answered: “Yes, it is Death.”

“Why these sufferings?” And the voice answered, “For no reason — they just

are so.” Beyond and besides this there was nothing.

From the very beginning of his illness, ever since he had first been to see

the doctor, Ivan Ilych’s life had been divided between two contrary and

alternating moods: now it was despair and the expectation of this

uncomprehended and terrible death, and now hope and an intently interested

observation of the functioning of his organs. Now before his eyes there was

only a kidney or an intestine that temporarily evaded its duty, and now only

that incomprehensible and dreadful death from which it was impossible to

escape.

These two states of mind had alternated from the very beginning of his

illness, but the further it progressed the more doubtful and fantastic

became the conception of the kidney, and the more real the sense of

impending death.

He had but to call to mind what he had been three months before and what he

was now, to call to mind with what regularity he had been going downhill,

for every possibility of hope to be shattered.

Latterly during the loneliness in which he found himself as he lay facing

the back of the sofa, a loneliness in the midst of a populous town and

surrounded by numerous acquaintances and relations but that yet could not

have been more complete anywhere — either at the bottom of the sea or under

the earth — during that terrible loneliness Ivan Ilych had lived only in

memories of the past. Pictures of his past rose before him one after

another. They always began with what was nearest in time and then went back

to what was most remote — to his childhood — and rested there. If he thought

of the stewed prunes that had been offered him that day, his mind went back

to the raw shrivelled French plums of his childhood, their peculiar flavour

and the flow of saliva when he sucked their stones, and along with the

memory of that taste came a whole series of memories of those days: his

nurse, his brother, and their toys. “No, I mustn’t think of that…. It

is too painful,” Ivan Ilych said to himself, and brought himself back to the

present — to the button on the back of the sofa and the creases in its

morocco. “Morocco is expensive, but it does not wear well: there had been a

quarrel about it. It was a different kind of quarrel and a different kind of

morocco that time when we tore father’s portfolio and were punished, and

mamma brought us some tarts….” And again his thoughts dwelt on his

childhood, and again it was painful and he tried to banish them and fix his

mind on something else.

Then again together with that chain of memories another series passed

through his mind — of how his illness had progressed and grown worse. There

also the further back he looked the more life there had been. There had been

more of what was good in life and more of life itself. The two merged

together. “Just as the pain went on getting worse and worse, so my life grew

worse and worse,” he thought. “There is one bright spot there at the back,

at the beginning of life, and afterwards all becomes blacker and blacker and

proceeds more and more rapidly — in inverse ration to the square of the

distance from death,” thought Ivan Ilych. And the example of a stone falling

downwards with increasing velocity entered his mind. Life, a series of

increasing sufferings, flies further and further towards its end — the most

terrible suffering. “I am flying….” He shuddered, shifted himself, and

tried to resist, but was already aware that resistance was impossible, and

again with eyes weary of gazing but unable to cease seeing what was before

them, he stared at the back of the sofa and waited — awaiting that dreadful

fall and shock and destruction.

“Resistance is impossible!” he said to himself. “If I could only understand

what it is all for! But that too is impossible. An explanation would be

possible if it could be said that I have not lived as I ought to. But it is

impossible to say that,” and he remembered all the legality, correctitude,

and propriety of his life. “That at any rate can certainly not be

admitted,” he thought, and his lips smiled ironically as if someone could

see that smile and be taken in by it. “There is no explanation! Agony,

death…. What for?”

Another two weeks went by in this way and during that fortnight an event

occurred that Ivan Ilych and his wife had desired. Petrishchev formally

proposed. It happened in the evening. The next day Praskovya Fedorovna came

into her husband’s room considering how best to inform him of it, but that

very night there had been a fresh change for the worse in his condition. She

found him still lying on the sofa but in a different position. He lay on his

back, groaning and staring fixedly straight in front of him.

She began to remind him of his medicines, but he turned his eyes towards her

with such a look that she did not finish what she was saying; so great an

animosity, to her in particular, did that look express.

“For Christ’s sake let me die in peace!” he said.

She would have gone away, but just then their daughter came in and went up

to say good morning. He looked at her as he had done at his wife, and in

reply to her inquiry about his health said dryly that he would soon free

them all of himself. They were both silent and after sitting with him for a

while went away.

“Is it our fault?” Lisa said to her mother. “It’s as if we were to blame! I

am sorry for papa, but why should we be tortured?”

The doctor came at his usual time. Ivan Ilych answered “Yes” and “No,” never

taking his angry eyes from him, and at last said: “You know you can do

nothing for me, so leave me alone.”

“We can ease your sufferings.”

“You can’t even do that. Let me be.”

The doctor went into the drawing room and told Praskovya Fedorovna that the

case was very serious and that the only resource left was opium to allay her

husband’s sufferings, which must be terrible.

It was true, as the doctor said, that Ivan Ilych’s physical sufferings were

terrible, but worse than the physical sufferings were his mental sufferings

which were his chief torture.

His mental sufferings were due to the fact that that night, as he looked at

Gerasim’s sleepy, good-natured face with its prominent cheek-bones, the

question suddenly occurred to him: “What if my whole life has been wrong?”

It occurred to him that what had appeared perfectly impossible before,

namely that he had not spent his life as he should have done, might after

all be true. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to

struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people,

those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed,

might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his professional

duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his

social and official interests, might all have been false. He tried to defend

all those things to himself and suddenly felt the weakness of what he was

defending. There was nothing to defend.

“But if that is so,” he said to himself, “and I am leaving this life with

the consciousness that I have lost all that was given me and it is

impossible to rectify it — what then?”

He lay on his back and began to pass his life in review in quite a new way.

In the morning when he saw first his footman, then his wife, then his

daughter, and then the doctor, their every word and movement confirmed to

him the awful truth that had been revealed to him during the night. In them

he saw himself — all that for which he had lived — and saw clearly that it

was not real at all, but a terrible and huge deception which had hidden both

life and death. This consciousness intensified his physical suffering

tenfold. He groaned and tossed about, and pulled at his clothing which

choked and stifled him. And he hated them on that account.

He was given a large dose of opium and became unconscious, but at noon his

sufferings began again. He drove everybody away and tossed from side to

side.

His wife came to him and said:

“Jean, my dear, do this for me. It can’t do any harm and often helps.

Healthy people often do it.”

He opened his eyes wide.

“What? Take communion? Why? It’s unnecessary! However… “

She began to cry.

“Yes, do, my dear. I’ll send for our priest. He is such a nice man.”

“All right. Very well,” he muttered.

When the priest came and heard his confession, Ivan Ilych was softened and

seemed to feel a relief from his doubts and consequently from his

sufferings, and for a moment there came a ray of hope. He again began to

think of the vermiform appendix and the possibility of correcting it. He

received the sacrament with tears in his eyes.

When they laid him down again afterwards he felt a moment’s ease, and the

hope that he might live awoke in him again. He began to think of the

operation that had been suggested to him. “To live! I want to live!” he said

to himself.

His wife came in to congratulate him after his communion, and when uttering

the usual conventional words she added:

“You feel better, don’t you?”

Without looking at her he said, “Yes.”

Her dress, her figure, the expression