danmacha18's review
5.0
Given my reading of this book and the proximity to the end of a university semester, I only had the energy and desire to read The Death of Ivan Ilych. And believe me, it's more than enough. I'm incredibly troubled by how good Tolstoy expressed the fears of death and the expectation of the living that they will never die.
johnaggreyodera's review
4.0
There’s pre “A Confession” Tolstoy and post “A Confession” Tolstoy. Pre A Confession Tolstoy lays out some tenets that marked general Tolstoyan thought - that childhood is the only happy time in one’s life (Childhood; Boyhood; Youth); that society is a terrible influence and comme il faut-ness corrupting to the spirit (Mashechka in Family Happiness; Anna Scherer and Helene Kuragina in War and Peace) - and thus that a good life is only possible far away from society - like peasants “uncorrupted” by society (Maryanka in The Cossacks; Platon Karataev in War & Peace) etc.
In “A Confession”, Tolstoy recounts the details of his spiritual crisis: he realizes God is dead - i.e. does not exist, and that we all must die sometime or another. He is thus troubled with the question of what the meaning of life is, given these truths. That he is one of the world’s most acclaimed authors at this time offers him little consolation - the meaning of life is not to be found in material “success”. At the end of A Confession, Tolstoy seems to have come to the conclusion that “God is life” - that he is not to be reached through reason; to be found in community; nor to be experienced through faith a la most organized religions, but, rather, as in most Eastern religions, to be affirmed through life itself. The meaning of life, according to A Confession Tolstoy, tends to come out of a lot of Christ’s teachings in the beatitudes - that the “true” meaning of life was love; that love is our capacity to care for our fellows simply because we recognize them as mutual sufferers - as fellow animals; that a life lived this way, when we are in touch with nature and with each other in the deepest unmediated sense, is what suffuses life with meaning.
Out of A Confession emerges a more stringent Tolstoy: whereas he previously disliked society but still found a way to exist within it, now he positively detests it. This Tolstoy’s stories are often more gory - someone almost always dies, and the moral lessons to be gained from him are usually very clear, and almost always seem dogmatic (“Sex is terrible” - Kreutzer Sonata; “ Life is unjist and woefully unfair, but it can still be lived well” -God Sees the Truth but He Waits) etc. This is the Tolstoy that wrote “The Death of Ivan Ilych”.
Ivan Ilych is a technocratic functionary; a well regarded Justice official. He has lived his entire life as the model of Comme il faut-ness (“proper” behaviour); neither being too wild nor too tame; giving respect to those he “ought” to and similarly looking down (but just enough) to those he should; marrying the right girl, from the right family, not because he particularly likes her, but again, because he should. His career advancement has followed a similar path: he’s worked diligently to climb the social ladder (as defined by the Nakaz system introduced by Catharine the great) and worrying about money, as most of us do. He is soon lucky to get a promotion, due to a friend pulling some strings for him.
Ivan moves into a new home, and while decorating (In the style of the middle classes - who wanted to resemble the rich so much, they ended up resembling each other”- he falls and hurts his side. The fall doesn’t seem too bad at first, but it soon turns serious, and no doctor he consults can tell him exactly what’s wrong with him. Ivan realizes he is going to die.
He, a man who has led a most comfortably boring life, now has to contend with mortality; has to begin reflecting. At first, Ivan thinks his suffering (and dying) unfair, for he believes he has lived life as it should be: if he had led a “bad” life, then dying would not have been a problem for him - he could have understood why. Everybody around him now irritates him - they refuse to speak about his impending death (they speak, rather, as if he is merely sick), and, in the moments when they do allude to his death, it is clear they only care about his death in so far as it affects them: who will get his post at work? How will his wife cope without him? What of his daughter’s wedding? At these moments, Ivan hates these people, and realizing he has always been like them, he understands that he has not lived a good life: bourgeois success and the pursuit of it has robbed him of all that a truly moral life consists in.
The only redemptive moments for Ivan are provided by Gerasim (his peasant servant - who is uncorrupted by bourgeois society) and Vasia (his thirteen year old son- at the precipice of puberty, but as of yet uncorrupted). Only these two approach his death as such - without any socially imposed ideas about what death and sickness ought to be, and because of that, only they can treat him with pity and compassion, that love which we give to others because of their suffering as animals, not because of any rank they hold, or any benefit we ourselves may derive from them.
More...