The Death of Ivan Ilyich
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The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Russian: Smert Ivana Ilyicha), first published in 1886, is a novella by Leo Tolstoy. It is one of Tolstoy's most celebrated pieces of late fiction. This work stems in part from Tolstoy's anguished intellectual and spiritual struggles which led to his conversion to idiosyncratic Buddhism-like Christianity. Central to the story is an examination on the nature of both life and death, and how man can come to terms with death's very inevitability. The novella was acclaimed by Vladimir Nabokov and Mahatma Gandhi as the greatest in the whole of Russian literature.
Plot
Ivan Ilych Golovin, a high court judge in St. Petersburg with a wife and family, lives a carefree, comme il faut life which is "most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible". One day, after falling from hanging curtains, he begins to suffer from a mysterious pain in his left abdomen. The pain becomes more and more excruciating. He is forced to visit physicians, who cannot pinpoint the source of his malady (Tolstoy hints that it is possibly some form of cancer), although it soon becomes clear his condition is terminal. He is brought face to face with his mortality, and realizes that although he knows of it, he does not truly grasp it.
- ::''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.
- ::''[...]
- ::''"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 be that I ought to die. That would be too terrible."
- ::''Such was his feeling.
In the long painful process of dying he re-examines his worthless life, as well as the hypocrisy of himself in the past and the people all around him, taking comfort in only the simpleness of his peasant man servant Gerasim. Tolstoy carefully traces his evolving frame of mind as he approaches a painful death. At the end, seconds before his death, he sees what is described as a light, realizing his past life was death itself and the real life only begins:
- ::''"And death...where is it?"
- ::''He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. "Where is it? What death?" There was no fear because there was no death.
- ::''In place of death there was light.
- ::''"So that's what it is!" he suddenly exclaimed aloud. "What joy!"
- ::''He drew in a breath, stopped in the midst of a sigh, stretched out, and died.
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Analysis & Criticism
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