Life on a Deathbed

The Death of Ivan Ilyich

A lifelong Russian Orthodox Christian,¹ Leo Tolstoy underwent an intense “conversion” in his late fifties when he embraced a more ascetic mode of living and, although a nobleman, lived as a servant. The Death of Ivan Ilyich, his first work exhibiting this change, recounts the formative events in the title character’s life, revealing an absence of any meaningful relationships right up until his deathbed repentance. Whether or not the novel captures some of Tolstoy’s late-in-life reflections on his pre-conversion life, it evokes the psalmist’s call to “number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom,” as the story unfolds the spiritual cost of neglecting or ignoring the relationships our Creator built into the natural order. It is a story told from a realist, though fully Christian, perspective.

Aspirations of the (Not) Highest Order

As a young man, Ivan is at first unsettled by the lives of “men in the highest station in society,” yet he befriends them. Though he does things that would once have caused him shame, when he sees that men of high position feel no shame in doing the same, he abandons his values. He further adopts an attitude of superiority, more than his status in life warrants; he is “better than the rest.” When he leaves one post for another, he ceases contact with former colleagues while holding himself “aloof from the provincial authorities” and associating with “a better circle among the judges and wealthy nobles.” Ivan regards others as means to the end of his own professional advancement.

He marries for two reasons: “pleasure in taking such a wife” and because “people of the highest rank considered such an act proper.” Once married, he situates his work and socializing—often without his wife—within the influential crowd he aspires to emulate. At home, he expects meals, housekeeping, and a bed. From family, he expects “respectability in external forms .   .   . in accordance with the opinions of society.” Whenever home life becomes burdensome, he retreats to his official spaces. Even the décor of his home serves his professional goals, though he cannot see it is essentially no different from anyone else’s.

Ivan shares no meaningful relationship with his wife and family. Though God said of Adam, “It is not good that the man should be alone,” Ivan listens to the voices of bureaucrats who tell him, “It looks good for a man of your position to have a wife.” So Ivan has a wife, but he cultivates no spiritual relationship with her. He does not live out Paul’s instruction to husbands to love their wives “as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” He ignores the direction to husbands to live sacrificially.

After the Fall

But Ivan’s life takes an unexpected turn when he suffers a fall while hanging curtains. With the same pretense that has characterized his life thus far, he pretends he is improving. Yet as the pain increases, he sinks into a state of self-pity, “alone, without anyone to understand him.” A life of using people to serve his ambition has left him isolated.

He contemplates death: “I shall not be, but what will be? There will be nothing. Then, where shall I be when I am no more?” Further, he cannot see that anyone else has ever experienced the same terror. He concludes that his colleagues, family, servants, and even his doctors are all focused on only one thing: how soon he—and they—would be “freed from his sufferings.”

A Single Servant

In the midst of his suffering, Ivan lies helpless and filled with self-pity. Then, Gerasim—young, strong, and healthy—offers to assist him.

“We shall all die,” Gerasim says. Ivan, generally disgusted by dependence on others, unexpectedly feels shame. To which the young man gives a most Christian response: “Why should I not do you this service? It is for a sick man.” Ivan feels better when Gerasim attends to his needs, and he creates tasks for Gerasim to do to keep him nearby. In dying, Ivan finally finds himself in a meaningful relationship he had made no effort to initiate.

Ivan longs to be kissed and wept over as a child is caressed and comforted, but all he perceives in his family and acquaintances is the lie that he is not dying. Still, he himself participates in that lie, though it poisons his last weeks. He wants both death and life. Though he is most tormented by what he perceives as a general absence of care from others, Gerasim’s attention is not without effect.

Gerasim’s simplicity of both faith and service exemplifies the Christian ideal of humility, and it lifts Ivan from his own self-imposed isolation. Before his fall, Ivan’s attitude toward colleagues and family had left him devoid of emotional connections. He had long imagined himself climbing the ladder of professional and social success while, in fact, his life had been descending deeper into meaningless emptiness.

After his fall, he gives himself over to loneliness and self-pity, isolated until he begins to appreciate Gerasim’s mere presence in his life. He cannot explain this new realization, yet he finds comfort in it. For the first time, he perceives someone as more than a means to an end.

To Live

Still, having never had a relationship with God, Ivan laments what he calls the cruelty of God—indeed, God’s absence. He does not recognize that, just as he had distanced himself from people, including even his family, he had also distanced himself from God. Without a relationship with God, Ivan is indeed isolated, trapped in his own existential misery.

While Gerasim admits a first glimmer into the possibilities of such a relationship, the true door to this relationship must be opened by God himself. Mere days before the end, Ivan hears a voice within asking what he needs. He responds, “Freedom from suffering. To live.” When the voice asks how he wants to live, Ivan recalls his hypocrisy and ambition; he has not lived as he should have. At length, he recognizes all he has done wrong, and he begins to see in others the same errors. Three days before his death, he sees a light and realizes he can repent of his empty life. He longs for the light and ceases to fear death.

Sanctified Suffering

Ivan’s fall is what literary critics call a felix culpa, roughly “a happy fall”—a harm that befalls a character but results in a greater good. In his life dedicated to pleasure and propriety, Ivan’s closest brush with suffering had been when he’d failed to win a desired promotion. But in dying, he endures pain similar to Job’s.

In the end, Ivan’s suffering is so intense that he screams for three days. Through it Tolstoy offers a concrete image of St. Paul’s reflections on his former life. Ivan regards all his professional success as rubbish, nothing in the light of Christ. His time and his efforts were all lost. His legal profession yielded only self-righteousness, not godly character. But in the end, Ivan shares in Christ’s suffering as he sees himself passing with excruciating difficulty through “a narrow sack, black and deep,” until he recognizes the light. In the very end, he enters the light of Christ.

In many ways, Ivan is a modern man who would fit easily into contemporary America. He lived and trusted only in material things. He kept himself aloof, even from his family. He embraced things but not people. Faith played no part in his life. Only during the final three agonizing days did he learn the great truth that his life had been a gift from God, and that to return that gift to God was to find true life.

Note:

Tolstoy was a controversial Orthodox Christian. Though he criticized the Orthodox Church and was excommunicated in 1901, he never repudiated Christianity, and he taught a radical following of the Sermon on the Mount.