We’re reading Tolstoy’s 1886 novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, in class this week. We’ve been reading several arguments in favor of ethical criticism, from Martha Nussbaum, Wayne Booth, John Gardner, etc., and we’ve read excerpts from Tolstoy’s own theory of art which requires ethical criticism. The idea is that we’ll read Ilyich the way ethical critics want us to read fiction, and we’ll also look for Tolstoy’s own aesthetic in the text.
I never tire of teaching this novella, in part because students seem to embrace it. The plot — what there is of it — is quite simple: the book opens with the funeral of Ivan Ilyich, a high court judge in Tsarist St. Petersburg, Russia. The immediate concerns of his colleagues and family are self-serving and superficial: promotions, pensions, and what the most minimal duties of propriety require. In Chapter 2, we are told that “Ivan Ilyich’s life had been the most simple and most ordinary and therefore the most terrible.” He had lived “pleasantly and properly”, goofing off a bit as a youth, attending law school, getting married, having kids, rising up the ranks, socializing appropriately, and basically doing what the respectable people of his class are expected to do. After a nice promotion, he relocates and purchases a new home, only to fall off a stepladder while trying to show the upholsterer how he wants curtains hung. He bruises his side, and never really recovers. The rest of the novella follows Ilyich’s deterioration and death from his own point of view.
There are many avenues into teaching and working with this novella. Bioethicists often use it to educate clinicians about the patient’s experience of serious illness. Ilyich’s doctors seem to give up on him (once cure is impossible, what is their role?), and his family behaves as if he has brought his illness upon himself. In the face of what is clearly his imminent death, his household continues to behave as if nothing much has changed.
What tormented Ivan Ilyich the most was the deception, the lie, which for some reason they all accepted, that he was not dying but was simply ill, and that he need only keep quiet and undergo a treatment and then something very good would result.
The awful, terrible act of his dying was, he could see, reduced by those about him to the level of a casual, unpleasant, and almost indecorous incident (as if someone entered a drawing-room diffusing an unpleasant odour)… He saw that no one felt for him, because no one even wished to grasp his position.
Ilyich’s physicians and his family lack compassion, empathy, and attentiveness. They treat his symptoms, not the whole person. As Ivan Ilyich himself notes (one of many reversal in the novella), his doctors view him in much the same way he has always treated accused persons:
There was the usual waiting and the important air assumed by the doctor, with which he was so familiar (resembling that which he himself assumed in court), and the sounding and listening, and the questions which called fro answers that were foregone conclusion and were evidently unnecessary, and the look of importance which implied that ‘if only you put yourself in our hands we will arrange everything — we know indubitably how it has ot be done, always in the same way for everybody alike.’
Lawyers use the novella to discuss whether good legal work requires the rigid separation of work and personal lives to which Ilyich is so attached, and, as above, whether good legal practice should include attention to the human side of law profession. Here’s Ivan Ilyich’s approach:
a method of eliminating all considerations irrelevant to the legal aspect of the case, and reducing even the most complicated case to a form in which it would be presented on paper only in its externals, completely excluding his personal opinion of the matter, while above all observing every prescribed formality.
For philosophers, Tolstoy’s proto-existentialism shows up perhaps most clearly. The existential idea that “existence precedes essence”, means that human existence has no predetermined goal or meaning, but rather is created with each free choice, and so, in a sense, it is absurd. If we’re looking for some external, fixed ultimate meaning, we’re on a pretty fruitless quest. As Camus wrote (in The Myth of Sisyphus), “The absurd is born out of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” Ivan Ilyich’s death is precipitated by falling off a stepladder while hanging curtains. The absurdity of curtains being his downfall can be said to mirror this kind of existential absurdity.
If there’s no ultimate meaning (and no God, at least not for atheist existentialists like Camus and Sartre), then we’re just born (for no reason), we live and we die. We can have a meaningful life, but we must create that meaning for ourselves, and it’s our fault if we don’t. This turns out to be too difficult for many of us to face, and we tend to exist in a state of inauthenticity, revealed when Ivan’s friends, instead of being confronted with their own mortality at Ivan’s funeral, instead think, “it is he who is dead and not I.” Even a very sick Ivan himself is afflicted with this “bad faith”:
The syllogism he had learned from Kiezewwetter’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 the others. He had been little Vanya, with a mamma and a papa, with Mitya and Volodya, with the toys, a coachman and a nurse, afterward 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?
Tolstoy’s own aesthetic theory reflects the religious beliefs he developed after a deep crisis over the meaning of life and inevitability of death. The Death of Ivan Ilyich was the first book he published after emerging from that period of crisis and conversion. Tolstoy found meaning in the simple lives and simple faith of the peasants. He renounced worldly goods, and sex and alcohol as well, going so far as to start making his own shoes. Ivan Ilyich’s commitment to the “good life”, where “good” means a life of material comfort and social status, comes under intense scrutiny in The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Tolstoy rejected his own earlier works (like War and Peace) for their pandering to a cultural elite, holding in later life that good art must unite, not divide. In What is Art?, he wrote, “The destiny of art in our time is to transmit from the realm of reason to the realm of feeling the truth that well-being for men consists in their being united together, an to set up, in place of the existing realm of force, that kingdom of God–that is of love.” Everything Ivan Ilyich had done in his life set up barriers between him and others, even his own family. And they between one another as well.
The character of Gerasim, “a fresh, clean peasant lad, grown stout on town food and always cheerful and birth” is the only person pities Ivan Ilyich, who sees a need of Ivan’s and meets it (he holds his legs up to relieve his pain, sometimes all night). Not coincidentally, Gerasin is the only character who recognizes that “We shall all of us die, so why shouldn’t I grudge a little trouble?” Gerasim represents the kind of simple faith, brotherhood and sincerity Tolstoy valued in life and in art (and which he associated, not unproblematically, with peasants).
Any one of these avenues — and many more I haven’t even mentioned — into The Death of Ivan Ilyich could be traveled for days. But there is one less talked about avenue I want to note before ending this long post: love. On rereading the novella this week, I noticed that the significance of romantic love (or its lack). In the quote aboive, for example, when Ivan Ilyich is differentiating himself from Caius, he says, “Had Caius been in love like that?” perhaps signalling love as a concrete, simple youthful pleasure superior to the professional and material success he has in later life.
As a young man, Ilyich enjoyed affairs prior to marriage, but these were already defined in relation to the society he kept:
In the province he had an affair with a lady who made advances to the elegant young lawyer, and there was also a milliner; and there were carousels with aides-de-camp who visited the district, and after supper visits to a certain outlying street of doubtful reputation [but] It all came under the heading of the French saying, ‘If faut que jeuneese se passe’ [youth must have its fling]. It was all done with clean hands, with French phrases, and above all among people of the best society and consequently with the approval of people of rank.
His choice of wife is also conditioned by his sense of decorum:
When Praskovya Federovna fell in love with him, he thought, “Why shouldn’t I marry, and he did. She came from a good family, was pretty, sweet, and “thoroughly correct.” “The marriage gave him personal satisfaction, and at the same time it was considered the right thing by the most highly placed of his associates.”
but Ivan Ilyich discovers that marriage constitutes an occasional “infringement” of both “comfort and propriety”, two things Ivan Ilyich values above all else, and he finds ways to avoid her, usually by taking refuge in his official duties. He realizes that marriage is “a very intricate and difficult affair”, and decides to use work as an excuse whenever being at home causes him any trouble. Tolstoy follows the marriage through ups (the promotion, the new house, the successful parties) and downs (she yells at him, she is annoying when pregnant). After he is injured, he becomes angrier and angrier towards her for not understanding his situation. At one point, she enters the room where he is resting to check on him and kisses him on the forehead: “When she was kissing him he hated her from the bottom of his heart and with difficulty refrained from pushing her away.” Later, “He hates her with his whole soul.”
She encourages him to take communion near the very end, and asks him if he feels better. By this point, he has had the momentous realization that:
In [his family] he saw himself — all that for which he had lived and saw clearly that it was not real at all, but a terrible and huge deception which had hidden both life and death.
Ivan Ilyich’s revelatory awareness that his life has been correct but not good frees him up from the concerns of Russian middle class life and opens an emotional space for connection with his fellow human beings, beginning with his family:
“Yes, I am making them wretched, he thought. ‘They are sorry, but it will be better for them when I die.”
With that, his pain stops, his fear abates, he sees the light, and he dies.
(And, yes, part of our discussion will be whether this isn’t all a bit too didactic. And whether knowing Tolstoy’s theory of art actually detracts from enjoying the novella, so loudly do his moral commitments ring.)
When I think of all of the Tolstoy criticism I’ve read (not a lot, and mainly in philosophy journals, which may be the problem), I don’t recall his marriage being at the center of much of it. But it’s really a vital part of the narrative. I don’t have any great theory about it (my terrific students this semester are as likely as not to fill in the blanks for me), but I’m not sure I would have noticed that had I not been reading so much romance fiction recently.
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Everything I know about Tolstoy’s own marriage is from reading Andrea Dworkin’s Intercousewhich perhaps has a bias. Although, my general if uneducated impression of Tolstoy’s marriage is that he was a narcissistic ass before and after his conversion. He seemed to be one of those men who is in love with his career or God, but never a person.
So I guess my question is how love is constructed in this story? Because I think love of mankind reiterates the bad faith of the Caius syllogism. That is, its generality, its vagueness (who is the beloved? how were they loved?) are just as much of an abstraction as Caius. Indeed, it seems from your account that Ivan is himself an abstraction to his family, a role occupied rather than a specific person (patient, father, husband but never Ivan).
Very interesting. I guess I need to read this.
The movie “The Last Station” has Helen Mirren as Countess Sofya Tolstoy in the story of the last year of Tolstoy’s life which nicely illustrates yours and Lazaraspaste’ comments on marriage in the story and in Tolstoy’s life.
If the challenge is to live an authentic life how do we do that relationally? In the story described above, Ivan Ilyich has not related/connected himself to anyone – is that the point at which his life became inauthentic?