‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’: On Mortality

A review of ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’, by Leo Tolstoy; first published 1886.

‘If the world could write itself,’ said Isaac Babel, ‘it would write like Tolstoy.’ High praise. Many would agree. His style is clear, straightforward, and rich in detail: he saw and could describe aspects of life that most of us miss. Virginia Woolf called him ‘the greatest of all novelists’. James Joyce said he was ‘never dull, never stupid, never pedantic, never theatrical.’

The Death of Ivan Ilyich opens with — well, the death of Ivan Ilyich. His colleagues have just learned of his death, and their reactions are mixed: a blend of mild regret and calculating self-interest, which sets the tone. Tolstoy shows us Ivan’s life through flashbacks. He lived respectably, conventionally and, it is not even implied but stated, pointlessly: his life was the ‘most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible’. The steady march of an illness forms the grim centrepiece of the story. He clings to his former comforts—work, standing, propriety—but finds them useless for staving off his growing despair.

His life was the ‘most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible’.

The illness begins with a trivial accident. Ivan is hanging curtains in his new home, and falls. He bangs his side. But the pain does not go away. Rather, it grows. As it does, Ivan becomes more irritable. On the advice of his wife, he goes to a doctor, who cannot pinpoint the source of his illness. Soon it becomes clear, though it isn’t stated, that Ivan’s mystery malady is terminal. He is going to die. Regardless, he tries every cure he can find; but soon the pain is so awful that he is forced to stop work and spend what is left of his life in bed. Here, he is brought face to face with his mortality.

So the central theme of the story isn’t novel. How should we live, and how should we die? But it is universal. Tolstoy has studied modern life and found it wanting. He deems it trivial, hollow and merciless. Writing just after his conversion, he asks us, through Ivan, if we have lived as we ought to have lived, or if we have just done what our culture demanded. Bronnie Ware, the palliative care nurse, says that ‘I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me’ is the most common regret of the dying. In The Death of Ivan Ilyich we find that those same people Ivan is so eager to please are indifferent both to his dying and his death. Only Gerasim, a peasant servant, shows him kindness. His earthy simplicity stands in contrast to the falsity of Ivan’s friends and family.

Tolstoy’s prose is spare, unadorned. He does not romanticise Ivan’s pain, physical or, if you like, spiritual. He studies it. His analysis is completely dispassionate:

‘It occurred to him that he had not spent his life as he should have done. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false.’

Tolstoy’s prose is spare, unadorned.

It is partly because of this that the story works. The tone, which is quasi-scientific, points to the universality of Ivan’s experience, and so to our own. Had Tolstoy stressed the particularity of Ivan’s suffering, he would have broken the spell, as it were. Instead, we find ourselves reading the above passage and thinking of how it applies to others and perhaps even to ourselves. What the story lacks in subtlety it makes up for impact. That we will die, after all, is not a secret. It is perhaps only by slapping us in the face with it, that Tolstoy can force us to bear it in mind, even when death seems far away.

As in Joyce’s The Dead, the ‘death’ of the story’s title took place long before the feeble heart of Ivan Ilyich ceased to beat. His life was a death-in-life: vain, inauthentic, hedonistic, bounded by monotonous routines and driven by the need to please those perceived to matter. All Tolstoy wants from us, his readers, is to ask ourselves the questions that Ivan is forced to ask himself as the curtain comes down on his life before it is too late.