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Creator(s): Tolstoy, Leo Nikolayevich (1828-1910) 
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THE DEATH OF IVAN ILYCH
by Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy
1886
Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude
Distributed by the Tolstoy Library
email: Tolstoy28@aol.com
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I
During an interval in the Melvinski trial in the large building of the
Law Courts the members and public prosecutor met in Ivan Egorovich
Shebek's private room, where the conversation turned on the celebrated
Krasovski case. Fedor Vasilievich warmly maintained that it was not
subject to their jurisdiction, Ivan Egorovich maintained the contrary,
while Peter Ivanovich, not having entered into the discussion at the
start, took no part in it but looked through the Gazette which had
just been handed in.
"Gentlemen," he said, "Ivan Ilych has died!"
"You don't say so!"
"Here, read it yourself," replied Peter Ivanovich, handing Fedor
Vasilievich the paper still damp from the press. Surrounded by a black
border were the words: "Praskovya Fedorovna Golovina, with profound
sorrow, informs relatives and friends of the demise of her beloved
husband Ivan Ilych Golovin, Member of the Court of Justice, which
occurred on February the 4th of this year 1882. the funeral will take
place on Friday at one o'clock in the afternoon."
Ivan Ilych had been a colleague of the gentlemen present and was liked
by them all. He had been ill for some weeks with an illness said to be
incurable. His post had been kept open for him, but there had been
conjectures that in case of his death Alexeev might receive his
appointment, and that either Vinnikov or Shtabel would succeed
Alexeev. So on receiving the news of Ivan Ilych's death the first
thought of each of the gentlemen in that private room was of the
changes and promotions it might occasion among themselves or their
acquaintances.
"I shall be sure to get Shtabel's place or Vinnikov's," thought Fedor
Vasilievich. "I was promised that long ago, and the promotion means an
extra eight hundred rubles a year for me besides the allowance."
"Now I must apply for my brother-in-law's transfer from Kaluga,"
thought Peter Ivanovich. "My wife will be very glad, and then she
won't be able to say that I never do anything for her relations."
"I thought he would never leave his bed again," said Peter Ivanovich
aloud. "It's very sad."
"But what really was the matter with him?"
"The doctors couldn't say -- at least they could, but each of them
said something different. When last I saw him I though he was getting
better."
"And I haven't been to see him since the holidays. I always meant to
go."
"Had he any property?"
"I think his wife had a little -- but something quiet trifling."
"We shall have to go to see her, but they live so terribly far away."
"Far away from you, you mean. Everything's far away from your place."
"You see, he never can forgive my living on the other side of the
river," said Peter Ivanovich, smiling at Shebek. Then, still talking
of the distances between different parts of the city, they returned to
the Court.
Besides considerations as to the possible transfers and promotions
likely to result from Ivan Ilych's death, the mere fact of the death
of a near acquaintance aroused, as usual, in all who heard of it the
complacent feeling that, "it is he who is dead and not I."
Each one thought or felt, "Well, he's dead but I'm alive!" But the
more intimate of Ivan Ilych's acquaintances, his so-called friends,
could not help thinking also that they would now have to fulfil the
very tiresome demands of propriety by attending the funeral service
and paying a visit of condolence to the widow.
Fedor Vasilievich and Peter Ivanovich had been his nearest
acquaintances. Peter Ivanovich had studied law with Ivan Ilych and had
considered himself to be under obligations to him.
Having told his wife at dinner-time of Ivan Ilych's death, and of his
conjecture that it might be possible to get her brother transferred to
their circuit, Peter Ivanovich sacrificed his usual nap, put on his
evening clothes and drove to Ivan Ilych's house.
At the entrance stood a carriage and two cabs. Leaning against the
wall in the hall downstairs near the cloakstand was a coffin-lid
covered with cloth of gold, ornamented with gold cord and tassels,
that had been polished up with metal powder. Two ladies in black were
taking off their fur cloaks. Peter Ivanovich recognized one of them as
Ivan Ilych's sister, but the other was a stranger to him. His
colleague Schwartz was just coming downstairs, but on seeing Peter
Ivanovich enter he stopped and winked at him, as if to say: "Ivan
Ilych has made a mess of things -- not like you and me."
Schwartz's face with his Piccadilly whiskers, and his slim figure in
evening dress, had as usual an air of elegant solemnity which
contrasted with the playfulness of his character and had a special
piquancy here, or so it seemed to Peter Ivanovich.
Peter Ivanovich allowed the ladies to precede him and slowly followed
them upstairs. Schwartz did not come down but remained where he was,
and Peter Ivanovich understood that he wanted to arrange where they
should play bridge that evening. The ladies went upstairs to the
widow's room, and Schwartz with seriously compressed lips but a
playful looking his eyes, indicated by a twist of his eyebrows the
room to the right where the body lay.
Peter Ivanovich, like everyone else on such occasions, entered feeling
uncertain what he would have to do. All he knew was that at such times
it is always safe to cross oneself. But he was not quite sure whether
one should make obseisances while doing so. He therefore adopted a
middle course. On entering the room he began crossing himself and made
a slight movement resembling a bow. At the same time, as far as the
motion of his head and arm allowed, he surveyed the room. Two young
men -- apparently nephews, one of whom was a high-school pupil -- were
leaving the room, crossing themselves as they did so. An old woman was
standing motionless, and a lady with strangely arched eyebrows was
saying something to her in a whisper. A vigorous, resolute Church
Reader, in a frock-coat, was reading something in a loud voice with an
expression that precluded any contradiction. The butler's assistant,
Gerasim, stepping lightly in front of Peter Ivanovich, was strewing
something on the floor. Noticing this, Peter Ivanovich was immediately
aware of a faint odour of a decomposing body.
The last time he had called on Ivan Ilych, Peter Ivanovich had seen
Gerasim in the study. Ivan Ilych had been particularly fond of him and
he was performing the duty of a sick nurse.
Peter Ivanovich continued to make the sign of the cross slightly
inclining his head in an intermediate direction between the coffin,
the Reader, and the icons on the table in a corner of the room.
Afterwards, when it seemed to him that this movement of his arm in
crossing himself had gone on too long, he stopped and began to look at
the corpse.
The dead man lay, as dead men always lie, in a specially heavy way,
his rigid limbs sunk in the soft cushions of the coffin, with the head
forever bowed on the pillow. His yellow waxen brow with bald patches
over his sunken temples was thrust up in the way peculiar to the dead,
the protruding nose seeming to press on the upper lip. He was much
changed and grown even thinner since Peter Ivanovich had last seen
him, but, as is always the case with the dead, his face was handsomer
and above all more dignified than when he was alive. the expression on
the face said that what was necessary had been accomplished, and
accomplished rightly. Besides this there was in that expression a
reproach and a warning to the living. This warning seemed to Peter
Ivanovich out of place, or at least not applicable to him. He felt a
certain discomfort and so he hurriedly crossed himself once more and
turned and went out of the door -- too hurriedly and too regardless of
propriety, as he himself was aware.
Schwartz was waiting for him in the adjoining room with legs spread
wide apart and both hands toying with his top-hat behind his back. The
mere sight of that playful, well-groomed, and elegant figure refreshed
Peter Ivanovich. He felt that Schwartz was above all these happenings
and would not surrender to any depressing influences. His very look
said that this incident of a church service for Ivan Ilych could not
be a sufficient reason for infringing the order of the session -- in
other words, that it would certainly not prevent his unwrapping a new
pack of cards and shuffling them that evening while a footman placed
fresh candles on the table: in fact, that there was no reason for
supposing that this incident would hinder their spending the evening
agreeably. Indeed he said this in a whisper as Peter Ivanovich passed
him, proposing that they should meet for a game at Fedor
Vasilievich's. But apparently Peter Ivanovich was not destined to play
bridge that evening. Praskovya Fedorovna (a short, fat woman who
despite all efforts to the contrary had continued to broaden steadily
from her shoulders downwards and who had the same extraordinarily
arched eyebrows as the lady who had been standing by the coffin),
dressed all in black, her head covered with lace, came out of her own
room with some other ladies, conducted them to the room where the dead
body lay, and said: "The service will begin immediately. Please go
in."
Schwartz, making an indefinite bow, stood still, evidently neither
accepting nor declining this invitation. Praskovya Fedorovna
recognizing Peter Ivanovich, sighed, went close up to him, took his
hand, and said: "I know you were a true friend to Ivan Ilych . . . "
and looked at him awaiting some suitable response. And Peter Ivanovich
knew that, just as it had been the right thing to cross himself in
that room, so what he had to do here was to press her hand, sigh, and
say, "Believe me . . . " So he did all this and as he did it felt that
the desired result had been achieved: that both he and she were
touched.
"Come with me. I want to speak to you before it begins," said the
widow. "Give me your arm."
Peter Ivanovich gave her his arm and they went to the inner rooms,
passing Schwartz who winked at Peter Ivanovich compassionately.
"That does for our bridge! Don's object if we find another player.
Perhaps you can cut in when you do escape," said his playful look.
Peter Ivanovich sighed still more deeply and despondently, and
Praskovya Fedorovna pressed his arm gratefully. When they reached the
drawing-room, upholstered in pink cretonne and lighted by a dim lamp,
they sat down at the table -- she on a sofa and Peter Ivanovich on a
low pouffe, the springs of which yielded spasmodically under his
weight. Praskovya Fedorovna had been on the point of warning him to
take another seat, but felt that such a warning was out of keeping
with her present condition and so changed her mind. As he sat down on
the pouffe Peter Ivanovich recalled how Ivan Ilych had arranged this
room and had consulted him regarding this pink cretonne with green
leaves. The whole room was full of furniture and knick-knacks, and on
her way to the sofa the lace of the widow's black shawl caught on the
edge of the table. Peter Ivanovich rose to detach it, and the springs
of the pouffe, relieved of his weight, rose also and gave him a push.
The widow began detaching her shawl herself, and Peter Ivanovich again
sat down, suppressing the rebellious springs of the pouffe under him.
But the widow had not quite freed herself and Peter Ivanovich got up
again, and again the pouffe rebelled and even creaked. When this was
all over she took out a clean cambric handkerchief and began to weep.
The episode with the shawl and the struggle with the pouffe had cooled
Peter Ivanovich's emotions and he sat there with a sullen look on his
face. This awkward situation was interrupted by Sokolov, Ivan Ilych's
butler, who came to report that the plot in the cemetery that
Praskovya Fedorovna had chosen would cost tow hundred rubles. She
stopped weeping and, looking at Peter Ivanovich with the air of a
victim, remarked in French that it was very hard for her. Peter
Ivanovich made a silent gesture signifying his full conviction that it
must indeed be so.
"Please smoke," she said in a magnanimous yet crushed voice, and
turned to discuss with Sokolov the price of the plot for the grave.
Peter Ivanovich while lighting his cigarette heard her inquiring very
circumstantially into the prices of different plots in the cemetery
and finally decide which she would take. when that was done she gave
instructions about engaging the choir. Sokolov then left the room.
"I look after everything myself," she told Peter Ivanovich, shifting
the albums that lay on the table; and noticing that the table was
endangered by his cigarette-ash, she immediately passed him an
ash-tray, saying as she did so: "I consider it an affectation to say
that my grief prevents my attending to practical affairs. On the
contrary, if anything can -- I won't say console me, but -- distract
me, it is seeing to everything concerning him." She again took out her
handkerchief as if preparing to cry, but suddenly, as if mastering her
feeling, she shook herself and began to speak calmly. "But there is
something I want to talk to you about."
Peter Ivanovich bowed, keeping control of the springs of the pouffe,
which immediately began quivering under him.
"He suffered terribly the last few days."
"Did he?" said Peter Ivanovich.
"Oh, terribly! He screamed unceasingly, not for minutes but for hours.
for the last three days he screamed incessantly. It was unendurable. I
cannot understand how I bore it; you could hear him three rooms off.
Oh, what I have suffered!"
"Is it possible that he was conscious all that time?" asked Peter
Ivanovich.
"Yes," she whispered. "To the last moment. He took leave of us a
quarter of an hour before he died, and asked us to take Volodya away."
The thought of the suffering of this man he had known so intimately,
first as a merry little boy, then as a schoolmate, and later as a
grown-up colleague, suddenly struck Peter Ivanovich with horror,
despite an unpleasant consciousness of his own and this woman's
dissimulation. He again saw that brow, and that nose pressing down on
the lip, and felt afraid for himself.
"Three days of frightful suffering and the death! Why, that might
suddenly, at any time, happen to me," he thought, and for a moment
felt terrified. But -- he did not himself know how -- the customary
reflection at once occurred to him that this had happened to Ivan
Ilych and not to him, and that it should not and could not happen to
him, and that to think that it could would be yielding to depressing
which he ought not to do, as Schwartz's expression plainly showed.
After which reflection Peter Ivanovich felt reassured, and began to
ask with interest about the details of Ivan Ilych's death, as though
death was an accident natural to Ivan Ilych but certainly not to
himself.
After many details of the really dreadful physical sufferings Ivan
Ilych had endured (which details he learnt only from the effect those
sufferings had produced on Praskovya Fedorovna's nerves) the widow
apparently found it necessary to get to business.
"Oh, Peter Ivanovich, how hard it is! How terribly, terribly hard!"
and she again began to weep.
Peter Ivanovich sighed and waited for her to finish blowing her nose.
When she had don so he said, "Believe me . . . " and she again began
talking and brought out what was evidently her chief concern with him
-- namely, to question him as to how she could obtain a grant of money
from the government on the occasion of her husband's death. She made
it appear that she was asking Peter Ivanovich's advice about her
pension, but he soon saw that she already knew about that to the
minutest detail, more even than he did himself. She knew how much
could be got out of the government in consequence of her husband's
death, but wanted to find out whether she could not possibly extract
something more. Peter Ivanovich tried to think of some means of doing
so, but after reflecting for a while and, out of propriety, condemning
the government for its niggardliness, he said he thought that nothing
more could be got. Then she sighed and evidently began to devise means
of getting rid of her visitor. Noticing this, he put out his
cigarette, rose, pressed her hand, and went out into the anteroom.
In the dining-room where the clock stood that Ivan Ilych had liked so
much and had bought at an antique shop, Peter Ivanovich met a priest
and a few acquaintances who had come to attend the service, and he
recognized Ivan Ilych's daughter, a handsome young woman. She was in
black and her slim figure appeared slimmer than ever. She had a
gloomy, determined, almost angry expression, and bowed to Peter
Ivanovich as though he were in some way to blame. Behind her, with the
same offended look, stood a wealthy young man, and examining
magistrate, whom Peter Ivanovich also knew and who was her fiance, as
he had heard. He bowed mournfully to them and was about to pass into
the death-chamber, when from under the stairs appeared the figure of
Ivan Ilych's schoolboy son, who was extremely like his father. He
seemed a little Ivan Ilych, such as Peter Ivanovich remembered when
they studied law together. His tear-stained eyes had in them the look
that is seen in the eyes of boys of thirteen or fourteen who are not
pure-minded. When he saw Peter Ivanovich he scowled morosely and
shamefacedly. Peter Ivanovich nodded to him and entered the
death-chamber. The service began: candles, groans, incense, tears, and
sobs. Peter Ivanovich stood looking gloomily down at his feet. He did
not look once at the dead man, did not yield to any depressing
influence, and was one of the first to leave the room. There was no
one in the anteroom, but Gerasim darted out of the dead man's room,
rummaged with his strong hands among the fur coats to find Peter
Ivanovich's and helped him on with it.
"Well, friend Gerasim," said Peter Ivanovich, so as to say something.
"It's a sad affair, isn't it?"
"It's God will. We shall all come to it some day," said Gerasim,
displaying his teeth -- the even white teeth of a healthy peasant --
and, like a man in the thick of urgent work, he briskly opened the
front door, called the coachman, helped Peter Ivanovich into the
sledge, and sprang back to the porch as if in readiness for what he
had to do next.
Peter Ivanovich found the fresh air particularly pleasant after the
smell of incense, the dead body, and carbolic acid.
"Where to sir?" asked the coachman.
"It's not too late even now. . . . I'll call round on Fedor
Vasilievich."
He accordingly drove there and found them just finishing the first
rubber, so that it was quite convenient for him to cut in.
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II
Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore
most terrible.
He had been a member of the Court of Justice, and died at the age of
forty-five. His father had been an official who after serving in
various ministries and departments in Petersburg had made the sort of
career which brings men to positions from which by reason of their
long service they cannot be dismissed, though they are obviously unfit
to hold any responsible position, and for whom therefore posts are
specially created, which though fictitious carry salaries of from six
to ten thousand rubles that are not fictitious, and in receipt of
which they live on to a great age.
Such was the Privy Councillor and superfluous member of various
superfluous institutions, Ilya Epimovich Golovin.
He had three sons, of whom Ivan Ilych was the second. The eldest son
was following in his father's footsteps only in another department,
and was already approaching that stage in the service at which a
similar sinecure would be reached. the third son was a failure. He had
ruined his prospects in a number of positions and was not serving in
the railway department. His father and brothers, and still more their
wives, not merely disliked meeting him, but avoided remembering his
existence unless compelled to do so. His sister had married Baron
Greff, a Petersburg official of her father's type. Ivan Ilych was le
phenix de la famille as people said. He was neither as cold and formal
as his elder brother nor as wild as the younger, but was a happy mean
between them -- an intelligent polished, lively and agreeable man. He
had studied with his younger brother at the School of Law, but the
latter had failed to complete the course and was expelled when he was
in the fifth class. Ivan Ilych finished the course well. Even when he
was at the School of Law he was just what he remained for the rest of
his life: a capable, cheerful, good-natured, and sociable man, though
strict in the fulfillment of what he considered to be his duty: and he
considered his duty to be what was so considered by those in
authority. Neither as a boy nor as a man was he a toady, but from
early youth was by nature attracted to people of high station as a fly
is drawn to the light, assimilating their ways and views of life and
establishing friendly relations with them. All the enthusiasms of
childhood and youth passed without leaving much trace on him; he
succumbed to sensuality, to vanity, and latterly among the highest
classes to liberalism, but always within limits which his instinct
unfailingly indicated to him as correct.
At school he had done things which had formerly seemed to him very
horrid and made him feel disgusted with himself when he did them; but
when later on he saw that such actions were done by people of good
position and that they did not regard them as wrong, he was able not
exactly to regard them as right, but to forget about them entirely or
not be at all troubled at remembering them.
Having graduated from the School of Law and qualified for the tenth
rank of the civil service, and having received money from his father
for his equipment, Ivan Ilych ordered himself clothes at Scharmer's,
the fashionable tailor, hung a medallion inscribed respice finem on
his watch-chain, took leave of his professor and the prince who was
patron of the school, had a farewell dinner with his comrades at
Donon's first-class restaurant, and with his new and fashionable
portmanteau, linen, clothes, shaving and other toilet appliances, and
a travelling rug, all purchased at the best shops, he set off for one
of the provinces where through his father's influence, he had been
attached to the governor as an official for special service.
In the province Ivan Ilych soon arranged as easy and agreeable a
position for himself as he had had at the School of Law. He performed
his official task, made his career, and at the same time amused
himself pleasantly and decorously. Occasionally he paid official
visits to country districts where he behaved with dignity both to his
superiors and inferiors, and performed the duties entrusted to him,
which related chiefly to the sectarians, with an exactness and
incorruptible honesty of which he could not but feel proud.
In official matters, despite his youth and taste for frivolous gaiety,
he was exceedingly reserved, punctilious, and even severe; but in
society he was often amusing and witty, and always good-natured,
correct in his manner, and bon enfant, as the governor and his wife --
with whom he was like one of the family -- used to say of him.
In the province he had an affair with a lady who made advances to the
elegant young lawyer, and there was also a milliner; and there were
carousals with aides-de-camp who visited the district, and
after-supper visits to a certain outlying street of doubtful
reputation; and there was too some obsequiousness to his chief and
even to his chief's wife, but all this was done with such a tone of
good breeding that no hard names could be applied to it. It all came
under the heading of the French saying: "Il faut que jeunesse se
passe." It was all done with clean hands, in clean linen, with French
phrases, and above all among people of the best society and
consequently with the approval of people of rank.
So Ivan Ilych served for five years and then came a change in his
official life. The new and reformed judicial institutions were
introduced, and new men were needed. Ivan Ilych became such a new man.
He was offered the post of examining magistrate, and he accepted it
though the post was in another province and obliged him to give up the
connexions he had formed and to make new ones. His friends met to give
him a send-off; they had a group photograph taken and presented him
with a silver cigarette-case, and he set off to his new post.
As examining magistrate Ivan Ilych was just as comme il faut and
decorous a man, inspiring general respect and capable of separating
his official duties from his private life, as he had been when acting
as an official on special service. His duties now as examining
magistrate were fare more interesting and attractive than before. In
his former position it had been pleasant to wear an undress uniform
made by Scharmer, and to pass through the crowd of petitioners and
officials who were timorously awaiting an audience with the governor,
and who envied him as with free and easy gait he went straight into
his chief's private room to have a cup of tea and a cigarette with
him. But not many people had then been directly dependent on him --
only police officials and the sectarians when he went on special
missions -- and he liked to treat them politely, almost as comrades,
as if he were letting them feel that he who had the power to crush
them was treating them in this simple, friendly way. There were then
but few such people. But now, as an examining magistrate, Ivan Ilych
felt that everyone without exception, even the most important and
self-satisfied, was in his power, and that he need only write a few
words on a sheet of paper with a certain heading, and this or that
important, self-satisfied person would be brought before him in the
role of an accused person or a witness, and if he did not choose to
allow him to sit down, would have to stand before him and answer his
questions. Ivan Ilych never abused his power; he tried on the contrary
to soften its expression, but the consciousness of it and the
possibility of softening its effect, supplied the chief interest and
attraction of his office. In his work itself, especially in his
examinations, he very soon acquired a method of eliminating all
considerations irrelevant to the legal aspect of the case, and
reducing even the most complicated case to a form in which it would be
presented on paper only in its externals, completely excluding his
personal opinion of the matter, while above all observing every
prescribed formality. The work was new and Ivan Ilych was one of the
first men to apply the new Code of 1864.
On taking up the post of examining magistrate in a new town, he made
new acquaintances and connexions, placed himself on a new footing and
assumed a somewhat different tone. He took up an attitude of rather
dignified aloofness towards the provincial authorities, but picked out
the best circle of legal gentlemen and wealthy gentry living in the
town and assumed a tone of slight dissatisfaction with the government,
of moderate liberalism, and of enlightened citizenship. At the same
time, without at all altering the elegance of his toilet, he ceased
shaving his chin and allowed his beard to grow as it pleased.
Ivan Ilych settled down very pleasantly in this new town. The society
there, which inclined towards opposition to the governor was friendly,
his salary was larger, and he began to play vint [a form of bridge],
which he found added not a little to the pleasure of life, for he had
a capacity for cards, played good-humouredly, and calculated rapidly
and astutely, so that he usually won.
After living there for two years he met his future wife, Praskovya
Fedorovna Mikhel, who was the most attractive, clever, and brilliant
girl of the set in which he moved, and among other amusements and
relaxations from his labours as examining magistrate, Ivan Ilych
established light and playful relations with her.
While he had been an official on special service he had been
accustomed to dance, but now as an examining magistrate it was
exceptional for him to do so. If he danced now, he did it as if to
show that though he served under the reformed order of things, and had
reached the fifth official rank, yet when it came to dancing he could
do it better than most people. So at the end of an evening he
sometimes danced with Praskovya Fedorovna, and it was chiefly during
these dances that he captivated her. She fell in love with him. Ivan
Ilych had at first no definite intention of marrying, but when the
girl fell in love with him he said to himself: "Really, why shouldn't
I marry?"
Praskovya Fedorovna came of a good family, was not bad looking, and
had some little property. Ivan Ilych might have aspired to a more
brilliant match, but even this was good. He had his salary, and she,
he hoped, would have an equal income. She was well connected, and was
a sweet, pretty, and thoroughly correct young woman. to say that Ivan
Ilych married because he fell in love with Praskovya Fedorovna and
found that she sympathized with his views of life would be as
incorrect as to say that he married because his social circle approved
of the match. He was swayed by both these considerations: the marriage
gave him personal satisfaction, and at the same time it was considered
the right thing by the most highly placed of his associates.
So Ivan Ilych got married.
The preparations for marriage and the beginning of married life, with
its conjugal caresses, the new furniture, new crockery, and new linen,
were very pleasant until his wife became pregnant -- so that Ivan
Ilych had begun to think that marriage would not impair the easy,
agreeable, gay and always decorous character of his life, approved of
by society and regarded by himself as natural, but would even improve
it. But from the first months of his wife's pregnancy, something new,
unpleasant, depressing, and unseemly, and from which there was no way
of escape, unexpectedly showed itself.
His wife, without any reason -- de gaiete de coeur as Ivan Ilych
expressed it to himself -- began to disturb the pleasure and propriety
of their life. She began to be jealous without any cause, expected him
to devote his whole attention to her, found fault with everything, and
made coarse and ill-mannered scenes.
At first Ivan Ilych hoped to escape from the unpleasantness of this
state of affairs by the same easy and decorous relation to life that
had served him heretofore: he tried to ignore his wife's disagreeable
moods, continued to live in his usual easy and pleasant way, invited
friends to his house for a game of cards, and also tried going out to
his club or spending his evenings with friends. But one day his wife
began upbraiding him so vigorously, using such coarse words, and
continued to abuse him every time he did not fulfil her demands, so
resolutely and with such evident determination not to give way till he
submitted -- that is, till he stayed at home and was bored just as she
was -- that he became alarmed. He now realized that matrimony -- at
any rate with Praskovya Fedorovna -- was not always conducive to the
pleasures and amenities of life, but on the contrary often infringed
both comfort and propriety, and that he must therefore entrench
himself against such infringement. And Ivan Ilych began to seek for
means of doing so. His official duties were the one thing that imposed
upon Praskovya Fedorovna, and by means of his official work and the
duties attached to it he began struggling with his wife to secure his
own independence.
With the birth of their child, the attempts to feed it and the various
failures in doing so, and with the real and imaginary illnesses of
mother and child, in which Ivan Ilych's sympathy was demanded but
about which he understood nothing, the need of securing for himself an
existence outside his family life became still more imperative.
As his wife grew more irritable and exacting and Ivan Ilych
transferred the center of gravity of his life more and more to his
official work, so did he grow to like his work better and became more
ambitious than before.
Very soon, within a year of his wedding, Ivan Ilych had realized that
marriage, though it may add some comforts to life, is in fact a very
intricate and difficult affair towards which in order to perform one's
duty, that is, to lead a decorous life approved of by society, one
must adopt a definite attitude just as towards one's official duties.
And Ivan Ilych evolved such an attitude towards married life. He only
required of it those conveniences -- dinner at home, housewife, and
bed -- which it could give him, and above all that propriety of
external forms required by public opinion. For the rest he looked for
lighthearted pleasure and propriety, and was very thankful when he
found them, but if he met with antagonism and querulousness he at once
retired into his separate fenced-off world of official duties, where
he found satisfaction.
Ivan Ilych was esteemed a good official, and after three years was
made Assistant Public Prosecutor. His new duties, their importance,
the possibility of indicting and imprisoning anyone he chose, the
publicity his speeches received, and the success he had in all these
things, made his work still more attractive.
More children came. His wife became more and more querulous and
ill-tempered, but the attitude Ivan Ilych had adopted towards his home
life rendered him almost impervious to her grumbling.
After seven years' service in that town he was transferred to another
province as Public Prosecutor. They moved, but were short of money and
his wife did not like the place they moved to. Though the salary was
higher the cost of living was greater, besides which two of their
children died and family life became still more unpleasant for him.
Praskovya Fedorovna blamed her husband for every inconvenience they
encountered in their new home. Most of the conversations between
husband and wife, especially as to the children's education, led to
topics which recalled former disputes, and these disputes were apt to
flare up again at any moment. There remained only those rare periods
of amorousness which still came to them at times but did not last
long. These were islets at which they anchored for a while and then
again set out upon that ocean of veiled hostility which showed itself
in their aloofness from one another. This aloofness might have grieved
Ivan Ilych had he considered that it ought not to exist, but he now
regarded the position as normal, and even made it the goal at which he
aimed in family life. His aim was to free himself more and more from
those unpleasantness and to give them a semblance of harmlessness and
propriety. He attained this by spending less and less time with his
family, and when obliged to be at home he tried to safeguard his
position by the presence of outsiders. The chief thing however was
that he had his official duties. The whole interest of his life now
centered in the official world and that interest absorbed him. The
consciousness of his power, being able to ruin anybody he wished to
ruin, the importance, even the external dignity of his entry into
court, or meetings with his subordinates, his success with superiors
and inferiors, and above all his masterly handling of cases, of which
he was conscious -- all this gave him pleasure and filled his life,
together with chats with his colleagues, dinners, and bridge. So that
on the whole Ivan Ilych's life continued to flow as he considered it
should do -- pleasantly and properly.
So things continued for another seven years. His eldest daughter was
already sixteen, another child had died, and only one son was left, a
schoolboy and a subject of dissension. Ivan Ilych wanted to put him in
the School of Law, but to spite him Praskovya Fedorovna entered him at
the High School. The daughter had been educated at home and had turned
out well: the boy did not learn badly either.
_________________________________________________________________
III
So Ivan Ilych lived for seventeen years after his marriage. He was
already a Public Prosecutor of long standing, and had declined several
proposed transfers while awaiting a more desirable post, when an
unanticipated and unpleasant occurrence quite upset the peaceful
course of his life. He was expecting to be offered the post of
presiding judge in a University town, but Happe somehow came to the
front and obtained the appointment instead. Ivan Ilych became
irritable, reproached Happe, and quarrelled both him and with his
immediate superiors -- who became colder to him and again passed him
over when other appointments were made.
This was in 1880, the hardest year of Ivan Ilych's life. It was then
that it became evident on the one hand that his salary was
insufficient for them to live on, and on the other that he had been
forgotten, and not only this, but that what was for him the greatest
and most cruel injustice appeared to others a quite ordinary
occurrence. Even his father did not consider it his duty to help him.
Ivan Ilych felt himself abandoned by everyone, and that they regarded
his position with a salary of 3,500 rubles as quite normal and even
fortunate. He alone knew that with the consciousness of the injustices
done him, with his wife's incessant nagging, and with the debts he had
contracted by living beyond his means, his position was far from
normal.
In order to save money that summer he obtained leave of absence and
went with his wife to live in the country at her brother's place.
In the country, without his work, he experienced ennui for the first
time in his life, and not only ennui but intolerable depression, and
he decided that it was impossible to go on living like that, and that
it was necessary to take energetic measures.
Having passed a sleepless night pacing up and down the veranda, he
decided to go to Petersburg and bestir himself, in order to punish
those who had failed to appreciate him and to get transferred to
another ministry.
Next day, despite many protests from his wife and her brother, he
started for Petersburg with the sole object of obtaining a post with a
salary of five thousand rubles a year. He was no longer bent on any
particular department, or tendency, or kind of activity. All he now
wanted was an appointment to another post with a salary of five
thousand rubles, either in the administration, in the banks, with the
railways in one of the Empress Marya's Institutions, or even in the
customs -- but it had to carry with it a salary of five thousand
rubles and be in a ministry other than that in which they had failed
to appreciate him.
And this quest of Ivan Ilych's was crowned with remarkable and
unexpected success. At Kursk an acquaintance of his, F. I. Ilyin, got
into the first-class carriage, sat down beside Ivan Ilych, and told
him of a telegram just received by the governor of Kursk announcing
that a change was about to take place in the ministry: Peter Ivanovich
was to be superseded by Ivan Semonovich.
The proposed change, apart from its significance for Russia, had a
special significance for Ivan Ilych, because by bringing forward a new
man, Peter Petrovich, and consequently his friend Zachar Ivanovich, it
was highly favourable for Ivan Ilych, since Sachar Ivanovich was a
friend and colleague of his.
In Moscow this news was confirmed, and on reaching Petersburg Ivan
Ilych found Zachar Ivanovich and received a definite promise of an
appointment in his former Department of Justice.
A week later he telegraphed to his wife: "Zachar in Miller's place. I
shall receive appointment on presentation of report."
Thanks to this change of personnel, Ivan Ilych had unexpectedly
obtained an appointment in his former ministry which placed him two
states above his former colleagues besides giving him five thousand
rubles salary and three thousand five hundred rubles for expenses
connected with his removal. All his ill humour towards his former
enemies and the whole department vanished, and Ivan Ilych was
completely happy.
He returned to the country more cheerful and contented than he had
been for a long time. Praskovya Fedorovna also cheered up and a truce
was arranged between them. Ivan Ilych told of how he had been feted by
everybody in Petersburg, how all those who had been his enemies were
put to shame and now fawned on him, how envious they were of his
appointment, and how much everybody in Petersburg had liked him.
Praskovya Fedorovna listened to all this and appeared to believe it.
She did not contradict anything, but only made plans for their life in
the town to which they were going. Ivan Ilych saw with delight that
these plans were his plans, that he and his wife agreed, and that,
after a stumble, his life was regaining its due and natural character
of pleasant lightheartedness and decorum.
Ivan Ilych had come back for a short time only, for he had to take up
his new duties on the 10th of September. Moreover, he needed time to
settle into the new place, to move all his belongings from the
province, and to buy and order many additional things: in a word, to
make such arrangements as he had resolved on, which were almost
exactly what Praskovya Fedorovna too had decided on.
Now that everything had happened so fortunately, and that he and his
wife were at one in their aims and moreover saw so little of one
another, they got on together better than they had done since the
first years of marriage. Ivan Ilych had thought of taking his family
away with him at once, but the insistence of his wife's brother and
her sister-in-law, who had suddenly become particularly amiable and
friendly to him and his family, induced him to depart alone.
So he departed, and the cheerful state of mind induced by his success
and by the harmony between his wife and himself, the one intensifying
the other, did not leave him. He found a delightful house, just the
thing both he and his wife had dreamt of. Spacious, lofty reception
rooms in the old style, a convenient and dignified study, rooms for
his wife and daughter, a study for his son -- it might have been
specially built for them. Ivan Ilych himself superintended the
arrangements, chose the wallpapers, supplemented the furniture
(preferably with antiques which he considered particularly comme il
faut), and supervised the upholstering. Everything progressed and
progressed and approached the ideal he had set himself: even when
things were only half completed they exceeded his expectations. He saw
what a refined and elegant character, free from vulgarity, it would
all have when it was ready. On falling asleep he pictured to himself
how the reception room would look. Looking at the yet unfinished
drawing room he could see the fireplace, the screen, the what-not, the
little chairs dotted here and there, the dishes and plates on the
walls, and the bronzes, as they would be when everything was in place.
He was pleased by the thought of how his wife and daughter, who shared
his taste n this matter, would be impressed by it. They were certainly
not expecting as much. He had been particularly successful in finding,
and buying cheaply, antiques which gave a particularly aristocratic
character to the whole place. But in his letters he intentionally
understated everything in order to be able to surprise them. All this
so absorbed him that his new duties -- though he liked his official
work -- interested him less than he had expected. Sometimes he even
had moments of absent-mindedness during the court sessions and would
consider whether he should have straight or curved cornices for his
curtains. He was so interested in it all that he often did things
himself, rearranging the furniture, or rehanging the curtains. Once
when mounting a step-ladder to show the upholsterer, who did not
understand, how he wanted the hangings draped, he mad a false step and
slipped, but being a strong and agile man he clung on and only knocked
his side against the knob of the window frame. The bruised place was
painful but the pain soon passed, and he felt particularly bright and
well just then. He wrote: "I feel fifteen years younger." He thought
he would have everything ready by September, but it dragged on till
mid-October. But the result was charming not only in his eyes but to
everyone who saw it.
In reality it was just what is usually seen in the houses of people of
moderate means who want to appear rich, and therefore succeed only in
resembling others like themselves: there are damasks, dark wood,
plants, rugs, and dull and polished bronzes -- all the things people
of a certain class have in order to resemble other people of that
class. His house was so like the others that it would never have been
noticed, but to him it all seemed to be quite exceptional. He was very
happy when he met his family at the station and brought them to the
newly furnished house all lit up, where a footman in a white tie
opened the door into the hall decorated with plants, and when they
went on into the drawing-room and the study uttering exclamations of
delight. He conducted them everywhere, drank in their praises eagerly,
and beamed with pleasure. At tea that evening, when Praskovya
Fedorovna among others things asked him about his fall, he laughed,
and showed them how he had gone flying and had frightened the
upholsterer.
"It's a good thing I'm a bit of an athlete. Another man might have
been killed, but I merely knocked myself, just here; it hurts when
it's touched, but it's passing off already -- it's only a bruise."
So they began living in their new home -- in which, as always happens,
when they got thoroughly settled in they found they were just one room
short -- and with the increased income, which as always was just a
little (some five hundred rubles) too little, but it was all very
nice.
Things went particularly well at first, before everything was finally
arranged and while something had still to be done: this thing bought,
that thing ordered, another thing moved, and something else adjusted.
Though there were some disputes between husband and wife, they were
both so well satisfied and had so much to do that it all passed off
without any serious quarrels. When nothing was left to arrange it
became rather dull and something seemed to be lacking, but they were
then making acquaintances, forming habits, and life was growing
fuller.
Ivan Ilych spent his mornings at the law court and came home to diner,
and at first he was generally in a good humour, though he occasionally
became irritable just on account of his house. (Every spot on the
tablecloth or the upholstery, and every broken window-blind string,
irritated him. He had devoted so much trouble to arranging it all that
every disturbance of it distressed him.) But on the whole his life ran
its course as he believed life should do: easily, pleasantly, and
decorously.
He got up at nine, drank his coffee, read the paper, and then put on
his undress uniform and went to the law courts. there the harness in
which he worked had already been stretched to fit him and he donned it
without a hitch: petitioners, inquiries at the chancery, the chancery
itself, and the sittings public and administrative. In all this the
thing was to exclude everything fresh and vital, which always disturbs
the regular course of official business, and to admit only official
relations with people, and then only on official grounds. A man would
come, for instance, wanting some information. Ivan Ilych, as one in
whose sphere the matter did not lie, would have nothing to do with
him: but if the man had some business with him in his official
capacity, something that could be expressed on officially stamped
paper, he would do everything, positively everything he could within
the limits of such relations, and in doing so would maintain the
semblance of friendly human relations, that is, would observe the
courtesies of life. As soon as the official relations ended, so did
everything else. Ivan Ilych possessed this capacity to separate his
real life from the official side of affairs and not mix the two, in
the highest degree, and by long practice and natural aptitude had
brought it to such a pitch that sometimes, in the manner of a
virtuoso, he would even allow himself to let the human and official
relations mingle. He let himself do this just because he felt that he
could at any time he chose resume the strictly official attitude again
and drop the human relation. and he did it all easily, pleasantly,
correctly, and even artistically. In the intervals between the
sessions he smoked, drank tea, chatted a little about politics, a
little about general topics, a little about cards, but most of all
about official appointments. Tired, but with the feelings of a
virtuoso -- one of the first violins who has played his part in an
orchestra with precision -- he would return home to find that his wife
and daughter had been out paying calls, or had a visitor, and that his
son had been to school, had done his homework with his tutor, and was
surely learning what is taught at High Schools. Everything was as it
should be. After dinner, if they had no visitors, Ivan Ilych sometimes
read a book that was being much discussed at the time, and in the
evening settled down to work, that is, read official papers, compared
the depositions of witnesses, and noted paragraphs of the Code
applying to them. This was neither dull nor amusing. It was dull when
he might have been playing bridge, but if no bridge was available it
was at any rate better than doing nothing or sitting with his wife.
Ivan Ilych's chief pleasure was giving little dinners to which he
invited men and women of good social position, and just as his
drawing-room resembled all other drawing-rooms so did his enjoyable
little parties resemble all other such parties.
Once they even gave a dance. Ivan Ilych enjoyed it and everything went
off well, except that it led to a violent quarrel with his wife about
the cakes and sweets. Praskovya Fedorovna had made her own plans, but
Ivan Ilych insisted on getting everything from an expensive
confectioner and ordered too many cakes, and the quarrel occurred
because some of those cakes were left over and the confectioner's bill
came to forty-five rubles. It was a great and disagreeable quarrel.
Praskovya Fedorovna called him "a fool and an imbecile," and he
clutched at his head and made angry allusions to divorce.
But the dance itself had been enjoyable. The best people were there,
and Ivan Ilych had danced with Princess Trufonova, a sister of the
distinguished founder of the Society "Bear My Burden".
The pleasures connected with his work were pleasures of ambition; his
social pleasures were those of vanity; but Ivan Ilych's greatest
pleasure was playing bridge. He acknowledged that whatever
disagreeable incident happened in his life, the pleasure that beamed
like a ray of light above everything else was to sit down to bridge
with good players, not noisy partners, and of course to four-handed
bridge (with five players it was annoying to have to stand out, though
one pretended not to mind), to play a clever and serious game (when
the cards allowed it) and then to have supper and drink a glass of
wine. after a game of bridge, especially if he had won a little (to
win a large sum was unpleasant), Ivan Ilych went to bed in a specially
good humour.
So they lived. they formed a circle of acquaintances among the best
people and were visited by people of importance and by young folk. In
their views as to their acquaintances, husband, wife and daughter were
entirely agreed, and tacitly and unanimously kept at arm's length and
shook off the various shabby friends and relations who, with much show
of affection, gushed into the drawing-room with its Japanese plates on
the walls. Soon these shabby friends ceased to obtrude themselves and
only the best people remained in the Golovins' set.
Young men made up to Lisa, and Petrishchev, an examining magistrate
and Dmitri Ivanovich Petrishchev's son and sole heir, began to be so
attentive to her that Ivan Ilych had already spoken to Praskovya
Fedorovna about it, and considered whether they should not arrange a
party for them, or get up some private theatricals.
So they lived, and all went well, without change, and life flowed
pleasantly.
_________________________________________________________________
IV
They were all in good health. It could not be called ill health if
Ivan Ilych sometimes said that he had a queer taste in his mouth and
felt some discomfort in his left side.
But this discomfort increased and, though not exactly painful, grew
into a sense of pressure in his side accompanied by ill humour. And
his irritability became worse and worse and began to mar the
agreeable, easy, and correct life that had established itself in the
Golovin family. Quarrels between husband and wife became more and more
frequent, and soon the ease and amenity disappeared and even the
decorum was barely maintained. Scenes again became frequent, and very
few of those islets remained on which husband and wife could meet
without an explosion. Praskovya Fedorovna now had good reason to say
that her husband's temper was trying. With characteristic exaggeration
she said he had always had a dreadful temper, and that it had needed
all her good nature to put up with it for twenty years. It was true
that now the quarrels were started by him. His bursts of temper always
came just before dinner, often just as he began to eat his soup.
Sometimes he noticed that a plate or dish was chipped, or the food was
not right, or his son put his elbow on the table, or his daughter's
hair was not done as he liked it, and for all this he blamed Praskovya
Fedorovna. At first she retorted and said disagreeable things to him,
but once or twice he fell into such a rage at the beginning of dinner
that she realized it was due to some physical derangement brought on
by taking food, and so she restrained herself and did not answer, but
only hurried to get the dinner over. She regarded this self-restraint
as highly praiseworthy. Having come to the conclusion that her husband
had a dreadful temper and made her life miserable, she began to feel
sorry for herself, and the more she pitied herself the more she hated
her husband. She began to wish he would die; yet she did not want him
to die because then his salary would cease. And this irritated her
against him still more. She considered herself dreadfully unhappy just
because not even his death could save her, and though she concealed
her exasperation, that hidden exasperation of hers increased his
irritation also.
After one scene in which Ivan Ilych had been particularly unfair and
after which he had said in explanation that he certainly was irritable
but that it was due to his not being well, she said that he was ill it
should be attended to, and insisted on his going to see a celebrated
doctor.
He went. Everything took place as he had expected and as it always
does. There was the usual waiting and the important air assumed by the
doctor, with which he was so familiar (resembling that which he
himself assumed in court), and the sounding and listening, and the
questions which called for answers that were foregone conclusions and
were evidently unnecessary, and the look of importance which implied
that "if only you put yourself in our hands we will arrange everything
-- we know indubitably how it has to be done, always in the same way
for everybody alike." It was all just as it was in the law courts. The
doctor put on just the same air towards him as he himself put on
towards an accused person.
The doctor said that so-and-so indicated that there was so-and-so
inside the patient, but if the investigation of so-and-so did not
confirm this, then he must assume that and that. If he assumed that
and that, then . . . and so on. To Ivan Ilych only one question was
important: was his case serious or not? But the doctor ignored that
inappropriate question. From his point of view it was not the one
under consideration, the real question was to decide between a
floating kidney, chronic catarrh, or appendicitis. It was not a
question the doctor solved brilliantly, as it seemed to Ivan Ilych, in
favour of the appendix, with the reservation that should an
examination of the urine give fresh indications the matter would be
reconsidered. All this was just what Ivan Ilych had himself
brilliantly accomplished a thousand times in dealing with men on
trial. The doctor summed up just as brilliantly, looking over his
spectacles triumphantly and even gaily at the accused. From the
doctor's summing up Ivan Ilych concluded that things were bad, but
that for the doctor, and perhaps for everybody else, it was a matter
of indifference, though for him it was bad. And this conclusion struck
him painfully, arousing in him a great feeling of pity for himself and
of bitterness towards the doctor's indifference to a matter of such
importance.
He said nothing of this, but rose, placed the doctor's fee on the
table, and remarked with a sigh: "We sick people probably often put
inappropriate questions. But tell me, in general, is this complaint
dangerous, or not? . . . "
The doctor looked at him sternly over his spectacles with one eye, as
if to say: "Prisoner, if you will not keep to the questions put to
you, I shall be obliged to have you removed from the court."
"I have already told you what I consider necessary and proper. The
analysis may show something more." And the doctor bowed.
Ivan Ilych went out slowly, seated himself disconsolately in his
sledge, and drove home. All the way home he was going over what the
doctor had said, trying to translate those complicated, obscure,
scientific phrases into plain language and find in them an answer to
the question: "Is my condition bad? Is it very bad? Or is there as yet
nothing much wrong?" And it seemed to him that the meaning of what the
doctor had said was that it was very bad. Everything in the streets
seemed depressing. The cabmen, the houses, the passers-by, and the
shops, were dismal. His ache, this dull gnawing ache that never ceased
for a moment, seemed to have acquired a new and more serious
significance from the doctor's dubious remarks. Ivan Ilych now watched
it with a new and oppressive feeling.
He reached home and began to tell his wife about it. She listened, but
in the middle of his account his daughter came in with her hat on,
ready to go out with her mother. She sat down reluctantly to listen to
this tedious story, but could not stand it long, and her mother too
did not hear him to the end.
"Well, I am very glad," she said. "Mind now to take your medicine
regularly. Give me the prescription and I'll send Gerasim to the
chemist's." And she went to get ready to go out.
While she was in the room Ivan Ilych had hardly taken time to breathe,
but he sighed deeply when she left it.
"Well," he thought, "perhaps it isn't so bad after all."
He began taking his medicine and following the doctor's directions,
which had been altered after the examination of the urine. but then it
happened that there was a contradiction between the indications drawn
from the examination of the urine and the symptoms that showed
themselves. It turned out that what was happening differed from what
the doctor had told him, and that he had either forgotten or
blundered, or hidden something from him. He could not, however, be
blamed for that, and Ivan Ilych still obeyed his orders implicitly and
at first derived some comfort from doing so.
From the time of his visit to the doctor, Ivan Ilych's chief
occupation was the exact fulfillment of the doctor's instructions
regarding hygiene and the taking of medicine, and the observation of
his pain and his excretions. His chief interest came to be people's
ailments and people's health. When sickness, deaths, or recoveries
were mentioned in his presence, especially when the illness resembled
his own, he listened with agitation which he tried to hide, asked
questions, and applied what he heard to his own case.
The pain did not grow less, but Ivan Ilych made efforts to force
himself to think that he was better. And he could do this so long as
nothing agitated him. But as soon as he had any unpleasantness with
his wife, any lack of success in his official work, or held bad cards
at bridge, he was at once acutely sensible of his disease. He had
formerly borne such mischances, hoping soon to adjust what was wrong,
to master it and attain success, or make a grand slam. But now every
mischance upset him and plunged him into despair. He would say to
himself: "there now, just as I was beginning to get better and the
medicine had begun to take effect, comes this accursed misfortune, or
unpleasantness . . . " And he was furious with the mishap, or with the
people who were causing the unpleasantness and killing him, for he
felt that this fury was killing him but he could not restrain it. One
would have thought that it should have been clear to him that this
exasperation with circumstances and people aggravated his illness, and
that he ought therefore to ignore unpleasant occurrences. But he drew
the very opposite conclusion: he said that he needed peace, and he
watched for everything that might disturb it and became irritable at
the slightest infringement of it. His condition was rendered worse by
the fact that he read medical books and consulted doctors. The
progress of his disease was so gradual that he could deceive himself
when comparing one day with another -- the difference was so slight.
But when he consulted the doctors it seemed to him that he was getting
worse, and even very rapidly. Yet despite this he was continually
consulting them.
That month he went to see another celebrity, who told him almost the
same as the first had done but put his questions rather differently,
and the interview with this celebrity only increased Ivan Ilych's
doubts and fears. A friend of a friend of his, a very good doctor,
diagnosed his illness again quite differently from the others, and
though he predicted recovery, his questions and suppositions
bewildered Ivan Ilych still more and increased his doubts. A
homeopathist diagnosed the disease in yet another way, and prescribed
medicine which Ivan Ilych took secretly for a week. But after a week,
not feeling any improvement and having lost confidence both in the
former doctor's treatment and in this one's, he became still more
despondent. One day a lady acquaintance mentioned a cure effected by a
wonder-working icon. Ivan Ilych caught himself listening attentively
and beginning to believe that it had occurred. This incident alarmed
him. "Has my mind really weakened to such an extent?" he asked
himself. "Nonsense! It's all rubbish. I mustn't give way to nervous
fears but having chosen a doctor must keep strictly to his treatment.
That is what I will do. Now it's all settled. I won't think about it,
but will follow the treatment seriously till summer, and then we shall
see. From now there must be no more of this wavering!" this was easy
to say but impossible to carry out. The pain in his side oppressed him
and seemed to grow worse and more incessant, while the taste in his
mouth grew stranger and stranger. It seemed to him that his breath had
a disgusting smell, and he was conscious of a loss of appetite and
strength. There was no deceiving himself: something terrible, new, and
more important than anything before in his life, was taking place
within him of which he alone was aware. Those about him did not
understand or would not understand it, but thought everything in the
world was going on as usual. That tormented Ivan Ilych more than
anything. He saw that his household, especially his wife and daughter
who were in a perfect whirl of visiting, did not understand anything
of it and were annoyed that he was so depressed and so exacting, as if
he were to blame for it. Though they tried to disguise it he saw that
he was an obstacle in their path, and that his wife had adopted a
definite line in regard to his illness and kept to it regardless of
anything he said or did. Her attitude was this: "You know," she would
say to her friends, "Ivan Ilych can't do as other people do, and keep
to the treatment prescribed for him. One day he'll take his drops and
keep strictly to his diet and go to bed in good time, but the next day
unless I watch him he'll suddenly forget his medicine, eat sturgeon --
which is forbidden -- and sit up playing cards till one o'clock in the
morning."
"Oh, come, when was that?" Ivan Ilych would ask in vexation. "Only
once at Peter Ivanovich's."
"And yesterday with shebek."
"Well, even if I hadn't stayed up, this pain would have kept me
awake."
"Be that as it may you'll never get well like that, but will always
make us wretched."
Praskovya Fedorovna's attitude to Ivan Ilych's illness, as she
expressed it both to others and to him, was that it was his own fault
and was another of the annoyances he caused her. Ivan ilych felt that
this opinion escaped her involuntarily -- but that did not make it
easier for him.
At the law courts too, Ivan Ilych noticed, or thought he noticed, a
strange attitude towards himself. It sometimes seemed to him that
people were watching him inquisitively as a man whose place might soon
be vacant. Then again, his friends would suddenly begin to chaff him
in a friendly way about his low spirits, as if the awful, horrible,
and unheard-of thing that was going on within him, incessantly gnawing
at him and irresistibly drawing him away, was a very agreeable subject
for jests. Schwartz in particular irritated him by his jocularity,
vivacity, and savoir-faire, which reminded him of what he himself had
been ten years ago.
Friends came to make up a set and they sat down to cards. They dealt,
bending the new cards to soften them, and he sorted the diamonds in
his hand and found he had seven. His partner said "No trumps" and
supported him with two diamonds. What more could be wished for? It
ought to be jolly and lively. They would make a grand slam. But
suddenly Ivan Ilych was conscious of that gnawing pain, that taste in
his mouth, and it seemed ridiculous that in such circumstances he
should be pleased to make a grand slam.
He looked at his partner Mikhail Mikhaylovich, who rapped the table
with his strong hand and instead of snatching up the tricks pushed the
cards courteously and indulgently towards Ivan Ilych that he might
have the pleasure of gathering them up without the trouble of
stretching out his hand for them. "Does he think I am too weak to
stretch out my arm?" thought Ivan Ilych, and forgetting what he was
doing he over-trumped his partner, missing the grand slam by three
tricks. And what was most awful of all was that he saw how upset
Mikhail Mikhaylovich was about it but did not himself care. And it was
dreadful to realize why he did not care.
They all saw that he was suffering, and said: "We can stop if you are
tired. Take a rest." Lie down? No, he was not at all tired, and he
finished the rubber. All were gloomy and silent. Ivan Ilych felt that
he had diffused this gloom over them and could not dispel it. They had
supper and went away, and Ivan Ilych was left alone with the
consciousness that his life was poisoned and was poisoning the lives
of others, and that this poison did not weaken but penetrated more and
more deeply into his whole being.
With this consciousness, and with physical pain besides the terror, he
must go to bed, often to lie awake the greater part of the night. Next
morning he had to get up again, dress, go to the law courts, speak,
and write; or if he did not go out, spend at home those twenty-four
hours a day each of which was a torture. And he had to live thus all
alone on the brink of an abyss, with no one who understood or pitied
him.
_________________________________________________________________
V
So one month passed and then another. Just before the New Year his
brother-in-law came to town and stayed at their house. Ivan Ilych was
at the law courts and Praskovya Fedorovna had gone shopping. When Ivan
Ilych came home and entered his study he found his brother-in-law
there -- a healthy, florid man -- unpacking his portmanteau himself.
He raised his head on hearing Ivan Ilych's footsteps and looked up at
him for a moment without a word. That stare told Ivan Ilych
everything. His brother-in-law opened his mouth to utter an
exclamation of surprise but checked himself, and that action confirmed
it all.
"I have changed, eh?"
"Yes, there is a change."
And after that, try as he would to get his brother-in-law to return to
the subject of his looks, the latter would say nothing about it.
Praskovya Fedorovna came home and her brother went out to her. Ivan
Ilych locked to door and began to examine himself in the glass, first
full face, then in profile. He took up a portrait of himself taken
with his wife, and compared it with what he saw in the glass. The
change in him was immense. Then he bared his arms to the elbow, looked
at them, drew the sleeves down again, sat down on an ottoman, and grew
blacker than night.
"No, no, this won't do!" he said to himself, and jumped up, went to
the table, took up some law papers and began to read them, but could
not continue. He unlocked the door and went into the reception-room.
The door leading to the drawing-room was shut. He approached it on
tiptoe and listened.
"No, you are exaggerating!" Praskovya Fedorovna was saying.
"Exaggerating! Don't you see it? Why, he's a dead man! Look at his
eyes -- there's no life in them. But what is it that is wrong with
him?"
"No one knows. Nikolaevich [that was another doctor] said something,
but I don't know what. And Seshchetitsky [this was the celebrated
specialist] said quite the contrary . . . "
Ivan Ilych walked away, went to his own room, lay down, and began
musing; "The kidney, a floating kidney." He recalled all the doctors
had told him of how it detached itself and swayed about. And by an
effort of imagination he tried to catch that kidney and arrest it and
support it. So little was needed for this, it seemed to him. "No, I'll
go to see Peter Ivanovich again." [That was the friend whose friend
was a doctor.] He rang, ordered the carriage, and got ready to go.
"Where are you going, Jean?" asked his wife with a specially sad and
exceptionally kind look.
This exceptionally kind look irritated him. He looked morosely at her.
"I must go to see Peter Ivanovich."
He went to see Peter Ivanovich, and together they went to see his
friend, the doctor. He was in, and Ivan Ilych had a long talk with
him.
Reviewing the anatomical and physiological details of what in the
doctor's opinion was going on inside him, he understood it all.
There was something, a small thing, in the vermiform appendix. It
might all come right. Only stimulate the energy of one organ and check
the activity of another, then absorption would take place and
everything would come right. He got home rather late for dinner, ate
his dinner, and conversed cheerfully, but could not for a long time
bring himself to go back to work in his room. At last, however, he
went to his study and did what was necessary, but the consciousness
that he had put something aside -- an important, intimate matter which
he would revert to when his work was done -- never left him. When he
had finished his work he remembered that this intimate matter was the
thought of his vermiform appendix. But he did not give himself up to
it, and went to the drawing-room for tea. There were callers there,
including the examining magistrate who was a desirable match for his
daughter, and they were conversing, playing the piano, and singing.
Ivan Ilych, as Praskovya Fedorovna remarked, spent that evening more
cheerfully than usual, but he never for a moment forgot that he had
postponed the important matter of the appendix. At eleven o'clock he
said goodnight and went to his bedroom. Since his illness he had slept
alone in a small room next to his study. He undressed and took up a
novel by Zola, but instead of reading it he fell into thought, and in
his imagination that desired improvement in the vermiform appendix
occurred. There was the absorption and evacuation and the
re-establishment of normal activity. "Yes, that's it!" he said to
himself. "One need only assist nature, that's all." He remembered his
medicine, rose, took it, and lay down on his back watching for the
beneficent action of the medicine and for it to lessen the pain. "I
need only take it regularly and avoid all injurious influences. I am
already feeling better, much better." He began touching his side: it
was not painful to the touch. "There, I really don't feel it. It's
much better already." He put out the light and turned on his side
. . . "The appendix is getting better, absorption is occurring."
Suddenly he felt the old, familiar, dull, gnawing pain, stubborn and
serious. There was the same familiar loathsome taste in his mouth. His
heart sand and he felt dazed. "My God! My God!" he muttered. "Again,
again! And it will never cease." And suddenly the matter presented
itself in a quite different aspect. "Vermiform appendix! Kidney!" he
said to himself. "It's not a question of appendix or kidney, but of
life and . . . death. Yes, life was there and now it is going, going
and I cannot stop it. Yes. Why deceive myself? Isn't it obvious to
everyone but me that I'm dying, and that it's only a question of
weeks, days . . . it may happen this moment. There was light and now
there is darkness. I was here and now I'm going there! Where?" A chill
came over him, his breathing ceased, and he felt only the throbbing of
his heart.
"When I am not, what will there be? There will be nothing. Then where
shall I be when I am no more? Can this be dying? No, I don't want to!"
He jumped up and tried to light the candle, felt for it with trembling
hands, dropped candle and candlestick on the floor, and fell back on
his pillow.
"What's the use? It makes no difference," he said to himself, staring
with wide-open eyes into the darkness. "Death. Yes, death. And none of
them knows or wishes to know it, and they have no pity for me. Now
they are playing." (He heard through the door the distant sound of a
song and its accompaniment.) "It's all the same to them, but they will
die too! Fools! I first, and they later, but it will be the same for
them. And now they are merry . . . the beasts!"
Anger choked him and he was agonizingly, unbearably miserable. "It is
impossible that all men have been doomed to suffer this awful horror!"
He raised himself.
"Something must be wrong. I must calm myself -- must think it all over
from the beginning." And he again began thinking. "Yes, the beginning
of my illness: I knocked my side, but I was still quite well that day
and the next. It hurt a little, then rather more. I saw the doctors,
then followed despondency and anguish, more doctors, and I drew nearer
to the abyss. My strength grew less and I kept coming nearer and
nearer, and now I have wasted away and there is no light in my eyes. I
think of the appendix -- but this is death! I think of mending the
appendix, and all the while here is death! Can it really be death?"
Again terror seized him and he gasped for breath. He leant down and
began feeling for the matches, pressing with his elbow on the stand
beside the bed. It was in his way and hurt him, he grew furious with
it, pressed on it still harder, and upset it. Breathless and in
despair he fell on his back, expecting death to come immediately.
Meanwhile the visitors were leaving. Praskovya Fedorovna was seeing
them off. She heard something fall and came in.
"What has happened?"
"Nothing. I knocked it over accidentally."
She went out and returned with a candle. He lay there panting heavily,
like a man who has run a thousand yards, and stared upwards at her
with a fixed look.
"What is it, Jean?"
"No . . . o . . . thing. I upset it." ("Why speak of it? She won't
understand," he thought.)
And in truth she did not understand. She picked up the stand, lit his
candle, and hurried away to see another visitor off. When she came
back he still lay on his back, looking upwards.
"What is it? Do you feel worse?"
"Yes."
She shook her head and sat down.
"Do you know, Jean, I think we must ask Leshchetitsky to come and see
you here."
This meant calling in the famous specialist, regardless of expense. He
smiled malignantly and said "No." She remained a little longer and
then went up to him and kissed his forehead.
While she was kissing him he hated her from the bottom of his soul and
with difficulty refrained from pushing her away.
"Good night. Please God you'll sleep."
"Yes."
_________________________________________________________________
VI
Ivan Ilych saw that he was dying, and he was in continual despair.
In the depth of his heart he 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 learnt 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. He had been little Vanya, with
a mamma and a papa, with Mitya and Volodya, with the toys, a coachman
and a nurse, afterwards with Katenka and will all the joys, griefs,
and delights of childhood, boyhood, and youth. What did Caius know of
the smell of that striped leather ball Vanya had been so fond of? Had
Caius kissed his mother's hand like that, and did the silk of her
dress rustle so for Caius? Had he rioted like that at school when the
pastry was bad? Had Caius been in love like that? Could Caius preside
at a session as he did? "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.
"If I had to die like Caius I would have known it was so. An inner
voice would have told me so, but there was nothing of the sort in me
and I and all my friends felt that our case was quite different from
that of Caius. and now here it is!" he said to himself. "It can't be.
It's impossible! But here it is. How is this? How is one to understand
it?"
He could not understand it, and tried to drive this false, incorrect,
morbid thought away and to replace it by other proper and healthy
thoughts. But that thought, and not the thought only but the reality
itself, seemed to come and confront him.
And to replace that thought he called up a succession of others,
hoping to find in them some support. He tried to get back into the
former current of thoughts that had once screened the thought of death
from him. But strange to say, all that had formerly shut off, hidden,
and destroyed his consciousness of death, no longer had that effect.
Ivan Ilych now spent most of his time in attempting to re-establish
that old current. He would say to himself: "I will take up my duties
again -- after all I used to live by them." And banishing all doubts
he would go to the law courts, enter into conversation with his
colleagues, and sit carelessly as was his wont, scanning the crowd
with a thoughtful look and leaning both his emaciated arms on the arms
of his oak chair; bending over as usual to a colleague and drawing his
papers nearer he would interchange whispers with him, and then
suddenly raising his eyes and sitting erect would pronounce certain
words and open the proceedings. But suddenly in the midst of those
proceedings the pain in his side, regardless of the stage the
proceedings had reached, would begin its own gnawing work. Ivan Ilych
would turn his attention to it and try to drive the thought of it
away, but without success. It would come and stand before him and look
at him, and he would be petrified and the light would die out of his
eyes, and he would again begin asking himself whether It alone was
true. And his colleagues and subordinates would see with surprise and
distress that he, the brilliant and subtle judge, was becoming
confused and making mistakes. He would shake himself, try to pull
himself together, manage somehow to bring the sitting to a close, and
return home with the sorrowful consciousness that his judicial labours
could not as formerly hide from him what he wanted them to hide, and
could not deliver him from It. And what was worst of all was that It
drew his attention to itself not in order to make him take some action
but only that he should look at It, look it straight in the face: look
at it and without doing anything, suffer inexpressibly.
And to save himself from this condition Ivan Ilych looked for
consolations -- new screens -- and new screens were found and for a
while seemed to save him, but then they immediately fell to pieces or
rather became transparent, as if It penetrated them and nothing could
veil It.
In these latter days he would go into the drawing-room he had arranged
-- that drawing-room where he had fallen and for the sake of which
(how bitterly ridiculous it seemed) he had sacrificed his life -- for
he knew that his illness originated with that knock. He would enter
and see that something had scratched the polished table. He would look
for the cause of this and find that it was the bronze ornamentation of
an album, that had got bent. He would take up the expensive album
which he had lovingly arranged, and feel vexed with his daughter and
her friends for their untidiness -- for the album was torn here and
there and some of the photographs turned upside down. He would put it
carefully in order and bend the ornamentation back into position. Then
it would occur to him to place all those things in another corner of
the room, near the plants. He would call the footman, but his daughter
or wife would come to help him. They would not agree, and his wife
would contradict him, and he would dispute and grow angry. But that
was all right, for then he did not think about It. It was invisible.
But then, when he was moving something himself, his wife would say:
"Let the servants do it. You will hurt yourself again." And suddenly
It would flash through the screen and he would see it. It was just a
flash, and he hoped it would disappear, but he would involuntarily pay
attention to his side. "It sits there as before, gnawing just the
same!" And he could no longer forget It, but could distinctly see it
looking at him from behind the flowers. "What is it all for?"
"It really is so! I lost my life over that curtain as I might have
done when storming a fort. Is that possible? How terrible and how
stupid. It can't be true! It can't, but it is."
He would go to his study, lie down, and again be alone with It: face
to face with It. And nothing could be done with It except to look at
it and shudder.
_________________________________________________________________
VII
How it happened it is impossible to say because it came about step by
step, unnoticed, but in the third month of Ivan Ilych's illness, his
wife, his daughter, his son, his acquaintances, the doctors, the
servants, and above all he himself, were aware that the whole interest
he had for other people was whether he would soon vacate his place,
and at last release the living from the discomfort caused by his
presence and be himself released from his sufferings.
He slept less and less. He was given opium and hypodermic injections
of morphine, but this did not relieve him. The dull depression he
experienced in a somnolent condition at first gave him a little
relief, but only as something new, afterwards it became as distressing
as the pain itself or even more so.
Special foods were prepared for him by the doctors' orders, but all
those foods became increasingly distasteful and disgusting to him.
For his excretions also special arrangements had to be made, and this
was a torment to him every time -- a torment from the uncleanliness,
the unseemliness, and the smell, and from knowing that another person
had to take part in it.
But just through his most unpleasant matter, Ivan Ilych obtained
comfort. Gerasim, the butler's young assistant, always came in to
carry the things out. Gerasim was a clean, fresh peasant lad, grown
stout on town food and always cheerful and bright. At first the sight
of him, in his clean Russian peasant costume, engaged on that
disgusting task embarrassed Ivan Ilych.
Once when he got up from the commode to weak to draw up his trousers,
he dropped into a soft armchair and looked with horror at his bare,
enfeebled thighs with the muscles so sharply marked on them.
Gerasim with a firm light tread, his heavy boots emitting a pleasant
smell of tar and fresh winter air, came in wearing a clean Hessian
apron, the sleeves of his print shirt tucked up over his strong bare
young arms; and refraining from looking at his sick master out of
consideration for his feelings, and restraining the joy of life that
beamed from his face, he went up to the commode.
"Gerasim!" said Ivan Ilych in a weak voice.
"Gerasim started, evidently afraid he might have committed some
blunder, and with a rapid movement turned his fresh, kind, simple
young face which just showed the first downy signs of a beard.
"Yes, sir?"
"That must be very unpleasant for you. You must forgive me. I am
helpless."
"Oh, why, sir," and Gerasim's eyes beamed and he showed his glistening
white teeth, "what's a little trouble? It's a case of illness with
you, sir."
And his deft strong hands did their accustomed task, and he went out
of the room stepping lightly. five minutes later he as lightly
returned.
Ivan Ilych was still sitting in the same position in the armchair.
"Gerasim," he said when the latter had replaced the freshly-washed
utensil. "Please come here and help me." Gerasim went up to him. "Lift
me up. It is hard for me to get up, and I have sent Dmitri away."
Gerasim went up to him, grasped his master with his strong arms deftly
but gently, in the same way that he stepped -- lifted him, supported
him with one hand, and with the other drew up his trousers and would
have set him down again, but Ivan Ilych asked to be led to the sofa.
Gerasim, without an effort and without apparent pressure, led him,
almost lifting him, to the sofa and placed him on it.
"That you. How easily and well you do it all!"
Gerasim smiled again and turned to leave the room. But Ivan Ilych felt
his presence such a comfort that he did not want to let him go.
"One thing more, please move up that chair. No, the other one -- under
my feet. It is easier for me when my feet are raised."
Gerasim brought the chair, set it down gently in place, and raised
Ivan Ilych's legs on it. It seemed to Ivan Ilych that he felt better
while Gerasim was holding up his legs.
"It's better when my legs are higher," he said. "Place that cushion
under them."
Gerasim did so. He again lifted the legs and placed them, and again
Ivan Ilych felt better while Gerasim held his legs. When he set them
down Ivan Ilych fancied he felt worse.
"Gerasim," he said. "Are you busy now?"
"Not at all, sir," said Gerasim, who had learnt from the townsfolk how
to speak to gentlefolk.
"What have you still to do?"
"What have I to do? I've done everything except chopping the logs for
tomorrow."
"Then hold my legs up a bit higher, can you?"
"Of course I can. Why not?" and Gerasim raised his master's legs
higher and Ivan Ilych thought that in that position he did not feel
any pain at all.
"And how about the logs?"
"Don't trouble about that, sir. There's plenty of time."
Ivan Ilych told Gerasim to sit down and hold his legs, and began to
talk to him. And strange to say it seemed to him that he felt better
while Gerasim held his legs up.
After that Ivan Ilych would sometimes call Gerasim and get him to hold
his legs on his shoulders, and he liked talking to him. Gerasim did it
all easily, willingly, simply, and with a good nature that touched
Ivan Ilych. Health, strength, and vitality in other people were
offensive to him, but Gerasim's strength and vitality did not mortify
but soothed him.
What tormented Ivan Ilych most was the deception, the lie, which for
some reason they all accepted, that he was not dying but was simply
ill, and the only need keep quiet and undergo a treatment and then
something very good would result. He however knew that do what they
would nothing would come of it, only still more agonizing suffering
and death. This deception tortured him -- their not wishing to admit
what they all knew and what he knew, but wanting to lie to him
concerning his terrible condition, and wishing and forcing him to
participate in that lie. Those lies -- lies enacted over him on the
eve of his death and destined to degrade this awful, solemn act to the
level of their visitings, their curtains, their sturgeon for dinner --
were a terrible agony for Ivan Ilych. And strangely enough, many times
when they were going through their antics over him he had been within
a hairbreadth of calling out to them: "Stop lying! You know and I know
that I am dying. Then at least stop lying about it!" But he had never
had the spirit to do it. The awful, terrible act of his dying was, he
could see, reduced by those about him to the level of a casual,
unpleasant, and almost indecorous incident (as if someone entered a
drawing room defusing an unpleasant odour) and this was done by that
very decorum which he had served all his life long. He saw that no one
felt for him, because no one even wished to grasp his position. Only
Gerasim recognized it and pitied him. And so Ivan Ilych felt at ease
only with him. He felt comforted when Gerasim supported his legs
(sometimes all night long) and refused to go to bed, saying: "Don't
you worry, Ivan Ilych. I'll get sleep enough later on," or when he
suddenly became familiar and exclaimed: "If you weren't sick it would
be another matter, but as it is, why should I grudge a little
trouble?" Gerasim alone did not lie; everything showed that he alone
understood the facts of the case and did not consider it necessary to
disguise them, but simply felt sorry for his emaciated and enfeebled
master. Once when Ivan Ilych was sending him away he even said
straight out: "We shall all of us die, so why should I grudge a little
trouble?" -- expressing the fact that he did not think his work
burdensome, because he was doing it for a dying man and hoped someone
would do the same for him when his time came.
Apart from this lying, or because of it, what most tormented Ivan
Ilych was that no one pitied him as he wished to be pitied. At certain
moments after prolonged suffering he wished most of all (though he
would have been ashamed to confess it) for someone to pity him as a
sick child is pitied. He longed to be petted and comforted. he knew he
was an important functionary, that he had a beard turning grey, and
that therefore what he long for was impossible, but still he longed
for it. and in Gerasim's attitude towards him there was something akin
to what he wished for, and so that attitude comforted him. Ivan Ilych
wanted to weep, wanted to be petted and cried over, and then his
colleague Shebek would come, and instead of weeping and being petted,
Ivan Ilych would assume a serious, severe, and profound air, and by
force of habit would express his opinion on a decision of the Court of
Cassation and would stubbornly insist on that view. This falsity
around him and within him did more than anything else to poison his
last days.
_________________________________________________________________
VIII
It was morning. He knew it was morning because Gerasim had gone, and
Peter the footman had come and put out the candles, drawn back one of
the curtains, and begun quietly to tidy up. Whether it was morning or
evening, Friday or Sunday, made no difference, it was all just the
same: the gnawing, unmitigated, agonizing pain, never ceasing for an
instant, the consciousness of life inexorably waning but not yet
extinguished, the approach of that ever dreaded and hateful Death
which was the only reality, and always the same falsity. What were
days, weeks, hours, in such a case?
"Will you have some tea, sir?"
"He wants things to be regular, and wishes the gentlefolk to drink tea
in the morning," thought ivan Ilych, and only said "No."
"Wouldn't you like to move onto the sofa, sir?"
"He wants to tidy up the room, and I'm in the way. I am uncleanliness
and disorder," he thought, and said only:
"No, leave me alone."
The man went on bustling about. Ivan Ilych stretched out his hand.
Peter came up, ready to help.
"What is it, sir?"
"My watch."
Peter took the watch which was close at hand and gave it to his
master.
"Half-past eight. Are they up?"
"No sir, except Vladimir Ivanovich" (the son) "who has gone to school.
Praskovya Fedorovna ordered me to wake her if you asked for her. Shall
I do so?"
"No, there's no need to." "Perhaps I's better have some tea," he
thought, and added aloud: "Yes, bring me some tea."
Peter went to the door, but Ivan Ilych dreaded being left alone. "How
can I keep him here? Oh yes, my medicine." "Peter, give me my
medicine." "Why not? Perhaps it may still do some good." He took a
spoonful and swallowed it. "No, it won't help. It's all tomfoolery,
all deception," he decided as soon as he became aware of the familiar,
sickly, hopeless taste. "No, I can't believe in it any longer. But the
pain, why this pain? If it would only cease just for a moment!" And he
moaned. Peter turned towards him. "It's all right. Go and fetch me
some tea."
Peter went out. Left alone Ivan Ilych groaned not so much with pain,
terrible thought that was, as from mental anguish. Always and for ever
the same, always these endless days and nights. If only it would come
quicker! If only what would come quicker? Death, darkness? . . . No,
no! anything rather than death!
When Peter returned with the tea on a tray, Ivan Ilych stared at him
for a time in perplexity, not realizing who and what he was. Peter was
disconcerted by that look and his embarrassment brought Ivan Ilych to
himself.
"Oh, tea! All right, put it down. Only help me to wash and put on a
clean shirt."
And Ivan Ilych began to wash. With pauses for rest, he washed his
hands and then his face, cleaned his teeth, brushed his hair, looked
in the glass. He was terrified by what he saw, especially by the limp
way in which his hair clung to his pallid forehead.
While his shirt was being changed he knew that he would be still more
frightened at the sight of his body, so he avoided looking at it.
Finally he was ready. He drew on a dressing-gown, wrapped himself in a
plaid, and sat down in the armchair to take his tea. For a moment he
felt refreshed, but as soon as he began to drink the tea he was again
aware of the same taste, and the pain also returned. He finished it
with an effort, and then lay down stretching out his legs, and
dismissed Peter.
Always the same. Now a spark of hope flashes up, then a sea of despair
rages, and always pain; always pain, always despair, and always the
same. When alone he had a dreadful and distressing desire to call
someone, but he knew beforehand that with others present it would be
still worse. "Another dose of morphine--to lose consciousness. I will
tell him, the doctor, that he must think of something else. It's
impossible, impossible, to go on like this."
An hour and another pass like that. But now there is a ring at the
door bell. Perhaps it's the doctor? It is. He comes in fresh, hearty,
plump, and cheerful, with that look on his face that seems to say:
"There now, you're in a panic about something, but we'll arrange it
all for you directly!" The doctor knows this expression is out of
place here, but he has put it on once for all and can't take it off --
like a man who has put on a frock-coat in the morning to pay a round
of calls.
The doctor rubs his hands vigorously and reassuringly.
"Brr! How cold it is! There's such a sharp frost; just let me warm
myself!" he says, as if it were only a matter of waiting till he was
warm, and then he would put everything right.
"Well now, how are you?"
Ivan Ilych feels that the doctor would like to say: "Well, how are our
affairs?" but that even he feels that this would not do, and says
instead: "What sort of a night have you had?"
Ivan Ilych looks at him as much as to say: "Are you really never
ashamed of lying?" But the doctor does not wish to understand this
question, and Ivan Ilych says: "Just as terrible as ever. The pain
never leaves me and never subsides. If only something . . . "
"Yes, you sick people are always like that. . . . There, now I think I
am warm enough. Even Praskovya Fedorovna, who is so particular, could
find no fault with my temperature. Well, now I can say good-morning,"
and the doctor presses his patient's hand.
Then dropping his former playfulness, he begins with a most serious
face to examine the patient, feeling his pulse and taking his
temperature, and then begins the sounding and auscultation.
Ivan Ilych knows quite well and definitely that all this is nonsense
and pure deception, but when the doctor, getting down on his knee,
leans over him, putting his ear first higher then lower, and performs
various gymnastic movements over him with a significant expression on
his face, Ivan Ilych submits to it all as he used to submit to the
speeches of the lawyers, though he knew very well that they were all
lying and why they were lying.
The doctor, kneeling on the sofa, is still sounding him when Praskovya
Fedorovna's silk dress rustles at the door and she is heard scolding
Peter for not having let her know of the doctor's arrival.
She comes in, kisses her husband, and at once proceeds to prove that
she has been up a long time already, and only owing to a
misunderstanding failed to be there when the doctor arrived.
Ivan Ilych looks at her, scans her all over, sets against her the
whiteness and plumpness and cleanness of her hands and neck, the gloss
of her hair, and the sparkle of her vivacious eyes. He hates her with
his whole soul. And the thrill of hatred he feels for her makes him
suffer from her touch.
Her attitude towards him and his diseases is still the same. Just as
the doctor had adopted a certain relation to his patient which he
could not abandon, so had she formed one towards him -- that he was
not doing something he ought to do and was himself to blame, and that
she reproached him lovingly for this -- and she could not now change
that attitude.
"You see he doesn't listen to me and doesn't take his medicine at the
proper time. And above all he lies in a position that is no doubt bad
for him -- with his legs up."
She described how he made Gerasim hold his legs up.
The doctor smiled with a contemptuous affability that said: "What's to
be done? These sick people do have foolish fancies of that kind, but
we must forgive them."
When the examination was over the doctor looked at his watch, and then
Praskovya Fedorovna announced to Ivan Ilych that it was of course as
he pleased, but she had sent today for a celebrated specialist who
would examine him and have a consultation with Michael Danilovich
(their regular doctor).
"Please don't raise any objections. I am doing this for my own sake,"
she said ironically, letting it be felt that she was doing it all for
his sake and only said this to leave him no right to refuse. He
remained silent, knitting his brows. He felt that he was surrounded
and involved in a mesh of falsity that it was hard to unravel
anything.
Everything she did for him was entirely for her own sake, and she told
him she was doing for herself what she actually was doing for herself,
as if that was so incredible that he must understand the opposite.
At half-past eleven the celebrated specialist arrived. Again the
sounding began and the significant conversations in his presence and
in another room, about the kidneys and the appendix, and the questions
and answers, with such an air of importance that again, instead of the
real question of life and death which now alone confronted him, the
question arose of the kidney and appendix which were not behaving as
they ought to and would now be attached by Michael Danilovich and the
specialist and forced to amend their ways.
The celebrated specialist took leave of him with a serious though not
hopeless look, and in reply to the timid question Ivan Ilych, with
eyes glistening with fear and hope, put to him as to whether there was
a chance of recovery, said that he could not vouch for it but there
was a possibility. The look of hope with which Ivan Ilych watched the
doctor out was so pathetic that Praskovya Fedorovna, seeing it, even
wept as she left the room to hand the doctor his fee.
The gleam of hope kindled by the doctor's encouragement did not last
long. The same room, the same pictures, curtains, wall-paper, medicine
bottles, were all there, and the same aching suffering body, and Ivan
Ilych began to moan. They gave him a subcutaneous injection and he
sank into oblivion.
It was twilight when he came to. They brought him his dinner and he
swallowed some beef tea with difficulty, and then everything was the
same again and night was coming on.
After dinner, at seven o'clock, Praskovya Fedorovna came into the room
in evening dress, her full bosom pushed up by her corset, and with
traces of powder on her face. She had reminded him in the morning that
they were going to the theatre. Sarah Bernhardt was visiting the town
and they had a box, which he had insisted on their taking. Now he had
forgotten about it and her toilet offended him, but he concealed his
vexation when he remembered that he had himself insisted on their
securing a box and going because it would be an instructive and
aesthetic pleasure for the children.
Praskovya Fedorovna came in, self-satisfied but yet with a rather
guilty air. She sat down and asked how he was, but, as he saw, only
for the sake of asking and not in order to learn about it, knowing
that there was nothing to learn -- and then went on to what she really
wanted to say: that she would not on any account have gone but that
the box had been taken and Helen and their daughter were going, as
well as Petrishchev (the examining magistrate, their daughter's
fiance) and that it was out of the question to let them go alone; but
that she would have much preferred to sit with him for a while; and he
must be sure to follow the doctor's orders while she was away.
"Oh, and Fedor Petrovich" (the fiance) "would like to come in. May he?
And Lisa?"
"All right."
Their daughter came in in full evening dress, her fresh young flesh
exposed (making a show of that very flesh which in his own case caused
so much suffering), strong, healthy, evidently in love, and impatient
with illness, suffering, and death, because they interfered with her
happiness.
Fedor petrovich came in too, in evening dress, his hair curled a la
Capoul, a tight stiff collar round his long sinewy neck, an enormous
white shirt-front and narrow black trousers tightly stretched over his
strong thighs. He had one white glove tightly drawn on, and was
holding his opera hat in his hand.
Following him the schoolboy crept in unnoticed, in a new uniform, poor
little fellow, and wearing gloves. Terribly dark shadows showed under
his eyes, the meaning of which Ivan Ilych knew well.
His son had always seemed pathetic to him, and now it was dreadful to
see the boy's frightened look of pity. It seemed to Ivan Ilych that
Vasya was the only one besides Gerasim who understood and pitied him.
They all sat down and again asked how he was. A silence followed. Lisa
asked her mother about the opera glasses, and there was an altercation
between mother and daughter as to who had taken them and where they
had been put. This occasioned some unpleasantness.
Fedor Petrovich inquired of Ivan Ilych whether he had ever seen Sarah
Bernhardt. Ivan Ilych did not at first catch the question, but then
replied: "No, have you seen her before?"
"Yes, in Adrienne Lecouvreur."
Praskovya Fedorovna mentioned some roles in which Sarah Bernhardt was
particularly good. Her daughter disagreed. Conversation sprang up as
to the elegance and realism of her acting -- the sort of conversation
that is always repeated and is always the same.
In the midst of the conversation Fedor Petrovich glanced at Ivan Ilych
and became silent. The others also looked at him and grew silent. Ivan
Ilych was staring with glittering eyes straight before him, evidently
indignant with them. This had to be rectified, but it was impossible
to do so. The silence had to be broken, but for a time no one dared to
break it and they all became afraid that the conventional deception
would suddenly become obvious and the truth become plain to all. Lisa
was the first to pluck up courage and break that silence, but by
trying to hide what everybody was feeling, she betrayed it.
"Well, if we are going it's time to start," she said, looking at her
watch, a present from her father, and with a faint and significant
smile at Fedor Petrovich relating to something known only to them. She
got up with a rustle of her dress.
They all rose, said good-night, and went away.
When they had gone it seemed to Ivan Ilych that he felt better; the
falsity had gone with them. But the pain remained -- that same pain
and that same fear that made everything monotonously alike, nothing
harder and nothing easier. Everything was worse.
Again minute followed minute and hour followed hour. Everything
remained the same and there was no cessation. And the inevitable end
of it all became more and more terrible.
"Yes, send Gerasim here," he replied to a question Peter asked.
_________________________________________________________________
IX
His wife returned late at night. She came in on tiptoe, but he heard
her, opened his eyes, and made haste to close them again. She wished
to send Gerasim away and to sit with him herself, but he opened his
eyes and said: "No, go away."
"Are you in great pain?"
"Always the same."
"Take some opium."
He agreed and took some. She went away.
Till about three in the morning he was in a state of stupefied misery.
It seemed to him that he and his pain were being thrust into a narrow,
deep black sack, but though they were pushed further and further in
they could not be pushed to the bottom. And this, terrible enough in
itself, was accompanied by suffering. He was frightened yet wanted to
fall through the sack, he struggled but yet co-operated. And suddenly
he broke through, fell, and regained consciousness. Gerasim was
sitting at the foot of the bed dozing quietly and patiently, while he
himself lay with his emaciated stockinged legs resting on Gerasim's
shoulders; the same shaded candle was there and the same unceasing
pain.
"Go away, Gerasim," he whispered.
"It's all right, sir. I'll stay a while."
"No. Go away."
He removed his legs from Gerasim's shoulders, turned sideways onto his
arm, and felt sorry for himself. He only waited till Gerasim had gone
into the next room and then restrained himself no longer but wept like
a child. He wept on account of his helplessness, his terrible
loneliness, the cruelty of man, the cruelty of God, and the absence of
God.
"Why hast Thou done all this? Why hast Thou brought me here? Why, why
dost Thou torment me so terribly?"
He did not expect an answer and yet wept because there was no answer
and could be none. The pain again grew more acute, but he did not stir
and did not call. He said to himself: "Go on! Strike me! But what is
it for? What have I done to Thee? What is it for?"
Then he grew quiet and not only ceased weeping but even held his
breath and became all attention. It was as though he were listening
not to an audible voice but to the voice of his soul, to the current
of thoughts arising within him.
"What is it you want?" was the first clear conception capable of
expression in words, that he heard.
"What do you want? What do you want?" he repeated to himself.
"What do I want? To live and not to suffer," he answered.
And again he listened with such concentrated attention that even his
pain did not distract him.
"To live? How?" asked his inner voice.
"Why, to live as I used to -- well and pleasantly."
"As you lived before, well and pleasantly?" the voice repeated.
And in imagination he began to recall the best moments of his pleasant
life. But strange to say none of those best moments of his pleasant
life now seemed at all what they had then seemed -- none of them
except the first recollections of childhood. There, in childhood,
there had been something really pleasant with which it would be
possible to live if it could return. But the child who had experienced
that happiness existed no longer, it was like a reminiscence of
somebody else.
as soon as the period began which had produced the present Ivan Ilych,
all that had then seemed joys now melted before his sight and turned
into something trivial and often nasty.
And the further he departed from childhood and the nearer he came to
the present the more worthless and doubtful were the joys. This began
with the School of Law. A little that was really good was still found
there -- there was light-heartedness, friendship, and hope. But in the
upper classes there had already been fewer of such good moments. Then
during the first years of his official career, when he was in the
service of the governor, some pleasant moments again occurred: they
were the memories of love for a woman. Then all became confused and
there was still less of what was good; later on again there was still
less that was good, and the further he went the less there was. His
marriage, a mere accident, then the disenchantment that followed it,
his wife's bad breath and the sensuality and hypocrisy: then that
deadly official life and those preoccupations about money, a year of
it, and two, and ten, and twenty, and always the same thing. And the
longer it lasted the more deadly it became. "It is as if I had been
going downhill while I imagined I was going up. And that is really
what it was. I was going up in public opinion, but to the same extent
life was ebbing away from me. And now it is all done and there is only
death.
"Then what does it mean? Why? It can't be that life is so senseless
and horrible. But if it really has been so horrible and senseless, why
must I die and die in agony? There is something wrong!
"Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done," it suddenly occurred
to him. "But how could that be, when I did everything properly?" he
replied, and immediately dismissed from his mind this, the sole
solution of all the riddles of life and death, as something quite
impossible.
"Then what do you want now? To live? Live how? Live as you lived in
the law courts when the usher proclaimed `The judge is coming!' The
judge is coming, the judge!" he repeated to himself. "Here he is, the
judge. But I am not guilty!" he exclaimed angrily. "What is it for?"
And he ceased crying, but turning his face to the wall continued to
ponder on the same question: Why, and for what purpose, is there all
this horror? But however much he pondered he found no answer. And
whenever the thought occurred to him, as it often did, that it all
resulted from his not having lived as he ought to have done, he at
once recalled the correctness of his whole life and dismissed so
strange an idea.
_________________________________________________________________
X
Another fortnight passed. Ivan Ilych now no longer left his sofa. He
would not lie in bed but lay on the sofa, facing the wall nearly all
the time. He suffered ever the same unceasing agonies and in his
loneliness pondered always on the same insoluble question: "What is
this? Can it be that it is Death?" And the inner voice answered: "Yes,
it is Death."
"Why these sufferings?" And the voice answered, "For no reason -- they
just are so." Beyond and besides this there was nothing.
From the very beginning of his illness, ever since he had first been
to see the doctor, Ivan Ilych's life had been divided between two
contrary and alternating moods: now it was despair and the expectation
of this uncomprehended and terrible death, and now hope and an
intently interested observation of the functioning of his organs. Now
before his eyes there was only a kidney or an intestine that
temporarily evaded its duty, and now only that incomprehensible and
dreadful death from which it was impossible to escape.
These two states of mind had alternated from the very beginning of his
illness, but the further it progressed the more doubtful and fantastic
became the conception of the kidney, and the more real the sense of
impending death.
He had but to call to mind what he had been three months before and
what he was now, to call to mind with what regularity he had been
going downhill, for every possibility of hope to be shattered.
Latterly during the loneliness in which he found himself as he lay
facing the back of the sofa, a loneliness in the midst of a populous
town and surrounded by numerous acquaintances and relations but that
yet could not have been more complete anywhere -- either at the bottom
of the sea or under the earth -- during that terrible loneliness Ivan
ilych had lived only in memories of the past. Pictures of his past
rose before him one after another. they always began with what was
nearest in time and then went back to what was most remote -- to his
childhood -- and rested there. If he thought of the stewed prunes that
had been offered him that day, his mind went back to the raw
shrivelled French plums of his childhood, their peculiar flavour and
the flow of saliva when he sucked their stones, and along with the
memory of that taste came a whole series of memories of those days:
his nurse, his brother, and their toys. "No, I mustn't thing of
that. . . . It is too painful," Ivan Ilych said to himself, and
brought himself back to the present -- to the button on the back of
the sofa and the creases in its morocco. "Morocco is expensive, but it
does not wear well: there had been a quarrel about it. It was a
different kind of quarrel and a different kind of morocco that time
when we tore father's portfolio and were punished, and mamma brought
us some tarts. . . ." And again his thoughts dwelt on his childhood,
and again it was painful and he tried to banish them and fix his mind
on something else.
Then again together with that chain of memories another series passed
through his mind -- of how his illness had progressed and grown worse.
There also the further back he looked the more life there had been.
There had been more of what was good in life and more of life itself.
The two merged together. "Just as the pain went on getting worse and
worse, so my life grew worse and worse," he thought. "There is one
bright spot there at the back, at the beginning of life, and
afterwards all becomes blacker and blacker and proceeds more and more
rapidly -- in inverse ration to the square of the distance from
death," thought Ivan Ilych. And the example of a stone falling
downwards with increasing velocity entered his mind. Life, a series of
increasing sufferings, flies further and further towards its end --
the most terrible suffering. "I am flying. . . ." He shuddered,
shifted himself, and tried to resist, but was already aware that
resistance was impossible, and again with eyes weary of gazing but
unable to cease seeing what was before them, he stared at the back of
the sofa and waited -- awaiting that dreadful fall and shock and
destruction.
"Resistance is impossible!" he said to himself. "If I could only
understand what it is all for! But that too is impossible. An
explanation would be possible if it could be said that I have not
lived as I ought to. But it is impossible to say that," and he
remembered all the legality, correctitude, and propriety of his life.
"That at any rate can certainly not be admitted," he thought, and his
lips smiled ironically as if someone could see that smile and be taken
in by it. "There is no explanation! Agony, death. . . . What for?"
_________________________________________________________________
XI
Another two weeks went by in this way and during that fortnight an
even occurred that Ivan Ilych and his wife had desired. Petrishchev
formally proposed. It happened in the evening. The next day Praskovya
Fedorovna came into her husband's room considering how best to inform
him of it, but that very night there had been a fresh change for the
worse in his condition. She found him still lying on the sofa but in a
different position. He lay on his back, groaning and staring fixedly
straight in front of him.
She began to remind him of his medicines, but he turned his eyes
towards her with such a look that she did not finish what she was
saying; so great an animosity, to her in particular, did that look
express.
"For Christ's sake let me die in peace!" he said.
She would have gone away, but just then their daughter came in and
went up to say good morning. He looked at her as he had done at his
wife, and in reply to her inquiry about his health said dryly that he
would soon free them all of himself. They were both silent and after
sitting with him for a while went away.
"Is it our fault?" Lisa said to her mother. "It's as if we were to
blame! I am sorry for papa, but why should we be tortured?"
The doctor came at his usual time. Ivan Ilych answered "Yes" and "No,"
never taking his angry eyes from him, and at last said: "You know you
can do nothing for me, so leave me alone."
"We can ease your sufferings."
"You can't even do that. Let me be."
The doctor went into the drawing room and told Praskovya Fedorovna
that the case was very serious and that the only resource left was
opium to allay her husband's sufferings, which must be terrible.
It was true, as the doctor said, that Ivan Ilych's physical sufferings
were terrible, but worse than the physical sufferings were his mental
sufferings which were his chief torture.
His mental sufferings were due to the fact that that night, as he
looked at Gerasim's sleepy, good-natured face with it prominent
cheek-bones, the question suddenly occurred to him: "What if my whole
life has been wrong?"
It occurred to him that what had appeared perfectly impossible before,
namely that he had not spent his life as he should have done, might
after all be true. 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. He tried to defend all those things to
himself and suddenly felt the weakness of what he was defending. There
was nothing to defend.
"But if that is so," he said to himself, "and i am leaving this life
with the consciousness that I have lost all that was given me and it
is impossible to rectify it -- what then?"
He lay on his back and began to pass his life in review in quite a new
way. In the morning when he saw first his footman, then his wife, then
his daughter, and then the doctor, their every word and movement
confirmed to him the awful truth that had been revealed to him during
the night. In them he saw himself -- all that for which he had lived
-- and saw clearly that it was not real at all, but a terrible and
huge deception which had hidden both life and death. This
consciousness intensified his physical suffering tenfold. He groaned
and tossed about, and pulled at his clothing which choked and stifled
him. And he hated them on that account.
He was given a large dose of opium and became unconscious, but at noon
his sufferings began again. He drove everybody away and tossed from
side to side.
His wife came to him and said:
"Jean, my dear, do this for me. It can't do any harm and often helps.
Healthy people often do it."
He opened his eyes wide.
"What? Take communion? Why? It's unnecessary! However . . . "
She began to cry.
"Yes, do, my dear. I'll send for our priest. He is such a nice man."
"All right. Very well," he muttered.
When the priest came and heard his confession, Ivan Ilych was softened
and seemed to feel a relief from his doubts and consequently from his
sufferings, and for a moment there came a ray of hope. He again began
to think of the vermiform appendix and the possibility of correcting
it. He received the sacrament with tears in his eyes.
When they laid him down again afterwards he felt a moment's ease, and
the hope that he might live awoke in him again. He began to think of
the operation that had been suggested to him. "To live! I want to
live!" he said to himself.
His wife came in to congratulate him after his communion, and when
uttering the usual conventional words she added:
"You feel better, don't you?"
Without looking at her he said "Yes."
Her dress, her figure, the expression of her face, the tone of her
voice, all revealed the same thing. "This is wrong, it is not as it
should be. All you have lived for and still live for is falsehood and
deception, hiding life and death from you." And as soon as he admitted
that thought, his hatred and his agonizing physical suffering again
sprang up, and with that suffering a consciousness of the unavoidable,
approaching end. And to this was added a new sensation of grinding
shooting pain and a feeling of suffocation.
The expression of his face when he uttered that "Yes" was dreadful.
Having uttered it, he looked her straight in the eyes, turned on his
face with a rapidity extraordinary in his weak state and shouted:
"Go away! Go away and leave me alone!"
_________________________________________________________________
XII
From that moment the screaming began that continued for three days,
and was so terrible that one could not hear it through two closed
doors without horror. At the moment he answered his wife realized that
he was lost, that there was no return, that the end had come, the very
end, and his doubts were still unsolved and remained doubts.
"Oh! Oh! Oh!" he cried in various intonations. he had begun by
screaming "I won't!" and continued screaming on the letter "O".
For three whole days, during which time did not exist for him, he
struggled in that black sack into which he was being thrust by an
invisible, resistless force. He struggled as a man condemned to death
struggles in the hands of the executioner, knowing that he cannot save
himself. And every moment he felt that despite all his efforts he was
drawing nearer and nearer to what terrified him. he felt that his
agony was due to his being thrust into that black hole and still more
to his not being able to get right into it. He was hindered from
getting into it by his conviction that his life had been a good one.
That very justification of his life held him fast and prevented his
moving forward, and it caused him most torment of all.
Suddenly some force struck him in the chest and side, making it still
harder to breathe, and he fell through the hole and there at the
bottom was a light. What had happened to him was like the sensation
one sometimes experiences in a railway carriage when one thinks one is
going backwards while one is really going forwards and suddenly
becomes aware of the real direction.
"Yes, it was not the right thing," he said to himself, "but that's no
matter. It can be done. But what is the right thing? he asked himself,
and suddenly grew quiet.
This occurred at the end of the third day, two hours before his death.
Just then his schoolboy son had crept softly in and gone up to the
bedside. The dying man was still screaming desperately and waving his
arms. His hand fell on the boy's head, and the boy caught it, pressed
it to his lips, and began to cry.
At that very moment Ivan Ilych fell through and caught sight of the
light, and it was revealed to him that though his life had not been
what it should have been, this could still be rectified. He asked
himself, "What is the right thing?" and grew still, listening. Then he
felt that someone was kissing his hand. He opened his eyes, looked at
his son, and felt sorry for him. His wife camp up to him and he
glanced at her. She was gazing at him open-mouthed, with undried tears
on her nose and cheek and a despairing look on her face. He felt sorry
for her too.
"Yes, I am making them wretched," he thought. "They are sorry, but it
will be better for them when I die." He wished to say this but had not
the strength to utter it. "Besides, why speak? I must act," he
thought. with a look at his wife he indicated his son and said: "Take
him away . . . sorry for him . . . sorry for you too. . . ." He tried
to add, "Forgive me," but said "Forego" and waved his hand, knowing
that He whose understanding mattered would understand.
And suddenly it grew clear to him that what had been oppressing him
and would not leave his was all dropping away at once from two sides,
from ten sides, and from all sides. He was sorry for them, he must act
so as not to hurt them: release them and free himself from these
sufferings. "How good and how simple!" he thought. "And the pain?" he
asked himself. "What has become of it? Where are you, pain?"
He turned his attention to it.
"Yes, here it is. Well, what of it? Let the pain be."
"And death . . . where is it?"
He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it.
"Where is it? What death?" There was no fear because there was no
death.
In place of death there was light.
"So that's what it is!" he suddenly exclaimed aloud. "What joy!"
To him all this happened in a single instant, and the meaning of that
instant did not change. For those present his agony continued for
another two hours. Something rattled in his throat, his emaciated body
twitched, then the gasping and rattle became less and less frequent.
"It is finished!" said someone near him.
He heard these words and repeated them in his soul.
"Death is finished," he said to himself. "It is no more!"
He drew in a breath, stopped in the midst of a sigh, stretched out,
and died.
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Indexes
_________________________________________________________________
Index of French Words and Phrases
* [1]Il faut que jeunesse se passe.
* [2]a la Capoul
* [3]bon enfant
* [4]comme il faut
* [5]de gaiete de coeur
* [6]le phenix de la famille
_________________________________________________________________
This document is from the Christian Classics Ethereal
Library at Calvin College, http://www.ccel.org,
generated on demand from ThML source.
References
1. file://localhost/ccel/t/tolstoy/ivan/cache/ivan.html3#iii-p9.1
2. file://localhost/ccel/t/tolstoy/ivan/cache/ivan.html3#ix-p49.1
3. file://localhost/ccel/t/tolstoy/ivan/cache/ivan.html3#iii-p8.1
4. file://localhost/ccel/t/tolstoy/ivan/cache/ivan.html3#iv-p16.1
5. file://localhost/ccel/t/tolstoy/ivan/cache/ivan.html3#iii-p19.1
6. file://localhost/ccel/t/tolstoy/ivan/cache/ivan.html3#iii-p4.1
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