Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich

[this book was read forBookbugin December 2024]

"The example of syllogistic reasoning he had read in Kiezewetter's Logic — "Gaius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Gaius is mortal" — and of men in general, made absolute sense; but he was no Gauis and was not some man in general."

Despite these thoughts surfacing as he learns of his illness, this reader found Ivan Ilyich to be a singularly unremarkable, and slightly unpleasant man. Born to into the aristocratic Golovin family prospering under the rule of Tsar Alexander II, his father, a man of some standing and no use, had decided that his son was to be a lawyer, and unlike his younger brother who had the courage to fail at law school, Ivan Ilyich was a perfectly acceptable student, an acceptable lawyer, a long-suffering husband, and finally an acceptable judge.

Ivan Ilych's life and career are defined solely by their acceptability. He never strays from what society expects of him; he cultivates no interesting hobbies, limiting himself to gambling and interior design, he reads little besides his law papers and perhaps a popular book, required for conversation in high society. He experiences marital strife, but ascribes it to his wife's acerbic temper rather than the fact that he distances himself from her at the hint of need or conflict; consider the fact that Praskovya Fedorovna is pregnant five times over the course of the novella, and even as three of those children die, Ivan Ilyich can muster no sympathy for his wife.

This comfortable, self serving monotony is of course, disrupted by the gnawing discomfort that materializes in Ivan Ilyich's side and develops into an agonising pain accompanied by terminal illness. On learning of his impending doom, for the very first time, Ivan Ilyich is forced to think; for his doctors are unsure of the character of the illness — it might be in his appendix, it might be in his kidneys — but no one is sure. Ivan Ilyich's societal, judicial, and familial certainty is dissolved in the blink of an eye and is replaced by the singular certainty of pain, an irrepressible, inexpressible, pain.

"Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned [...] To witness the moment when pain causes a reversion to the pre-language of cries and groans is to witness the destruction of language; but conversely, to be present when a person moves up out of that pre-language and projects the facts of sentience into speech is almost to have been permitted to be present at the birth of language itself."

— Elaine Scarry, in, The Body in Pain.

Pain unmakes Ivan Ilyich's body —

When he was done, he remembered where his heart was — in his appendix.

— And remakes him; Ivan Ilyich, recused from duties as a judge is left to contemplate his life, and finds solace only in the carefree days of his childhood. His youth, his time in school, his career and family, he begins to question. He begins to wonder whether he truly did live a life at all —

"It occurred to him that those scarcely detected impulses to struggle against what people of the highest social rank considered good, those feeble tendencies that he barely noticed and immediately suppressed, might in fact be what was real, and everything else was false. His career, all the arrangements of his life and family, his social and professional ambitions — each of them might be false [...] he saw himself and everything he had lived by, and saw clearly that it was all false, all of it was a monstrous and immense deceit foreclosing both life and death."

In questioning his entire existence in the presence of excruciating pain, at the doors of death, Ivan Illyich, is for a moment, vivified by a burning hatred for everything he has stood for, in that moment he becomes a howling terror to his family; they are forced to sedate him, they send for a priest. And in that brief moment he becomes an interesting man. And then, he dies.