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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.
What is the narrative point of view (please
see “Fiction Terms and Definitions)—What if Tolstoy had chosen
first person narration?
"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 thought 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.
p. 1332
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 [Peter] did all this and as he did it felt that the desired result had
been achieved: that both he and she were touched.
What does this say about Peter’s motives?
"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.
(p. 1334)
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.
(p.
1336)
Chapter
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.
Up pops Rousseau
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.
(p. 1338)
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.
Why the single–sentence paragraph? Why does he marry?
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.
(p. 1340)
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 fulfill 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.
Chapter 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.
Why does he feel entitled?
(p. 1342)
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 made 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.
(p. 1344)
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.
(p. 1346)
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.
Chapter
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.
Why does the doctor act
this way? Whom does it remind you
of? Irony?
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.
(p. 1348)
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.
(p. 1350)
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.
Chapter
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.
(p. 1352)
"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."
Chapter
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.
Chapter
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 this
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.
Chapter
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 forever 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.
Yet another shot of
Rousseau.
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.
Chapter
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.
The Inner Light.
“That still, small voice.” Quakers
"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.
Whom does Ilyich’s
description of his childhood feelings remind you of?
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.
Does
he reject the truth?
Chapter
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. [Rousseau] 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?"
Chapter 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. [You guessed it--Rousseau]
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!"
Chapter 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. [You know who]
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 came 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.
Ironic, is it not?
"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 him 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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