The Death of Ivan Ilych (Themes)

Themes

Death

Tolstoy was plagued for most of his life with a fear of death. He came to realize, as the character of Ivan Ilych demonstrates vividly, that the closeness of death can create a healthy urgency in life. Ivan Ilych only becomes aware of the superficiality of his social propriety because of his proximity to death. He is horrified in knowing that he cannot escape death as he has escaped all other unpleasantness in life — by treating them with a distance and insincerity. Gerasim stands in opposition to this fear in his simple acceptance of death as a part of life. A comparison can be made between the high-class social falsity among which Ivan Ilych has lived and the peasant, or servant, life among which Gerasim has lived. Ivan Ilych has an agonizing death which is only relieved when he accepts death. Gerasim, as he helps the dying man, comments, “We shall all of us die, so why should I grudge a little trouble?” Ivan Ilych’s refusal to accept death mirrors the sterility of most of his life and the lives of his colleagues and wife. They ignore his pain and maintain their social conventions in the face of his eminent death. Ivan Ilych, however, is unable to ignore his own death. “It,” the menacing reality of death, is irrational and goes against the facade of ease and pleasant living in which he has constantly lived and in which those surrounding him still live. Death ultimately forces Ivan Ilych to see the lack of compassion in his once well-ordered life. When he sees this, he can feel love and pity for his son and wife, and death is obliterated in this new light.

Love and Pity Vs. Pride

Ivan Ilych had lived most of his life with a sense of pride and vanity. The society of which he is a part praises the trivial marks of wealth and propriety which consume the Ilych family and Ivan Ilych’s office. He believes himself to be condescendingly friendly towards those who come before him at work and takes pride in the impersonal “official” relationships which he masters. Ivan Ilych’s pride plays a crucial role in his “fall” from the stepladder as he fixes the draping of the curtains which the upholsterer has not done properly for the social decor he wants to exude. Like the Biblical fall of Adam and Eve from grace, Ivan Ilych‘s pride causes his fall and subsequent pain. Through his eventual selflessness and pity, which he finds through death, and the pity which is shown to him by Gerasim and his son, Ivan Ilych is able to feel love and accept death. Ivan Ilych is touched by the simple way in which Gerasim accepts death, comforts him, and shows him compassion. He is also moved when his son kisses his hand in his last moments of life. These instances, combined with his impending death and his struggle against being pushed into the deep black sack, bring Ivan Ilych to the realization that he pities his son and wife. He tries to ask for their forgiveness, rejecting the pride which previously consumed his life, and showing love.

Nature Vs. Civilization

Ivan Ilych lives in an isolated and superficial world embedded within the civilization which his urban class valorizes. He denies his wife sympathy when she becomes irritable during her pregnancies and creates more walls within his social roles to compensate for ignoring her needs. The same lack of compassion, then, is all that she can demonstrate towards him as he lies dying; she maintains her social proprieties and is absorbed with going to the opera and with their daughter’s engagement. These impersonal relationships within the Ilych family and the insincere friendships between Ivan Ilych and his colleagues serve to depict the shallowness of his civilized world. As he used his friends and colleagues to gain higher positions, so they use him when he dies and his job is left vacant. The worth which each of these characters finds in one another depends on what they can get from one another. Likewise, at Ivan Ilych’s funeral, his wife’s main concern is how she can procure funds from the government after her husband’s death. The lack of humanity within Ivan Ilych’s world is contrasted to the world of Gerasim and the childhoods of Ivan Ilych and his son, Vladimir. Gerasim is of the land and not of the same social class as Ivan Ilych. Because of this, he does not display the same propriety towards death as Ivan Ilych’s friends and wife. Death, for Gerasim, is not an inconvenience which is to be ignored but is natural and pitiable. Ivan Ilych remembers his childhood, before he assumed the mask of propriety which death has shown him to be false, as his happiest days. Ivan sees this same innocence in his son, who shows Ivan pity and kisses his hand. The honest manner in which Gerasim and Vladimir pity Ivan contrasts with the falsity of his wife and colleagues and the shallow civilized life which is also Ivan Ilych’s before his revelation at death.

Topics for Further Study

• Compare the philosophical attitudes of Leo Tolstoy’s contemporaries on death. Was a fear of death and its implications for a meaningless or more meaningful life a common preoccupation during the time Tolstoy was writing? What ideas of death are made more lucid in Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych” which where also being explored by contemporary philosophers?
• Explore Tolstoy’s ideas about social conventions and their effect on human development in comparison with Franz Kafka’s portrayal of Gregor in “The Metamorphosis.” Could any of Freud’s works elucidate what these authors are trying to convey?
• Are Tolstoy‘s allusions to religious ideologies in “The Death of Ivan Ilych” (such as his use of Ivan Ilych’s fatal fall and the Biblical fall, and his reference to Ivan seeing the light before he dies) too dependent on a framework which has faith in God? Do Tolstoy’s religious undertones detract from the narrative of Ivan’s death?