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

poisoned and was poisoning the lives of others, and that this poison did not

weaken but penetrated more and more deeply into his whole being.

With this consciousness, and with physical pain besides the terror, he must

go to bed, often to lie awake the greater part of the night. Next morning he

had to get up again, dress, go to the law courts, speak, and write; or if he

did not go out, spend at home those twenty-four hours a day each of which

was a torture. And he had to live thus all alone on the brink of an abyss,

with no one who understood or pitied him.

So one month passed and then another. Just before the New Year his

brother-in-law came to town and stayed at their house. Ivan Ilych was at the

law courts and Praskovya Fedorovna had gone shopping. When Ivan Ilych came

home and entered his study he found his brother-in-law there — a healthy,

florid man — unpacking his portmanteau himself. He raised his head on

hearing Ivan Ilych’s footsteps and looked up at him for a moment without a

word. That stare told Ivan Ilych everything. His brother-in-law opened his

mouth to utter an exclamation of surprise but checked himself, and that

action confirmed it all.

“I have changed, eh?”

“Yes, there is a change.”

And after that, try as he would to get his brother-in-law to return to the

subject of his looks, the latter would say nothing about it. Praskovya

Fedorovna came home and her brother went out to her. Ivan Ilych locked to

door and began to examine himself in the glass, first full face, then in

profile. He took up a portrait of himself taken with his wife, and compared

it with what he saw in the glass. The change in him was immense. Then he

bared his arms to the elbow, looked at them, drew the sleeves down again,

sat down on an ottoman, and grew blacker than night.

“No, no, this won’t do!” he said to himself, and jumped up, went to the

table, took up some law papers and began to read them, but could not

continue. He unlocked the door and went into the reception-room. The door

leading to the drawing-room was shut. He approached it on tiptoe and

listened.

“No, you are exaggerating!” Praskovya Fedorovna was saying.

“Exaggerating! Don’t you see it? Why, he’s a dead man! Look at his eyes —

there’s no life in them. But what is it that is wrong with him?”

“No one knows. Nikolaevich [that was another doctor] said something, but I

don’t know what. And Seshchetitsky [this was the celebrated specialist] said

quite the contrary… “

Ivan Ilych walked away, went to his own room, lay down, and began musing;

“The kidney, a floating kidney.” He recalled all the doctors had told him of

how it detached itself and swayed about. And by an effort of imagination he

tried to catch that kidney and arrest it and support it. So little was

needed for this, it seemed to him. “No, I’ll go to see Peter Ivanovich

again.” [That was the friend whose friend was a doctor.] He rang, ordered

the carriage, and got ready to go.

“Where are you going, Jean?” asked his wife with a specially sad and

exceptionally kind look.

This exceptionally kind look irritated him. He looked morosely at her.

“I must go to see Peter Ivanovich.”

He went to see Peter Ivanovich, and together they went to see his friend,

the doctor. He was in, and Ivan Ilych had a long talk with him.

Reviewing the anatomical and physiological details of what in the doctor’s

opinion was going on inside him, he understood it all.

There was something, a small thing, in the vermiform appendix. It might all

come right. Only stimulate the energy of one organ and check the activity of

another, then absorption would take place and everything would come right.

He got home rather late for dinner, ate his dinner, and conversed

cheerfully, but could not for a long time bring himself to go back to work

in his room. At last, however, he went to his study and did what was

necessary, but the consciousness that he had put something aside — an

important, intimate matter which he would revert to when his work was done

— never left him. When he had finished his work he remembered that this

intimate matter was the thought of his vermiform appendix. But he did not

give himself up to it, and went to the drawing-room for tea. There were

callers there, including the examining magistrate who was a desirable match

for his daughter, and they were conversing, playing the piano, and singing.

Ivan Ilych, as Praskovya Fedorovna remarked, spent that evening more

cheerfully than usual, but he never for a moment forgot that he had

postponed the important matter of the appendix. At eleven o’clock he said

goodnight and went to his bedroom. Since his illness he had slept alone in a

small room next to his study. He undressed and took up a novel by Zola, but

instead of reading it he fell into thought, and in his imagination that

desired improvement in the vermiform appendix occurred. There was the

absorption and evacuation and the re-establishment of normal activity. “Yes,

that’s it!” he said to himself. “One need only assist nature, that’s all.”

He remembered his medicine, rose, took it, and lay down on his back watching

for the beneficent action of the medicine and for it to lessen the pain. “I

need only take it regularly and avoid all injurious influences. I am already

feeling better, much better.” He began touching his side: it was not painful

to the touch. “There, I really don’t feel it. It’s much better already.” He

put out the light and turned on his side… “The appendix is getting

better, absorption is occurring.” Suddenly he felt the old, familiar, dull,

gnawing pain, stubborn and serious. There was the same familiar loathsome

taste in his mouth. His heart sank and he felt dazed. “My God! My God!” he

muttered. “Again, again! And it will never cease.” And suddenly the matter

presented itself in a quite different aspect. “Vermiform appendix!

Kidney!” he said to himself. “It’s not a question of appendix or kidney, but

of life and… death. Yes, life was there and now it is going, going and

I cannot stop it. Yes. Why deceive myself? Isn’t it obvious to everyone but

me that I’m dying, and that it’s only a question of weeks, days… it may

happen this moment. There was light and now there is darkness. I was here

and now I’m going there! Where?” A chill came over him, his breathing

ceased, and he felt only the throbbing of his heart.

“When I am not, what will there be? There will be nothing. Then where shall

I be when I am no more? Can this be dying? No, I don’t want to!” He jumped

up and tried to light the candle, felt for it with trembling hands, dropped

candle and candlestick on the floor, and fell back on his pillow.

“What’s the use? It makes no difference,” he said to himself, staring with

wide-open eyes into the darkness. “Death. Yes, death. And none of them knows

or wishes to know it, and they have no pity for me. Now they are playing.”

(He heard through the door the distant sound of a song and its

accompaniment.) “It’s all the same to them, but they will die too! Fools! I

first, and they later, but it will be the same for them. And now they are

merry… the beasts!”

Anger choked him and he was agonizingly, unbearably miserable. “It is

impossible that all men have been doomed to suffer this awful horror!” He

raised himself.

“Something must be wrong. I must calm myself — must think it all over from

the beginning.” And he again began thinking. “Yes, the beginning of my

illness: I knocked my side, but I was still quite well that day and the

next. It hurt a little, then rather more. I saw the doctors, then followed

despondency and anguish, more doctors, and I drew nearer to the abyss. My

strength grew less and I kept coming nearer and nearer, and now I have

wasted away and there is no light in my eyes. I think of the appendix — but

this is death! I think of mending the appendix, and all the while here is

death! Can it really be death?” Again terror seized him and he gasped for

breath. He leant down and began feeling for the matches, pressing with his

elbow on the stand beside the bed. It was in his way and hurt him, he grew

furious with it, pressed on it still harder, and upset it. Breathless and in

despair he fell on his back, expecting death to come immediately.

Meanwhile the visitors were leaving. Praskovya Fedorovna was seeing them

off. She heard something fall and came in.

“What has happened?”

“Nothing. I knocked it over accidentally.”

She went out and returned with a candle. He lay there panting heavily, like

a man who has run a thousand yards, and stared upwards at her with a fixed

look.

“What is it, Jean?”

“No… O… thing. I upset it.” (“Why speak of it? She won’t

understand,” he thought.)

And in truth she did not understand. She picked up the stand, lit his

candle, and hurried away to see another visitor off. When she came back he

still lay on his back, looking upwards.

“What is it? Do you feel worse?”

“Yes.”

She shook her head and sat down.

“Do you know, Jean, I think we must ask Leshchetitsky to come and see you

here.”

This meant calling in the famous specialist, regardless of expense. He

smiled malignantly and said “No.” She remained a little longer and then went

up to him and kissed his forehead.

While she was kissing him he hated her from the bottom of his soul and with

difficulty refrained from pushing her away.

“Good night. Please God you’ll sleep.”

“Yes.”

Ivan Ilych saw that he was dying, and he was in continual despair.

In the depth of his heart he knew he was dying, but not only was he not

accustomed to the thought, he simply did not and could not grasp it.

The syllogism he had learnt from Kiesewetter’s Logic: “Caius is a man, men

are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal,” had always seemed to him correct as

applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. That Caius — man

in the abstract — was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius,

not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others.

He had been little Vanya, with a mamma and a papa, with Mitya and Volodya,

with the toys, a coachman and a nurse, afterwards with Katenka and with all

the joys, griefs, and delights of childhood, boyhood, and youth. What did

Caius know of the smell of that striped leather ball Vanya had been so fond

of? Had Caius kissed his mother’s hand like that, and did the silk of her

dress rustle so for Caius? Had he rioted like that at school when the pastry

was bad? Had Caius been in love like that? Could Caius preside at a session

as he did? “Caius really was mortal, and it was right for him to die; but

for me, little Vanya, Ivan Ilych, with all my thoughts and emotions, it’s

altogether a different matter. It cannot