The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

The final indignity
Originally published in 1886, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a novella by Leo Tolstoy. The story opens on a group of judges having a behind-the-scenes meeting in a court of law. The conversation is interrupted when one among them announces that Ivan Ilyich, one of their colleagues, has died. Though all the men in the room knew and worked with Ivan Ilyich, they respond not so much with grief but rather by considering what such a development might mean to their own career prospects. The setting then switches to Ivan Ilyich’s funeral, where the members of his family, with few exceptions, experience a similarly unsympathetic response to his demise.

Up to this point the deceased is still very much a mystery man to the reader. Tolstoy then proceeds to relate the life of Ivan Ilyich, or at least the end of that life—how he became ill and the events leading up to his death. After exhausting various possible remedies for his ailment, all unsuccessful, the problem is deemed incurable, and Ilyich is condemned to constant pain and permanent confinement in bed. Just as troubling as the physical pain, however, is the mental despair of impending death. Ivan Ilyich’s wife primarily views his illness as an inconvenience to herself and brands him a difficult patient, which only serves to upset and anger him all the more.

The plot can basically be divided into two unequal parts. The first is Tolstoy’s brutally frank and unglamorized portrait of terminal illness as an indiscriminately painful, shameful, and imprisoning experience. The second is the philosophical questioning of what it’s all worth. Is death just the cessation of life, or is there a point to it? Is there any meaning to life at all? Ivan Ilyich feels he has led a “proper” life in accordance with social norms. He has established himself as a prominent member of his community and built a small fortune for his family. Why is he being punished with such a gruesome death? Under closer scrutiny, however, his life has been primarily one of career-driven self-interest, and he has largely avoided his own family. In achieving “success,” he has led a hollow and purposeless life. By the time he finally comes to a deathbed examination of his own bourgeois morality, however, it is too little too late. Oddly enough, the same could be said of Tolstoy’s narrative. The bulk of the book is taken up by the blunt reality of dying, while the deeper philosophical inquiry feels a bit too little too late, rushed at the end and too vague to forcefully get across the moral message that Tolstoy is trying to convey.

In the 1870s, Tolstoy underwent a religious conversion. He began living a more back-to-basics lifestyle of austere self-denial and asceticism in order to achieve a more profound spiritual purity. The Death of Ivan Ilyich reflects this epiphany with its nondenominational philosophical advocacy for reassessing one’s values and establishing a more virtuous moral code. This is hardly a manifesto, however, as Ivan Ilyich teaches the reader more about how not to live one’s life rather than how one should live it. Though the imagery is forthright in its bleak harshness, the moral message could have benefited from more stridence and less subtlety. Personally, I feel a similar lesson was presented more movingly through the life of Levin in Anna Karenina. Nevertheless, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a beautiful work of realist writing, and one that feels surprisingly modern for the late 19th century. It is definitely worth a read for its artistry and insight, but many readers may find it more depressing than inspirational.
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