The Death of Ivan Ilyich

My first Tolstoy.

A book about death, which suits my tastes perfectly (Disclaimer: I have a morbid obsession with the concept of death).

Having witnessed first-hand a dear family member struggle with death exactly one year ago, I couldn't have read this book at a better time. It is bewildering how we only recognize the inevitability of death and the mortality of our fickle selves when we finally face it, or when someone dear passes away. Only then would we realize how close death is lurking, and how life was nothing but a constant struggle with death.

Tolstoy accurately describes what it is like to face death slowly but surely moving towards you. How you cling to life with every speck of hope you can muster out of your feeble self but then show more when death unveils itself to you, you embrace it and wait for it. But death still mocks you. How your loved ones continue believing there is hope; that you can be saved from its clutches. But only you know the truth. You urge death on to get its job done; to rid yourself of the humility of being weak; of seeing your loved ones' pity and how much of a liability you have become to them now.

I was particularly drawn to the transformation of Ivan Ilych's character from a man obsessed with life (and its minute details) to the entire opposite. It is that critical point of time in one's life that I continuously ponder on. As perplexing and mysterious the ways of death are, I think to be human is not only to recognize one's mortality, but to contemplate it and to embrace it.

5/5 show less

Long time ago, back in school I read War and Peace. Wonderful characters, engaging story and ... painful digressions. Clearly a masterpiece but in need of a good editor who would cut this tome in half and leave only what matters. Tolstoy's take on philosophy clearly did not impress me. About ten years later I found myself reading Anna Karenina and I had a similar response - characters were there in flesh and blood, the story was interesting to follow but ... could I just skip 'the perfect landowner' musings? So, after two Tolstoy's chef-d'oeuvres, I thought I had enough of big old Leo.

Lately, when discussing literature with friends from the book-club, the mention of Tolstoy would almost invariably be linked with 'The Death of Ivan show more Ilych'. I felt like I was missing something big. Turned out, I was missing something small - a novella of 50 pages or so. Inexcusable! Especially since it was there on my shelf in one of the 'Collected works' volumes.

Good thing about writing a review for this novella is that there cannot be a spoiler. The biggest spoiler is in the title, chosen by Leo himself. In case someone like me still has doubts how this thing would end, you have a confirmation in the first paragraph: "Gentlemen, Ivan Ilych died!" The ending is clear, what matters is how you get there, which is incidentally true not only about Ivan Ilych but about every single one of us.

This is where Tolstoy performs his magic. He starts slow. He pulls the reader into a routine description of an uneventful life of an insignificant person. A successful career, a problematic but functional marriage, improving social standing and living conditions, good prospects for the kids, etc. - problems and aspirations of an aristocratic family in XIX century Russia are eerily similar to those of a modern middle class one in the West. It's easy to imagine yourself in the shoes of Ivan Ilych. Here the author is making a snowball.

The illness of Ivan Ilych starts out as a minor inconvenience, then a distraction, a source of domestic fights, lack of attention at work and play, annoyance initially with doctors and then with his own body, and finally the source of fear. Ivan Ilych realizes that he is going to die. The snowball is now rolling down the hill. The way the intensity of this short story changes is unbelievable. The chapters become shorter and punchier, the physical suffering more acute, the mental pain - intolerable, the questions - haunting.

As the snowball grows and gathers speed, you know that it will bury poor Ivan Ilych in the end, what you don't know is that it will bury you, the reader, as well. Turns out you were the target all along and Ivan Ilych was just a dummy, conveniently sacrificed on the way.

Had you not read this novella and somehow stumbled upon this inconsequential review, I would not spoil you the pleasure of discovering how exactly you would be hit by the curved snowball thrown by Tolstoy. I would just insist that you stop whatever you were doing and read this thing. It is inexcusable if you don't!

This story is where the power of literature is clearly felt. You don't need to be dying in order to ask yourself the questions that assail Ivan Ilych on his deathbed. These are the questions you should have been asking all along. If you have not up until now, you will be, after reading the book. And you might have an answer too.

"Death is finished. It is no more!" show less

This is why Tolstoy is one of the greats. Because his work reads on multiple levels, and because his characters are never caricatures just there to hold a spear or prop up some scenery.

On one level this is the story of the life and death of a not particularly likeable functionary. On another its an indictment of a particular society in a particular time, in which isolation from and indifference to others are the price of privilege and comfort and how a man loses himself in that devil's bargain. On another its a story of how we all tend to lose sight of the important things in life in the process of living it. On another it is the story of how even a not particularly likeable functionary is still a human being, with the fears and show more feelings and loves and losses that we all share as part of our common humanity.

So much going on in such a small space. show less

I’ve always had a keen sense of my own mortality, but I’ve reached a time of life when death is edging more clearly into view than it did in my youth. The generations ahead of me are stepping ever more vigorously into that dream from whence no passenger ever returned, and I feel time pressing ever more firmly on my own back. Whether I will die is a settled question; what it will mean is all that’s left to me.

“The Death of Ivan Ilych” is Leo Tolstoy’s meditation on what it means to die. I don’t think it’s accidental that his protagonist is 45 years old, roughly the same age that Tolstoy had been when he experienced the deep existential crisis that transformed his life. Tolstoy, writing ten years after the fact, seems to show more ask himself, “If I had been thrown into a bed of sickness and death at that time, what would I have felt? How would I have assessed my life to that point? What would have been my thoughts?” The result is the rawest confrontation with personal extinction that I’ve had the sober pleasure to read.

The sentence that most struck me in this fine novella opens the second chapter: “Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.” This is crucial to Tolstoy’s understanding of a life that’s worth dying for. After opening with Ivan’s wake, Tolstoy sketches a biography of this respected judge who was raised properly, studied properly, married properly, and now discharges his duty properly. Ivan never deviates from the strictures of his class and, in return, receives the comfortable living he assumes he deserves. Tolstoy piles up adverbs — easily, pleasantly, correctly, decorously — to describe both Ivan’s conduct and the reward it brings. All is well, until it isn’t.

I can best describe Ivan’s inner psychological drama as he sickens and dies with the words of Blaise Pascal: “We are fools to depend upon the society of our fellow-men. Wretched as we are, powerless as we are, they will not aid us; we shall die alone.” To his horror, Ivan discovers three things: death is an incomprehensible truth, society-approved conduct is an empty lie, and the living don’t really care about the dying. He’s built a career where he is admired but friendless; he’s built a marriage where he is secure but not loved; he’s sired children who are well-bred but drifting away. At the end of all his easy, pleasant, correct, and decorous living is the It that comes for us all:

“It would come and stand before him and look at him, and he would be petrified and the light would die out of his eyes, and he would again begin asking himself whether It alone was true…And what was worst of all was that It drew his attention to itself not in order to make him take some action but only that he should look at It, look it straight in the face: look at it and without doing anything, suffer inexpressibly.”

For Tolstoy, the greatest tragedy is coming to your end only to find you wasted yourself on an inauthentic life. What makes the novella compelling is that Ivan is not a bad man, and his illness and death are not byproducts of bad living. The reader feels his anger, despair, and terror as a parade of contradictory doctors accomplish nothing, as his wife and children embrace their vivacious and healthy lives without him, and as he wastes away to a shell in the faux-luxury of the house that mocks him with its pretence of success. He cries out to live, but he cannot. He did everything right, and it was all for nothing. He lived a most simple and most ordinary life, one that you or I might live; but in the end, Tolstoy seems to say, the cost of an unexamined life is everything.

Is Tolstoy right? Well, here’s the thing: death is intensely personal. For a man like Tolstoy, the specter of empty ordinariness is horrifying. Why would you waste your few precious years on society’s bourgeois mores, upward mobility, and drab social conventions, when the great truth of life is that it ends? Many agree with him, and — like Tolstoy — devote themselves to causes bigger than themselves. However, some (like George Eliot at the end of “Middlemarch”) have a different take: “But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

For Eliot, the simple and ordinary life is precisely the important life: unassuming, frugal, shedding a beneficent influence, and improving the world in small ways commensurate with your station. To be sure, Ivan Ilych’s great failing is that he “was by nature attracted to people of high station as a fly is drawn to the light assimilating their ways and views of life” with no great interest in improving anything or anyone. Still, he ticks the boxes Eliot approves: he does his duty, provides for his family, and doesn’t rock society’s boat. For Eliot, this might be a well-lived hidden life that contributes silently to the world’s growing good. For Tolstoy, it’s a waste and a farce and a tragedy.

You, dear reader, will draw your own conclusions. Death, again, is intensely personal. None of us will know until the moment arrives how we will feel, but much of that future feeling will surely be governed by whether your philosophy is closer to Tolstoy’s or Eliot’s. Will we rage against the dying of light as Dylan Thomas would have us do, or follow Mark Twain’s lead and embrace death as a friend that releases us from the misery of living? Something in between? I don’t know, but someday I’ll find out. Until then, I’ll aim at the best of both worlds: to live a fully examined life, and to leave my small corner of the world a little better than I found it. show less

This is the story of the life and - as the title indicates - the death of an ordinary man. Ivan Ilych is not a particularly likeable character, nor are his wife and children, nor the colleagues who also appear in the narrative. And yet, the story of Ivan's death is powerful and moving, simply but exquisitely told. Ivan's anger, his fear, his resentment are all unflinchingly described.

I've spent the past few months acutely aware of mortality. A close friend died suddenly a few months ago. Two other women I know well have inoperable cancer. My mother is frail and elderly and every time I see her I know I may never see her alive again. That sense of being surrounded by death in life is something that all of us face as we age.

Talking show more about dying and death is not something we do much of in our society, even though it is something which occurs every moment of every day. Reading this book, as short as it is, brings the reader face to face with that perience. No matter how ordinary a person, no matter how ordinary their life, each death is unique - an extraordinary experience for the person concerned.

This is not easy reading, but it is something to read and remember. show less

Throughout recorded time, humans have wondered about the afterlife and its relationship to this life. Tolstoy takes a spin on that and focuses on the interface between the two. What exactly happens as one approaches death? Few have experienced near-death, but no one has experienced death fully. What is dying like?

Tolstoy provides his answer in this short depiction of a Russian lawyer Ivan Ilych. He lives a normal, even boring, life and suddenly gets sick. His performance at work suffers, and his family gawks at him. He experiences pain and after much contemplation, decides that there is no meaning in death. He is offered last rites. Eventually, he dies saying to himself, “Death is finished… It is no more!”, and the book show more ends.

Throughout this process, we readers peer into his inner life. We see his uncertainty and curiosity about death. In twenty-first century parlance, he grieves his own death as he comes to accept his mortality. At one point, he thinks, “There is no explanation! Agony, death… What for?” He also reflects on the quality of his life and decides that he lived a good life.

Tolstoy offers readers the opportunity to examine their own experience and to accept, albeit incompletely, their own finitude. He writes in the Christian tradition even though much of this work applies to those outside this faith. He takes no position on the existence of an afterlife, either positively or negatively. Instead, he focuses on what a (good?) death consists of and how human nature reacts when approaching death.

This classical yet modern statement about how humans approach death helps readers detach from their own emotions towards death. By observing Ivan Ilych, we readers observe ourselves and the prejudices we carry towards death on the basis of our own experiences. Thus, Tolstoy offers us a liturgy of sorts. He allows us to play out the drama over and over in this short novella. In so doing, he seeks to allow us to embrace life more fully. That job is accomplished through his strongly asserted words. The rest is up to us. show less

Uno de los relatos más conocidos de León Tolstoi es ’La muerte de Ivan Ilich’, una trama desarrollada entre las clases burguesas de una Rusia crepuscular, donde el protagonista, Ivan Ilich, es un hombre del que desde el inicio sabemos de su muerte. Ivan Ilich es un alto funcionario, regido por la rectitud y acostumbrado a la comodidad, rodeado de la más alta burguesía, cuya vida familiar transcurre bajo el tedio y el hastío. Sin embargo, un día se da cuenta de que sufre un dolor en el costado, al que no da importancia, pero que le provoca constantes molestias. Dolor que se vuelve persistente y que significará su fin.

En esta breve novela, Tolstoi nos plantea múltiples preguntas: ¿Estamos preparados para la muerte? ¿En qué show more consiste verdaderamente vivir? ¿Vivimos como debemos? Tolstoi no ofrece respuestas a estas preguntas, quién puede, pero en cambio nos desvela el propósito del ser humano en una naturaleza por demás caótica y azarosa, y de su afán por trascender. Sin embargo, todo esto se vuelve intrascendente al encarar la muerte, a la que Ivan Ilich afronta con miedo, preguntándose si su paso por la vida será meramente anecdótico. Tolstoi retrata una burguesía carente de humanidad, presumida y decidida a alcanzar las metas más superficiales. Y esta frivolidad y mezquindad la encontramos en ’La muerte de Ivan Ilich’ sobre todo en sus diálogos.

Certero en sus reflexiones, Tolstoi nos muestra a un Ivan Ilich que se pregunta si su vida ha merecido la pena, si la ha malgastado en aspiraciones absurdas. Ante su inminente final, Ivan Ilich intenta comprender el porqué de su muerte. Tolstoi aborda el tema de la muerte de manera directa y sin tapujos, en una historia que te enfrenta a tu realidad y te hace saber algo más de ti mismo. show less