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

farewell dinner with his comrades at Donon’s first-class restaurant, and

with his new and fashionable portmanteau, linen, clothes, shaving and other

toilet appliances, and a traveling rug, all purchased at the best shops, he

set off for one of the provinces where through his father’s influence, he

had been attached to the governor as an official for special service.

In the province Ivan Ilych soon arranged as easy and agreeable a position

for himself as he had had at the School of Law. He performed his official

task, made his career, and at the same time amused himself pleasantly and

decorously. Occasionally he paid official visits to country districts where

he behaved with dignity both to his superiors and inferiors, and performed

the duties entrusted to him, which related chiefly to the sectarians, with

an exactness and incorruptible honesty of which he could not but feel proud.

In official matters, despite his youth and taste for frivolous gaiety, he

was exceedingly reserved, punctilious, and even severe; but in society he

was often amusing and witty, and always good-natured, correct in his manner,

and bon enfant, as the governor and his wife — with whom he was like one of

the family — used to say of him.

In the province he had an affair with a lady who made advances to the

elegant young lawyer, and there was also a milliner; and there were

carousals with aides-de-camp who visited the district, and after-supper

visits to a certain outlying street of doubtful reputation; and there was

too some obsequiousness to his chief and even to his chief’s wife, but all

this was done with such a tone of good breeding that no hard names could be

applied to it. It all came under the heading of the French saying: “_Il faut

que jeunesse se passe._” It was all done with clean hands, in clean linen,

with French phrases, and above all among people of the best society and

consequently with the approval of people of rank.

So Ivan Ilych served for five years and then came a change in his official

life. The new and reformed judicial institutions were introduced, and new

men were needed. Ivan Ilych became such a new man. He was offered the post

of examining magistrate, and he accepted it though the post was in another

province and obliged him to give up the connexions he had formed and to make

new ones. His friends met to give him a send-off; they had a group

photograph taken and presented him with a silver cigarette-case, and he set

off to his new post.

As examining magistrate Ivan Ilych was just as comme il faut and decorous a

man, inspiring general respect and capable of separating his official duties

from his private life, as he had been when acting as an official on special

service. His duties now as examining magistrate were far more interesting

and attractive than before. In his former position it had been pleasant to

wear an undress uniform made by Scharmer, and to pass through the crowd of

petitioners and officials who were timorously awaiting an audience with the

governor, and who envied him as with free and easy gait he went straight

into his chief’s private room to have a cup of tea and a cigarette with him.

But not many people had then been directly dependent on him — only police

officials and the sectarians when he went on special missions — and he liked

to treat them politely, almost as comrades, as if he were letting them feel

that he who had the power to crush them was treating them in this simple,

friendly way. There were then but few such people. But now, as an examining

magistrate, Ivan Ilych felt that everyone without exception, even the most

important and self-satisfied, was in his power, and that he need only write

a few words on a sheet of paper with a certain heading, and this or that

important, self-satisfied person would be brought before him in the role of

an accused person or a witness, and if he did not choose to allow him to sit

down, would have to stand before him and answer his questions. Ivan Ilych

never abused his power; he tried on the contrary to soften its expression,

but the consciousness of it and the possibility of softening its effect,

supplied the chief interest and attraction of his office. In his work

itself, especially in his examinations, he very soon acquired a method of

eliminating all considerations irrelevant to the legal aspect of the case,

and reducing even the most complicated case to a form in which it would be

presented on paper only in its externals, completely excluding his personal

opinion of the matter, while above all observing every prescribed formality.

The work was new and Ivan Ilych was one of the first men to apply the new

Code of 1864.

On taking up the post of examining magistrate in a new town, he made new

acquaintances and connexions, placed himself on a new footing and assumed a

somewhat different tone. He took up an attitude of rather dignified

aloofness towards the provincial authorities, but picked out the best circle

of legal gentlemen and wealthy gentry living in the town and assumed a tone

of slight dissatisfaction with the government, of moderate liberalism, and

of enlightened citizenship. At the same time, without at all altering the

elegance of his toilet, he ceased shaving his chin and allowed his beard to

grow as it pleased.

Ivan Ilych settled down very pleasantly in this new town. The society there,

which inclined towards opposition to the governor was friendly, his salary

was larger, and he began to play vint [a form of bridge], which he found

added not a little to the pleasure of life, for he had a capacity for cards,

played good-humouredly, and calculated rapidly and astutely, so that he

usually won.

After living there for two years he met his future wife, Praskovya Fedorovna

Mikhel, who was the most attractive, clever, and brilliant girl of the set

in which he moved, and among other amusements and relaxations from his

labours as examining magistrate, Ivan Ilych established light and playful

relations with her.

While he had been an official on special service he had been accustomed to

dance, but now as an examining magistrate it was exceptional for him to do

so. If he danced now, he did it as if to show that though he served under

the reformed order of things, and had reached the fifth official rank, yet

when it came to dancing he could do it better than most people. So at the

end of an evening he sometimes danced with Praskovya Fedorovna, and it was

chiefly during these dances that he captivated her. She fell in love with

him. Ivan Ilych had at first no definite intention of marrying, but when the

girl fell in love with him he said to himself: “Really, why shouldn’t I

marry?”

Praskovya Fedorovna came of a good family, was not bad looking, and had some

little property. Ivan Ilych might have aspired to a more brilliant match,

but even this was good. He had his salary, and she, he hoped, would have an

equal income. She was well connected, and was a sweet, pretty, and

thoroughly correct young woman. To say that Ivan Ilych married because he

fell in love with Praskovya Fedorovna and found that she sympathized with

his views of life would be as incorrect as to say that he married because

his social circle approved of the match. He was swayed by both these

considerations: the marriage gave him personal satisfaction, and at the same

time it was considered the right thing by the most highly placed of his

associates.

So Ivan Ilych got married.

The preparations for marriage and the beginning of married life, with its

conjugal caresses, the new furniture, new crockery, and new linen, were very

pleasant until his wife became pregnant — so that Ivan Ilych had begun to

think that marriage would not impair the easy, agreeable, gay and always

decorous character of his life, approved of by society and regarded by

himself as natural, but would even improve it. But from the first months of

his wife’s pregnancy, something new, unpleasant, depressing, and unseemly,

and from which there was no way of escape, unexpectedly showed itself.

His wife, without any reason — de gaiete de coeur as Ivan Ilych expressed it

to himself — began to disturb the pleasure and propriety of their life. She

began to be jealous without any cause, expected him to devote his whole

attention to her, found fault with everything, and made coarse and

ill-mannered scenes.

At first Ivan Ilych hoped to escape from the unpleasantnesses of this state of

affairs by the same easy and decorous relation to life that had served him

heretofore: he tried to ignore his wife’s disagreeable moods, continued to

live in his usual easy and pleasant way, invited friends to his house for a

game of cards, and also tried going out to his club or spending his evenings

with friends. But one day his wife began upbraiding him so vigorously, using

such coarse words, and continued to abuse him every time he did not fulfill

her demands, so resolutely and with such evident determination not to give

way till he submitted — that is, till he stayed at home and was bored just

as she was — that he became alarmed. He now realized that matrimony — at any

rate with Praskovya Fedorovna — was not always conducive to the pleasures

and amenities of life, but on the contrary often infringed both comfort and

propriety, and that he must therefore entrench himself against such

infringement. And Ivan Ilych began to seek for means of doing so. His

official duties were the one thing that imposed upon Praskovya Fedorovna,

and by means of his official work and the duties attached to it he began

struggling with his wife to secure his own independence.

With the birth of their child, the attempts to feed it and the various

failures in doing so, and with the real and imaginary illnesses of mother

and child, in which Ivan Ilych’s sympathy was demanded but about which he

understood nothing, the need of securing for himself an existence outside

his family life became still more imperative.

As his wife grew more irritable and exacting and Ivan Ilych transferred the

center of gravity of his life more and more to his official work, so did he

grow to like his work better and became more ambitious than before.

Very soon, within a year of his wedding, Ivan Ilych had realized that

marriage, though it may add some comforts to life, is in fact a very

intricate and difficult affair towards which in order to perform one’s duty,

that is, to lead a decorous life approved of by society, one must adopt a

definite attitude just as towards one’s official duties.

And Ivan Ilych evolved such an attitude towards married life. He only

required of it those conveniences — dinner at home, housewife, and bed —

which it could give him, and above all that propriety of external forms

required by public opinion. For the rest he looked for lighthearted pleasure

and propriety, and was very thankful when he found them, but if he met with

antagonism and querulousness he at once retired into his separate fenced-off

world of official duties, where he found satisfaction.

Ivan Ilych was esteemed a good official, and after three years was made

Assistant Public Prosecutor. His new duties, their importance, the

possibility of indicting and imprisoning anyone he chose, the publicity his

speeches received, and the success he had in all these things, made his