The Death of Ivan Ilyich
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- For the Croatian development critic, see Ivan Illich
The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Russian: Смерть Ивана Ильича, 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 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.
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[edit] Plot summary
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 while 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.
Ilyich 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 learned 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:
The turning point in the story occurs in Chapter XI when, at the suggestion of his wife, Ivan is visited by a priest, confesses his sins and receives the Eucharist, the Body of Christ.
In Chapter XII Ivan sees a light on three separate occasions. "...there at the bottom [of the hole] was a light." Then when he touched his crying son's head Ivan "caught sight of the light." Finally, "in place of death there was light." The light that Ivan saw was Jesus Christ. Jesus as "light" is a biblical them, as in John 8:12, Jesus said, "I am the light of the world."
Tolstoy writes, "There was no fear because there was no death," and "In place of death there was light."
Ivan seems to begin to understand at this point, as he exclaims, "What joy."
Someone near Ivan then says, "It is finished." The analogy of these words is found in that these were the final words spoken by Jesus before he died on the cross according to the book of John.
The action in Chapter XII, the last chapter in the story, occurs during a three day period. This is the same number of days Jesus was in the tomb before His Resurrection. When Jesus resurrected Himself from the dead, he conquered death.
Ivan's last words to himself are "Death is finished. It is no more." The Resurrection of Jesus Christ destroyed death--it is no more.
The meaning of life which Tolstoy has wants us to discover from this story is found in John 6:54.
[edit] Controversy
Christians have often embraced the apparent conversion or redemption of Ivan Ilych at the end. Ivan Ilych sees the light, cries out "What Joy!" etc. Indeed, the novella was written soon after Tolstoy had a conversion experience. Tolstoy's Christianity, however, was always a quirky one, focused on the life of Jesus as a model of love in action. There is, for example, no definite indication of life after death in “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” only the powerful depiction of the man’s experience of dying.
Many non-Christians and secularists have different interpretations of the end of the novella. One such interpretation is that Ivan Ilych's whole struggle and agony ends with the great gift of a cessation of suffering. Another interpretation is that Ivan Ilych's breakthrough is the freedom that comes with truth, in his case, seeing the falsity of his life, which enables him to have a brief moment of unselfish love or at least compassion for his wife and son. Tolstoy almost always had an ideological or religious ax to grind in his fiction, but the power of his imagination and humanity usually overwhelms his theories.
[edit] Trivia
Akira Kurosawa's 1952 film Ikiru (To Live) was inspired by The Death of Ivan Ilyich, though the film is not a retelling of the Tolstoy work.
The film Ivans XTC was also inspired by this novella.
