The Death of Ivan Ilych (Criticism)

Criticism

Angela Frattarola

Frattarola is a freelance writer and scholar. In the following essay, she discusses characterization and the theme of redemption in the story.

Though “The Death of Ivan Ilych” is an affective text which is still read with enthusiasm today, there are some difficulties which contemporary readers may have with Tolstoy’s novella. The character of Ivan Ilych and the shallowness of his colleagues and wife are haunting for any reader. They come alive in their superficiality and their mundane worries. In many ways, these characters can be seen as the norm in our society when viewed through a pessimistic lens. However, Tolstoy does supply his readers with a few minor exceptions among the majority of pathetic characters. It is important to note that Ivan Ilych is depicted as being equally shallow and thoughtless in his “agreeable, easy, and correct” life, of which the reader is informed after reading of his death in the opening sketch. The extreme pervasiveness of characters who are primarily concerned with propriety is interrupted by the introduction of Gerasim and Vladimir. These characters demonstrate deeper emotions than the others and are singled out as being the only characters able to show pity and kindness to Ivan Ilych in his last days of life.

Gerasim is the Russian peasant who acts as Ivan Ilych’s sick nurse as he is dying. Ivan Ilych takes much comfort in Gerasim’s presence and feels that his healthy and agile body gives him hope. While looking at Gerasim’s “sleepy, good-natured face with its prominent cheekbones,” Ivan Ilych meditates, “What if my whole life has really been wrong?” This is an example of Tolstoy’s often overly romantic and idealized portrait of Gerasim which can grow tiresome to readers who are constantly on the guard against such essentialistic characters. These pure characters frequently fail to be dynamic figures within a text, and merely become stereotypes of an idealized image. Critics have repeatedly noted Gerasim’s role in “The Death of Ivan Ilych”; Edward Wasiolek sums up Gerasim’s character, “He breathes the health of youth and natural peasant life, lifts up the legs of the dying Ivan Ilych, cleans up after him with good humor, and in general shows him a kind of natural compassion.” Irving Halperin echoes these sentiments when he concludes, “because of Gerasim’s devotion, Ivan Ilych becomes capable of extending compassion to his wife and son. In this overall perspective, then, Gerasim may be viewed as the true hero of the story.” And another critic, Temira Pachmuss, asserts that Gerasim possesses “real humanity” since

“Tolstoy thought the instinctive understanding of life and death that enabled Gerasim to do right naturally, to tell the truth, and to feel a deep sympathy for his fellow creatures was a result of Gerasim’s natural identification with nature.” The recurring portrayal of Gerasim as the healthy and simple Russian peasant, who has more compassion and understanding than all the other socially proper and therefore entirely empty and shallow characters, is often hard to accept because it is too easily interpreted as a black and white photo; these are the “good guys,” these are the “bad guys.” (It is also essentialistic in that it is like saying that all women understand nature because women are essentially bound to the earth and the body, or that African Americans naturally have “soul.”)

This overly simplified and essentialistic stereotype is again found in Vladimir, Ivan Ilych’s son. Because Vladimir is a child, he is immediately assumed to be innocent and beyond the socially determined conventions of his mother, sister, and Ivan Ilych’s colleagues. This image is too simple, too easy. In such a hauntingly vivid depiction of death, it can be disappointing for a reader to encounter such one-dimensional characters who are supposed to carry heavily essentialistic ideologies: the rough Russian peasant who innately holds an understanding of death and love because he is in tune with nature; the innocent youth who has not yet been corrupted by social convention and is therefore privileged with a more sincere and real love for the dying man. These images allow a reader to fully grasp the intentions of Tolstoy and therefore they are useful. However, their limitations may make Tolstoy a less dynamic writer. These characters are less believable because they are designed to embody all that is good and innocent in “The Death of Ivan Ilych.” They represent one side of a dualism, or schism, which Tolstoy perpetuates throughout the text and which serves his purpose — to bring the reader a better understanding of a facet of life which he feels is important.

Regardless of Tolstoy’s possible shortcomings in his character development, he is able to present a timeless masterpiece for contemporary readers. Though “The Death of Ivan Ilych” was written after Tolstoy’s conversion to radical Christianity and some critics believe that the moralizing of his post-conversion writing detracts from his artistic abilities as a writer, it is because of the message which Tolstoy is striving to convey that “The Death of Ivan Ilych” is so memorable. Even without a belief in God, Tolstoy’s message comes across to a reader as a lesson of life. Ivan Ilych is callously treated after his death because that was the attitude which he showed others. It is not until his last days that he is forced to think about his life with an urgency which colors every conscious minute due to the proximity of death. It is within this context that Ivan Ilych ascertains that he most definitely did not live his life as he should have and gets “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.” Tolstoy devotes the text to detailing the reasons why Ivan Ilych and his peers are living within a “falsity,” and within a few crucial paragraphs is able to sum up how he rids himself of this “falsity” in his final days. Tolstoy’s point is not to taunt a reader and mock the one who realizes only moments before death that he had never lived. Rather, Tolstoy wants the reader to have this realization along with Ivan Ilych so that she/he too may discover the beauty to be found in love before it is too late. The simple concept that one gets back what one gives is the apparent message I find in Tolstoy’s novella.

After his death, Ivan Ilych’s family and colleagues seem to carry on as if nobody has stopped to think about their lives after the death of their friend. Instead, characters like Peter Ivanovich and Schwartz, Ivan Ilych’s co-workers and friends, fight thoughts of death from their minds and are constantly assuring themselves that they are still alive and that it is Ivan Ilych who has died. Praskovya Fedoravna is still preoccupied with her proper role of the grief-stricken widow, the maintenance of their meticulously decorated house, and her financial situation. Tolstoy assures the reader that no one has learned from Ivan Ilych’s death; they all continue to live as he once did — shallow yet always correct. This contrast makes the reader conscious that Tolstoy is now pointing to you; you are the one who should learn from Ivan Ilych’s death. Tolstoy’s ability to make the reader feel as though he/she is seeing a revelation which no one else can see privileges the reader as the one who can benefit from Ivan Ilych’s agony.

Gerasim and Ivan Ilych’s son are able to give the dying man love and through experiencing this, he realizes that love is what he must give back. Though some critics believe that the revelation which Ivan Ilych feels in his last moments of life and which allows him to die in peace is an unrealistic hope for most readers, I believe that the existence of such a revelation is exactly Tolstoy’s point. Ivan Ilych was lucky in that death fell upon him and he was able to come to this realization of the need for love and compassion in life. We, as readers, can read the story of his death and learn from it what the other characters so obviously miss. In contrast, John Donnelly attests, “[Both] Tolstoy and Ilych (that is, the Ilych in the last two hours of his drawn-out dying period) were much too sanguine about the human condition and the prospects for attaining moral integrity in this life. In short, I believe the Tolstoy an lesson to be drawn from Ilych’s dying is not a realistic expectation, although it is devoutly to be wished.” This reading seems to neglect the basic lesson behind “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” leaving a reader with little else.

Before Tolstoy died, he told his daughter, “The more a man loves, the more real he becomes.” This seems to be the overwhelming message of “The Death of Ivan Ilych” also. Tolstoy understood this concept most completely after his spiritual conversion and could not rest until he tried his best to convey it to others through his writing, whether in parables, folk tales, drama, pamphlets, or fiction. Like the look of warning on the dead face of Ivan Ilych which Peter Ivanovich looks down upon, Tolstoy’s story communicates a warning of the same message to his readers. Thus, “The Death of Ivan Ilych” can be read repeatedly throughout one’s life as one always needs to be reminded, or rather warned, to live and love before death comes.

Source: Angela Frattarola, “An Overview of ‘The Death of Ivan Ilych’,” in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 1999.

What Do I Read Next?

• In Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1891), Peyton Farquhar is about to be hanged from a bridge because of a military crime. The rope breaks, he escapes by swimming away, and he reviews the events of his life — all in a hallucination in the instant before his death.
• In Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” (1894), Louise Mallard receives news that her husband has died in a train wreck. Tearlessly, she retreats to her room and reviews the course of her married life. She comes to recognize that she has gained great personal freedom with his death. When her husband suddenly walks in the door — he was not on the train after all — she drops dead. Her family and physician assume she died of joy.
• “The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka, published in 1937, depicts the transformation of Gregor Samsa from a responsible young man to a bug. Kafka’s emotional portrayal of Gregor and his family create insight on the facade of social propriety and one’s need to escape the dominating roles of society.
• In Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, written in 1938, the central character, called the Stage Manager, reviews the histories of the lives of various inhabitants of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire.
• Joan Didion’s “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” published in 1966, mingles fact and fiction. It is the real account of a real woman, Lucille Marie Maxwell Miller. However her story is told through Didion’s narrative and her notion that life can become superficial without a hint of the forbidden.
• Trainspotting, published in 1993 by Irvine Welsh is a collection of short stories recounting the revelries and derelict antics of a group of boys in Edinburgh doing everything in their power to not fall victim to “growing up.”