“The past history of Ivan Ilyich’s life was most simple and ordinary and most terrible.”
That all depends on what we mean by the word “ordinary.” Ivan Ilyich’s life is ordinary in the sense of being inauthentic, derivative, and shallow. He lives a life surrendered to the opinions and conventions of society—a society obsessed with the trivial and artificial, with vanity and comfort. Ilyich lives as though the most pressing questions in life are whether he’ll receive an expected promotion and whether his guests will be impressed by his drawing room. He wastes his life away until he’s brough up short by the sudden specter of his own mortality.
In this work, Tolstoy set for himself a fascinating question: What happens to a man who has lived a life guided entirely by the precepts of high society, done everything quite correctly—by the book—achieved every worldly success and comfort, only to discover that he’s dying and that his life has been meaningless?
A Worldly Life
The novella begins with the protagonist already dead. We learn of his death from the perspective of his colleagues at work, who view it mostly through the lens of what it means for their own career advancement. Thus, from the first pages, Tolstoy establishes the theme of society’s petty preoccupations: angling for promotions, accumulating money, showing off to one’s neighbor’s, indulging in pleasures, keeping up appearances.The colleagues’ grief at the death of their “friend” is entirely artificial—as is, indeed, almost everything about their lives. In this way, they serve as foils to Ilyich. Through their selfish and shallow reactions to his death, they reflect back on the dead man the precise values that he lived by. The first sections of the story reads almost like satire as Tolstoy ruthlessly exposes the inauthenticity of the social sphere in which Ilyich moved when he was alive.
From there, Tolstoy retraces his steps to tell the story of Ilyich’s life. As a young man, Ilyich wins friends and prestige through his charming, easygoing nature. He attends law school and rises through the ranks of the Russian legal system, while amusing himself with drinking, card-playing, and philandering.
Ilyich’s guiding light isn’t virtue or high ideals, but the conduct of “highly placed people.” Public opinion becomes his compass. “In law school he had committed acts which had formerly seemed to him of great vileness and had inspired a feeling of self-loathing in him at the time he committed them; but subsequently, seeing that such acts were also committed by highly placed people and were not considered bad, he, without really thinking them good, forgot all about them and was not troubled.”
Ilyich amuses himself with a young woman, Praskovya Fyodorovna, without considering that she might fall in love with him—which she does. With characteristic flippancy, he decides he might as well marry her as not, even though their relationship lacks substance. But he soon finds that marriage interferes with the way he thinks life should be: “easy, pleasant, merry, and always decent and approved of by society.”
Unsurprisingly, Ilyich’s marriage flounders as he neglects the responsibilities of a husband and a father. Ilyich and his wife’s relationship deteriorates to a point of barely concealed enmity, even hatred, like deadly rocks under the surface of a smooth ocean.
Still, things go on pleasantly enough as long as Ilyich can find ways to avoid his wife and protect his carefully constructed lifestyle of pleasantness, comfort, and respectability. “The official joys were the joys of self-esteem; the social joys were the joys of vainglory; but Ivan Ilyich’s real joys were the joys of playing [the card game] vint.”
A Double Perspective on Life
The cracks in Ilyich’s ideal life begin to show. The superficiality of Ilyich’s life starts to wear on him as he experiences the emptiness of his existence. “Ivan Ilyich felt for the first time not merely boredom, but an unbearable anguish.”Then, Ilyich’s illusion of control over his life collapses when he begins to suffer a mysterious illness. His carefully maintained lifestyle of “pleasantness” begins to slip away, bit by bit, making him irritable and frightened. Eventually, it becomes clear he’s dying, and his carefully constructed world of comfort turns out to be made of glass.
Little by little, Ilyich’s illness strips him of his comforts and pleasures—and along with them, the veneer of decency and goodness he’s maintained for so many years. “It was impossible to deceive himself: something dreadful, new, and so significant that nothing more significant had ever happened in his life, was being accomplished in Ivan Ilyich.” These words carry both literal and figurative meaning: literally, a strange illness eats away at Ilyich from within, while figuratively, a great spiritual transformation is underway inside him.
The problem for Ilyich is that he’s lived all his life as though he would never die, as though the little pleasures of a dance or a dinner or a card game will never end, and as though the soul of man can be sustained by pleasure and profit alone. With all of that gone, Ilyich is forced to reckon with the reality of his mortality, in the face of which all his prior pursuits turn out to be fragile vessels for happiness and meaning.
At this point, Ilyich experiences profound isolation. “He had to live alone on the brink of disaster like that, without a single human being who could understand and pity him.” In this, he reaps what he sowed: Because Ilyich never invested in any human relationship when he was well and never gave much consideration to anyone besides himself, now that he is ill, he finds himself alone. In the artificial world he made for himself, even the pity of others turns out to be mostly artificial. Ilyich becomes tormented by the lies that surround him, particularly the lie that he will get well, which everyone continues to pretend is true.
A Dying Breath of Fresh Air
There’s an exception, however. A young servant man, Gerasim, who attends him in his illness and is “always cheerful, bright.” But in spite of his cheerfulness, Gerasim does not play along with the general dishonesty about Ilyich’s condition. The honest, authentic country lad is juxtaposed against the doctors, lawyers, and ladies of high society who put up endless facades. Gerasim doesn’t pretend his master isn’t dying, but instead tends him with genuine care, generosity, kindness, and sympathy. Gerasim is the first unselfish character we encounter in the story.
The kindness of Gerasim inspires a reciprocal reaction in Ilyich. For the first time, he thinks of someone else: “I suppose this must be unpleasant for you. Excuse me. I can’t help it,” he tells the servant who has to help his master with even basic everyday functions. This marks a crucial turning point in Ilyich’s character arc. He begins to realize that though Gerasim is a nobody by societal standards, his selflessness has led him to a much more meaningful life than Ilyich’s own.
Ilyich reflects on his life. For a time, he continues to insist that he lived as one should. But at last, he admits the truth: “All that had then seemed like joys melted away and turned into something worthless and often vile.” He realizes that “In public opinion I was going uphill, and exactly to that extent life was slipping away from under me.”
He admits that he has wasted his life. At the same time, an internal voice tells him it’s not too late to amend it. In his dying moments, Ilyich finally turns outwards, towards others. He pities his son and even his wife. “He opened his eyes and looked at his son. He felt sorry for him. His wife came over to him. He looked at her. She was gazing at him with a despairing expression, openmouthed, and with unwiped tears on her nose and cheek. He felt sorry for her.” He asks their forgiveness. And through this, light suddenly breaks in upon the darkness.
With this powerful conclusion, Tolstoy reminds us that the greatest dramas of life do not center around achieving fame or wealth, around pleasures and public opinions, but instead play out in a man or woman’s soul and have to do with the answer to the question: Will you live for yourself or for others?
