Death is a theme in many works of literature. However, as author Leo Tolstoy dissects the mortality of a successful magistrate in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, he examines deep philosophical musings, and especially of life’s more sinister counterpart — death.
In this article, let’s shine a magnifying glass on death through the eyes of Leo Tolstoy, and just may even answer the greatest question man has ever pondered — the meaning of life.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich begins abruptly with the aftermath of Ivan Ilyich’s death. We are introduced to ‘mourners’ and colleagues of the newly deceased Ivan Ilyich, who was a high-court judge of late 19th century Russia. A man of high social standing with a desirable position in the courts, his colleagues are more concerned with their personal promotions than the fate of Ivan Ilyich or his family. They pay their respects as customary, but Pyotr Ivanovich, a friend of the deceased, is requested by Ivan Ilyich’s wife to have a conversation, where we soon realize he is more concerned for a game of bridge he is missing.
What is brilliant is how Tolstoy first examines death through the eyes of those most unfamiliar with it, in turn, giving the sense that any thought of death should be abandoned for fear of catching it like a virus. Broken up into 12 short chapters, it’s the second chapter we are introduced to the origins of Ivan Ilyich.
Ivan Ilyich is born into a privileged family, the second of three sons of a celebrated Russian official of great means. Ivan does what he thinks anyone in his position should do in life. He goes to the school of jurisprudence and begins climbing the ladder of his judicial career, and strives to achieve everything he thinks expected of him.
When he marries and has children, his relationship with his demanding wife only pushes him to recoil further into his professional affairs. His relationships with those in his family only come secondary, as he is not truly happy with his family. Their increasing debts due to a demanding lifestyle, which he blames his wife for, only force Ivan to seek further positions of higher value. Ivan is only concerned with making more money, regardless of what the position entails.
When receiving a higher position of justice due to capitalizing on a friend’s success, he and his family move to Saint Petersburg and all seems well. However, Ivan is still truly unhappy with his home life and lifestyle, though, again he hides it in his work. One day while fitting curtains in his new house, he falls and hurts his side. At first, he only deals with pain in his side and a bad taste in his mouth. However, as the pain increases, and the taste became nastier, his tolerance for his family dwindles to the point where he finally visits a doctor at his wife’s insistence.
When it became obvious that Ivan’s situation is terminal, his whole world is thrown into flux. He tries to continue his professional and social obligations, though his worsening health eventually leads him to become something of a pariah to colleagues, as his condition is increasingly depressing.
Ivan resents his family, mainly his wife and daughter, who he believes avoided the notion of his death and only believe him sick. He feels alone, that no one cares for him or can relate to his condition. That is except for the peasant Gerasim, who shows him sympathy and tends to the dying man. Still, he is alone and has two main modes of feeling: one of hopeless pain and suffering; and another of hope that he will beat his terminal disease — though the latter comes in small pockets. As he meets with more and more specialists willing to try anything necessary to cure him, Ivan falls further and further into depression. Even the opium barely has an effect on both the pain of his mental and physical deterioration.
The closer he approaches death, the greater his pain is. The remainder of his time is spent in a small room, apart from his wife, where he either lies on the bed or couch. His hatred for his wife and daughter grows even nastier and vapider. He cries like a child as he reflects on his life. He wonders why he should die such a painful and early death. After all, he thought his entire life he was doing everything right. The way it should be done. But then he compares his life to that of the peasant Gerasim. He eventually realizes his life was lived in vain and therefore his death was made that much more senseless and unfulfilling.
He did everything he ought to have done. He went to school. He worked hard and tirelessly, achieving a high social and professional position. He married, had children, had a large house, servants, everything — and yet, he couldn’t think of one happy moment. The only happy moments he can imagine were when he was a child and his early years while at the school of jurisprudence. Ivan tries but cannot conceptualize death. It is only through further pain and anguish that he realizes his life was artificial and not authentic like Gerasim’s. This artificial life was only guided by self-interest, whereas the authentic life was marked by compassion and sympathy.
At the end of his life, during the last three terrible days where he screams in terrible agony, “some force” strikes Ivan’s chest and side and he is confronted by a bright light. When Ivan reaches for it, his hand falls onto his weeping son’s head, and he feels great pity for him. He also feels pity for his wife and daughter, his hatred vanishing. His terror of death disappears, and therefore, as Tolstoy would indicate, so does death itself.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich is perhaps Leo Tolstoy’s most personal work, he wrote it after a religious conversion. Tolstoy, himself, feared death and it could be said this work encapsulated Tolstoy’s own fears and thoughts of death.
Tolstoy depicted The Death of Ivan Ilyich in what he believed was an immoral way of living. If one lived for only personal gratification, then one’s death could only be that much more unfulfilling as it is equated with that of morality and the judgment of God. In other words, by dramatizing a particular sort of lifestyle and its unbearable decline, Tolstoy is able to impart his philosophy that success, such as Ivan Ilyich’s, comes at a great moral cost and if one decides to pay this cost, life will become hollow and insincere and therefore worse than death.
In 1984, philosopher Merold Westphal said that the story depicts “death as an enemy which (1) leads us to deceive ourselves, (2) robs us of the meaning of life, and (3) puts us in solitary confinement.” In 1997, psychologist Mark Freeman wrote:
Tolstoy’s book is about many things: the tyranny of bourgeois niceties, the terrible weak spots of the human heart, the primacy and elision of death. But more than anything, I would offer, it is about the consequences of living without meaning, that is, without a true and abiding connection to one’s life…
To quote Russian author, Vladimir Nabokov: “The Tolstoyan formula is: Ivan lived a bad life and since the bad life is nothing but the death of the soul, then Ivan lived a living death; and since beyond death is God’s living light, then Ivan died into a new life — Life with a capital L.”
The narrative depicts death in a realistic, absorbing way, but death itself is only truly realized and visualized in the first chapter. The story itself truly focuses on the lead-up and realization of death through a pensive, metaphysical exploration of what it truly means to live.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich has influenced other great works. One notable work I’d like to highlight is Akira Kurosawa’s more optimistic adaptation Ikiru. In this film, like in Tolstoy’s original work, the protagonist is faced with the grim realization of death, but by the end, instead of letting his life be in vain, he does something honorable in order to give meaning to his life.
Hopefully, this article has answered a few long-standing questions about The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and maybe just maybe, you have come closer to understanding your personal meaning for life. Or, even better, perhaps you’re now inspired to explore more of the works of Leo Tolstoy.
