SOURCE: Gutsche, George J. “Tolstoi's ‘The Death of Ivan Il'ich.’” In Moral Apostasy in Russian Literature, pp. 70-98. Dekalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986.

[In the following essay, Gutsche explores various Christian and moral interpretations of The Death of Ivan Ilyich.]

“So that's it!” he suddenly pronounced aloud. “What joy!”

Tolstoi is a towering figure in Russian literature and culture. Much of his prominence derives from the moral passion and earnestness of his search for the right way to live and from his efforts to bring the news to others when he had found it. It is hard to discuss any of his writings without referring to moral issues, for his constant grappling with problems of right and wrong was reflected in everything he wrote. Not all readers find his obsessive concern with morality and his uncompromising directness in treating moral problems palatable.¹ Nor has the worldview he constructed, promoted, and embedded in his fiction achieved any kind of lasting appeal and influence on the world of ideas. People have come to view Tolstoi the moralist with a combination of mild praise for his strong position against violence and bemused indifference toward his vegetarianism, cult of simplicity, and prohibitions against sex.

Tolstoi's moral presence, though often felt in his pre-1880 short stories and novelistic masterpieces, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, was felt even more sharply in writings after his spiritual crisis of the late 1870s. Largely as a result of this crisis and his perception that most art was morally tainted, he devoted most of his energy in the years following Anna Karenina to nonfiction, to study of the world's major religions, to exegesis and translation of the Gospels, and to the exposition of his religious and moral views. Fiction, presumably revalued for its moral potential, returned to his arsenal to play an important role in the mid-1880s; from this time until his death in 1910 he wrote numerous enduring works, which include short stories, plays, and one more large novel, Resurrection.

His religious views in later years were controversial, offensive not just to official Russian Orthodoxy but also to those who believed in virtually any conventional Christian doctrines. It cannot be, and was not then, easy for Christians to appreciate the seriousness and intensity of Tolstoi's moral convictions and at the same time maintain equanimity in the face of his vitriolic attack on conventional Christian doctrine and those who spoke in its behalf. Religion (which Tolstoi defined in a particular way) represented in its usual forms a pernicious threat to the purity of childhood and the integrity of conscience:

From a very early age—when children are most susceptible to suggestion, when those who bring up children cannot be sufficiently careful about what they communicate to them—children are hypnotized with the absurd, immoral dogmas of the so-called Christian religion, incompatible with our reason and knowledge. Children are taught the dogma of the Trinity, which a healthy reason cannot hold; the coming of one of these three Gods to earth for the redemption of the human race, and his resurrection and ascent into heaven; they are taught to expect a second coming, and punishment with eternal torments for disbelief in these dogmas; and they are taught to pray for their needs; and many other things.²

He follows this list of Christian doctrines and practices with a strong accusation: the Trinity, the Resurrection, and hell as a punishment for those who do not believe what the Church teaches are corrupting impositions on susceptible children who will grow up spiritually distorted, no longer believing in their own conscience, having yielded it to the authority of the Church. If people only would learn to trust their own reason and conscience, Tolstoi argues, they could distinguish right from wrong and truth from lies. The established church perverts the spiritual life, robbing people of the ability to make moral choices on their own:

And when all these notions, which are incompatible with reason, contemporary knowledge, and human conscience are indelibly stamped on the impressionable minds of children, they are left to themselves to find their way as best they can in the contradictions which flow from these dogmas they have accepted and assimilated as the unquestionable truth. No one tells them how they can and should reconcile these contradictions. If, however, theologians try to reconcile these contradictions, their attempts confuse the matter even more. So, little by little, people become accustomed to not trusting their reason (the theologians strongly support this distrust of reason), and therefore to the notion that anything is possible in the world, that people do not have within them anything by means of which they can themselves distinguish good from evil, or falsehood from truth; and that in what is most important for them—their actions—they should be guided not by their reason but by what others tell them. It is understandable what a horrible perversion of a person's spiritual world must be produced by such an education reinforced in adult life as well by all the means of hypnotization which, by the aid of the clergy, are continually exercised upon the people.

(35:188)

It is no wonder Russian religious philosophers have reacted so strongly in condemning this religion that does not have the customary trappings of mystery, sensing behind it an anarchism and distortion of holy writ and ridiculing Tolstoi's mundane obsession with rules of behavior.³ Although it is quite true that rules against violence, anger, lust, and taking oaths are important components of Tolstoyism, his religious views consist of more than rules. Underlying his views is a belief in the power of reason to direct one's moral life and, more important, a belief that all people have within them a moral sense that can easily be distorted by conventional religious education. And in addition to these beliefs, there is throughout his late writings a deep concern for the right relationship between behavior and attitudes, for actions in harmony with reason and conscience, and for behavior that is engendered spontaneously by the proper attitudes toward life.

To Tolstoi, striving for goodness, truth, and universal brotherhood has no moral validity unless such striving is deeply rooted, unreflective, and untainted by self-consciousness and abstractness.⁴ What is important is being oneself, finding the God within, understanding within oneself the meaning of life. “Repentance” (in a quite particular sense, “realizing the right way to live”) is possible through self-understanding; brotherhood is a natural result of serving oneself and the God within.

By living truly for oneself, one will be naturally in the right relation to others. In the story The Death of Ivan Il'ich, the central figure's realization of this truth comes suddenly, and he does not subject it to deep analysis. He simply becomes compassionate; for compassion, a self-sacrificing love for one's neighbor, is what Tolstoi believes people will discover as the meaning of life if they use their conscience as a guide. Ivan's compassion is not a product of abstract reasoning or of judging that one code of conduct or set of rules is more reasonable than another. Because it is not abstract and mechanical, the altruism that flows from this compassion has the right psychological basis: it is firmly rooted within him.

Much of what has been written about Tolstoi is flawed in two ways: first, by a failure to appreciate how important it was for actions to have their source in a morality that was “natural” to a person, not imposed from the outside; and second, by a failure to appreciate how critical Tolstoi was of Christian dogma. It is curious but true that many of the readings of The Death of Ivan Il'ich rely on concepts Tolstoi explicitly rejects in his nonfiction and, it will be argued, implicity rejects in the story as well.⁵ There is, however, something in this fiction that attracts explications that utilize a conventional Christian perspective, applied with appropriate concepts and terminology.

The purpose of beginning this [essay], which is devoted to the story, with some of Tolstoi's typical pronouncements on Christianity is to establish a context for our discussion of so-called Christian interpretations and to give the basis for a new reading designed to cohere with Tolstoi's views on religion as expressed in his other works. In what follows an effort will also be made to account for the story's perplexing capacity to attract a wide variety of readings. The Death of Ivan Il'ich will be shown to illustrate very clearly the genesis of a quintessentially moral—but hardly Christian, except in an extended sense—vision: the hero's experience of dying leads to disorienting experience culminating in a final vision. And this vision “on the edge” offers a new way of understanding life and an unconventional way of attaining immortality.

The Death of Ivan Il'ich (1886) was the first major fictional work by Tolstoi in his post-1880 period. Long regarded as a classic of short fiction, it has stimulated numerous and varied readings. The moral dimension of the story is readily apparent: Tolstoi indicts society's reigning values, personal pleasure and propriety, and advocates compassion and love as the best foundation for living. However, the moral and religious context in which the simple message of compassion and moral authenticity is expressed may not be so apparent to readers. Although it is easy to see that Tolstoi advances compassion as one of the highest of human virtues, the moral framework in which we are to see this conventional Christian virtue is, on close reading, far from clear. Tolstoi is usually accused of being heavy-handed in his manipulation of his readers⁶—and heavy-handedness is usually associated with the unequivocal expression of moral imperatives. But, paradoxically, this work has occasioned a variety of interpretations, suggesting that it is not possible to derive a simple, universally and univocally appreciated and understood moral.

As his first major fictional work in ten years, the story represents Tolstoi's recognition of and return to art as a means for illustrating his moral and religious views. On the basis of the rigorous demands Tolstoi made on his art after 1880, those features he ascribed to true art in his later treatise What Is Art? (1898), one might well expect in such a story a simple thesis that would lend itself to virtually uniform readings. In his treatise on art, he would argue for an art accessible to and understandable by everyone, an art with universal situations and a clearly moral function, which was to persuade people that they are all brothers and sisters, that they all have within them manifestations of the same spirit (his notion of “God”).

One value clearly offered in The Death of Ivan Il'ich is compassion, and there is no doubt that the moral advocacy of compassion for the suffering of others exemplified in this story is what Tolstoi later urged in his essay. The fact remains, however, that the advocacy of compassion is part of a very complex context that is susceptible to readings of a diverse and even contradictory character. These readings concern, in the end, the origins, place, and implications of the compassion Ivan, in his last moments, identifies as the meaning of life. The language and the settings surrounding Ivan's discovery suggest the Resurrection. Tolstoi is hardly paying his respects to conventional Christian dogma here. It can be argued, however, that the Christian suggestiveness is designed both to demonstrate Tolstoi's understanding of Christianity and to give solemnity and significance to the deathbed realizations of an ordinary man. Thus traditional Christianity becomes part of a strategy serving a higher purpose: the advancement of Tolstoi's own, radically revised Christianity. It is important to understand how this revised Christianity differs from other forms.

Tolstoi did not hide his skepticism about prevailing views of salvation and redemption. He was painfully blunt in numerous works: Harmonization and Translation of the Four Gospels (1880-1881), What I Believe (“V chem moia vera?”, 1882-1884), “On Life” (1886-1887), “Investigation of Dogmatic Theology” (1881-1882), and “The Kingdom of God Is within You” (1890-1893). In the latter, for example, he condemned the “idolatry” of Russian Orthodoxy, its veneration of icons, and its reliance on church rites, on salvation, on redemption, and on prayer:

The Sermon on the Mount or the creed: it is impossible to believe in both. And church people have chosen the latter: the creed is taught and read like a prayer in churches, and the Sermon on the Mount is even excluded from gospel readings in churches, so that churchgoers will never hear it, except on days when all of the Gospels are read. And it could not be otherwise: people who believe in a cruel and unreasonable God who has damned the human race and condemned his son as a sacrifice and part of mankind to eternal torment—cannot believe in a God of love. A person who believes in Christ as a God who is coming in his glory to judge and punish the living and the dead cannot believe in a Christ who commands us to turn the other cheek to the offender, to refuse to sit in judgment, and to forgive and love our enemies. [Here follows an attack on the Old Testament, which Tolstoi describes as “filled with abominations.”] A person believing in the teachings and sermons of the church about the compatibility of Christianity with executions and wars no longer can believe in the brotherhood of all people.

But the main thing is that a person who believes in the salvation of people by belief in redemption or in the sacraments can no longer try with all his might to fulfill in life the moral teachings of Christ.

A person who has been taught by the Church the blasphemous doctrine that a person cannot be saved by his own powers but that there is another means, will invariably run to these means, and not to his own powers on which, he is assured, it is a sin to rely. Church doctrine of any sort, with its redemption and sacrament and even worse, Orthodox doctrine, with its idolatry, excludes the doctrine of Christ.

(28:60-61)

This strong rejection of the authority of official representatives of religion and morality—and repeated insistence on the validity of the individual's unmediated sense of religious and moral truth—is combined with a carefully elaborated alternative religious doctrine. Tolstoi is usually seen as a moralist with rules of behavior, as a religious thinker deriving his philosophy from Matthew and the Sermon on the Mount (and the above quotation supports this view) rather than from the Book of John, with its revelatory concept of being born again that so impressed Dostoevskii. This distinction is acceptable so long as one realizes that Tolstoi views rules as living parts of a person: they inhere in demeanor and are reflected in behavior that is moral not because it is consciously in accordance with rules but because it derives from the proper attitude toward the world—one characterized by love for others. Behavior is then manifested naturally, in harmony with rules. As Tolstoi's many religious writings demonstrate, it was more than recognition of universal brotherhood and sisterhood that he wanted. His religion was a religion of actions in this world, together with the proper attitudes and feelings; he promoted love and compassion, and, especially, avoidance of any kind of violence, whether the coercive activities of the state, of the church, or of other individuals. Compassion was not compassion, however, unless it was sincere and deeply rooted in the distinctive relationship an individual had with the world. This relationship was, Tolstoi insisted, attainable by all who would use their own reason and conscience.

The notion of morality as something instinctive and spontaneous, a guide to action that is accessible to all people without external guidance, finds a suitable niche in Tolstoi's aesthetics as well. Tolstoi believed art should strive “to make that feeling of brotherhood and love of one's neighbor, now attained only by the best members of society, the customary feeling and the instinct of all men. By evoking under imaginary conditions the feeling of brotherhood and love, religious art will train men to experience those same feelings under similar circumstances in actual life; it will lay in the souls of men the rails along which the actions of those whom art thus educates will naturally pass.”⁷

Art as moral training “in the realm of feeling,” as “laying the rails” for the proper feelings that serve as the basis for the proper actions in life, is what The Death of Ivan Il'ich should exemplify if it is to live up to Tolstoi's demanding criteria. And these feelings should help to establish that relationship between people and the world which Tolstoi labeled “religion.”

A proper balance between artistic verity and moral explicitness is an obvious desideratum of moral fiction. Ivan is not a superficial vehicle for moral truth, a sacrifice to moral clarity. Nonetheless, there is a strong aura of the ordinary about Ivan that comes dangerously close to depriving him of the fullness we expect in a fictional character. He is given a particularized but unexceptional life as a child, youth, and adult; he is by design to be perceived as a very ordinary person; he is an obvious consequence of Tolstoi's effort to generalize and to represent a way of life familiar to everyone—and a death everyone will some day face. Only as he comes to grips with death does he become truly individualized; and as he yields to the impersonal force he finds within, he becomes even more individualized.

After a conventional childhood and schooling, Ivan makes a career choice, law, that is also unremarkable. Climbing the professional ladder, Ivan became a judge whose work involves condemning or absolving others from guilt and deciding legal right and wrong. Appropriately respectful of his elders and social betters, he makes no waves and observes all of society's conventions, living “comme il faut,” developing “stability” when it is expected of him, and acquiring a wife and family at the appropriate junctures. He masters and internalizes the appropriate responses, so that he knows exactly the kind of a wife appropriate for him and the kind of living quarters that would suit his status. Maintaining propriety and avoiding unpleasantness are the ruling principles of his life and those of the people around him.

Living by the law of society, expressed in the twin terms “pleasantness” and “properness” (“priiatnost'” and “prilichie”),⁸ leads him progressively to higher and more prestigious positions; it also channels him (because in a Tolstoyan world doing what society desires takes one further and further from meaningful life) into increasingly formalized relations with his family and his colleagues. He reaches the very top of the metaphorical ladder: a judgeship and new living quarters. And in these very quarters, at the pinnacle of his career, at the height of his success, he accidentally tumbles from a real ladder, injures his side, and slowly dies. What seemed to be a simple bruise turns out to be far more serious. In its trivial origin and profound consequences, the accident has much in common with Insarov's catching a cold while securing Elena's passport. But the insights that come to Ivan are radically different.

Having judged and condemned the behavior of others, Ivan is suddenly condemned himself and must now ponder the rightness of his life. This abrupt and ironic turnabout from health to disease is the first in a series of disorienting experiences for Ivan: he will fall from success to failure, experience hope and despair during the course of his illness, deteriorate while imagining he is getting better (chapter 9), change his values (between chapters 6 and 7),⁹ and in the end, find his suffering replaced by joy. During his decline, suffering physically and morally, he is himself “formalized” as something unpleasant by former friends, his doctors, his daughter, and his wife; and he is pitied only by his son, Vasia, and his peasant servant, Gerasim.

After intense suffering, Ivan finally comes to understand the falseness of his past life and the nature of real life, and feeling pain and death have been vanquished, he dies. A veritable paradigm in its vivid illustration of the genesis of moral revelation “on the edge of the abyss,” the story dramatizes a mythic conversion.¹⁰ Failing in his flight from the ultimate horror, Ivan must confront it; and confrontion leads to moral clarity and victory over the fear of death.

Critics have explored the sophisticated structural patterns Tolstoi employed to undercut the values by which Ivan lived before his illness¹¹ with particular attention on the first of the twelve chapters, Ivan's funeral—chronologically the end of the story. Here we are given an intimate view of the hypocrisy of Ivan's society, the falseness of conventional relations between people, and the various ways in which they avoid thinking about what is truly important. Tolstoi's moral strategy is transparent: he first presents the values Ivan himself lived by most of his life—and these are the values his society continues to live by after his death—and later shows through Ivan's example those values are inadequate, indeed base. Readers who share the narrator's scorn for the hypocrisy exhibited by most of the people at the funeral are presumably then sympathetically disposed toward Ivan's final revelations. Throughout most of the narrative, while Ivan struggles to discover what went wrong with his life, Tolstoi sustains a critical tone. When Ivan dies, no one except possibly his son shows any awareness that the kind of life promoted by society is based on delusions designed to protect people from unpleasant realities. No one seriously thinks about the most unpleasant of these realities, death; but the story, from the title to the end, keeps this unpleasant reality always in close view.

Earlier drafts indicate that originally Tolstoi had a different strategy. Ivan himself and a friend, not an omniscient narrator, told the story; in the final version the friend, Peter Ivanovich, receives Ivan's diary from his widow, reads it, and then articulates the main message for all to hear:

“It is impossible, impossible, impossible to live as I have lived and as we all have been living.” This is what Ivan Il'ich's death and his notes disclosed to me. I shall describe how I regarded life and death before this event; and I shall relate his notes as they have come to me, supplementing them only with those details I learned from his domestics.¹²

Tolstoi's decision not to illustrate, through Peter Ivanovich, the desired effect of Ivan's story (renunciation of one's previous way of life) but to imply it through Ivan's example alone marked a clear gain in the story's persuasive power. Although the presence of a converted friend of Ivan would be consonant with Tolstoi's didactic aim—it might underscore the thesis that ordinary human life is false and immoral—it would also tend to blunt the effect of the ending, the manner in which Ivan comes to realize that ordinary life is immoral. The newly converted friend is too explicitly moralistic and too easily converted into a critic of society. Moreover, there is a problem of balance: the friend's critique gives too much weight to the negative thesis and not enough to the right way to live, which Ivan discovered only at the end. With the diary narrative, rendering Ivan's last inner thoughts and revelations would present difficulties.

In the early version, the negative moral—the shallowness of conventional life—is succinctly summarized and the persuasive model laid bare: the story of Ivan's life has had a strong effect on his friend, the one we may assume Tolstoi wished us to feel as well. The story is designed to make us question the way in which we have been living and, ultimately, to renounce it. But in the end Tolstoi elected not to model the effect of Ivan's personal story in the verbal response of another character. He chose instead to present the story through the eyes of a narrator who was separate from the events but who had access to thoughts and feelings of all of the characters. Tolstoi also fashioned the events so that only Ivan undergoes a radical change in perspective.

The result is a clearer focus on Ivan and the model of “right” living he becomes in the end, a model unobscured by demonstrating the effects of the example on others. Such blurring in focus and its attendant possible violation of verity could very well have undermined the evocation of feelings Tolstoi strove for. Replication of the appropriate response is too strong a requirement to place on moral art if it is to differ from homily. Laying the rails is part of a program of education and training that can hardly be expected to obtain immediate results.

When Tolstoi recast the story in the third person, Peter Ivanovich was given a different role. We learn that neither he, one of Ivan's best friends, nor Praskov'ia Fedorovna, Ivan's wife, is ultimately converted or affected by Ivan's example, a fact that considerably reduces the optimism engendered by Ivan's joyful revelations. Tolstoi was only too aware of the power of his society's modes of living and thinking, and of course he harbored few illusions about the human capacity for self-delusion.¹³ People in Ivan's world are dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure and comfort and to the avoidance of what is discomforting: they cannot imagine their own deaths.

Nevertheless the narrator shows considerable interest in portraying Peter's thoughts and discomfort at the funeral. Three times in the first chapter Peter is given a chance to comprehend the significance of Ivan's death, and thus the meaning of life. In the old days they had been close, they had gone to school together, and in maturity they played cards together. And Peter, more sensitive than other friends of Ivan, had recognized early that Ivan was dying (26:62). The first chance Peter has to step out of society's perspective, which conceals what is really important, is when, looking at the corpse of his friend, he sees that Ivan's face seems more handsome and significant in death than in life. And his expression indicates that “what had to be done was done, and done right.” This sense of “fitness” reflects Ivan's achievement of what he had been striving all through his illness to discover, the “right” way of life. “Right” here and throughout the story (Ivan several times will say that his life was “ne to,” “the wrong thing”; he lived it “the wrong way”) is not necessarily a moral category but an assessment of aptness or congruence with some standard or set of standards. Also within Ivan's expression was a “reproach” or “reminder to the living.” Something in what he saw was unpleasant to Peter; so he crosses himself, turns, and leaves, in the kind of pain one feels upon recognizing a truth one is conditioned to avoid.

The second moment causing Peter discomfort occurs when he hears from Praskov'ia how much Ivan suffered in his final days (26:66)—it “horrified” him, and he feels “fearful” because Ivan has lived an ordinary life: one would not expect it to end with extraordinary suffering. His reference to the unfairness of suffering underlines an important issue in the story: why does such an ordinary man have to suffer so much? Is there an explanation for the extreme pain the author gives him? One answer relates to Tolstoi's strategy: Ivan's suffering has a shock value;¹⁴ Peter is disoriented enough to begin to think death and suffering could happen to him (26:67). “It is horrible”—“strashno”—is repeated. What restores his calm is the socially conditioned reflex. “The customary thought came” (“prishla obychnaiia mysl'”) that it happened to Ivan, not him, and he believes that it could not happen to him. This, of course, mirrors Ivan's reaction in the early stages of his illness, when he would become concerned about his recovery and resist thinking that he too could die. Like Ivan, Peter evaded thoughts of his own death.

But there is another possible explanation for the incongruity between Ivan's suffering and the quality of his life. One part of the “picture” of life that Tolstoi attacks is the notion that there is a link between sin and suffering. Though Ivan has lived superficially and falsely, he was no monster; and his sins have hardly been commensurate with his suffering and illness. Although pain and the fear of death may have connections with one's view of life, this relationship has nothing to do with a legalistic balancing of the scales, in which the pain of punishment is directly related to the immorality of one's life. We have seen in On the Eve how Elena came to expect some relationship between the punishing guilt she felt, the misfortunes she experienced, and her attempts to find personal happiness and fulfillment. Tolstoi's alternative, as expressed through Ivan's final vision, provides a different view: someone with the right understanding of life is “really” immune to physical pain (although others may think the pain extreme) and need not be concerned about mental and moral suffering.

Before he leaves the funeral, Peter sees Ivan's two children, the daughter, Liza, looking “gloomy” and “angry,” and the tearful Vasia; and in the hall he has a brief conversation with Ivan's servant, Gerasim. Peter's suggestion that Ivan's death was a pity elicits Gerasim's reply that it was God's will, and that all will end up that way (26:68). The word “pity” (expressed with the impersonal adverb “zhalko”) will recur as a leitmotiv, losing, as the story progresses, its conventional meaning and strengthening its connections with authentic compassion.¹⁵

Although it is clear in the story that Peter has not seen the truth, he is obviously more receptive to it than others at the funeral, especially associates and fellow cardplayers like Shvarts (whose very name suggests the absence of the “light” of truth); he is also clearly more open to the truth than Ivan's wife. Even though in this version he is no longer idealized as in Tolstoi's early draft, Peter, obviously sensitive to the deeper meaning of Ivan's death, retains a limited susceptibility to understanding the error of his own ways.¹⁶ Perhaps since his patronymic makes him the son of Ivan, he will some day see the light and carry the message, as did his biblical namesake (who, like Peter Ivanovich, had earlier missed three opportunities to admit the truth); for that matter, Ivan also has a symbolic biblical lineage: Ivan, whose name is the Russian version of John (the precursor of Christ), is by patronymic the son of Il'ia, or Elijah, the Old Testament precursor of the Messiah. The biblical resonance of the names in the story helps to generate an aura of seriousness and religious significance.

Thus the central issues the story will deal with—the falseness of conventional life, the meaning of pain and death, and the role of pity and compassion in authentic life—are suggested through Peter and his perception of Ivan's life and their society. This first chapter, which is both beginning and end, plays an important role in setting the context and establishing the values that will be examined. The final chapter, however, is even more important; for here Tolstoi deals with the moral concerns of the dying man, not just the values of those who have come to his funeral. It is here, in the last chapter, that Tolstoi distinctively marks his moral purposes with his depiction of Ivan's vital transformation. The amazing variety of readings this chapter has stimulated gives testimony to its key position in the story as well as its mysterious richness.

Though we are told in the beginning of the story and in the last chapter that Ivan screams for his last three days, other events—mostly psychological—in the last chapter push our awareness of his pain into the background. His screaming, which begins when he recognizes that the end has come and presumably continues without abatement until the end, is much less noticeable than in previous chapters. And the sense we have that it is somehow less testifies to the shift in emphasis Tolstoi has directed as we make the transition to his presentation of the positive side of his truth.

In each of the previous chapters we watch minute changes in Ivan's perceptions and temperament, his physical and psychological condition; subsuming all is his suffering. Now the pain has begun to move into the background, yielding its place to Ivan's revelations, which are of such importance that they will occupy the center of his consciousness. In fact, in his last hours Ivan seems unaware of his screaming; he is oblivious to his physical condition, undoubtedly because of his new view of life.

Ivan's mindset in this last period of his life can be seen as a stage of dying, the end of his depression and the beginning of his acceptance of death.¹⁷ Paradoxically, the proximity of death is linked to recurring thoughts of childhood and images of birth. Ivan loses his ability to speak, a development that intensifies for the reader the physical pain he feels, the inefficacy of all verbalization, and the regressive quality of his experience. He tries to say something (“I don't want …” [“to die,” presumably]) but instead merely howls with the sound of the final vowel of the word “want” (the long “u” sound of “khochu”). That Ivan's spiritual regeneration may lie in a return to the purity and innocence of childhood is suggested not only by the “baby-like” sounds he makes as his defenses fall, but also by recurring thoughts of his childhood. In chapter 10, for example, he recalls the flavor of plums he ate as a child, and the smell of his striped leather ball: more and more he realizes that life then had been full, fresh, innocent, and untainted.

Tolstoi very accurately renders what many have observed about dying people: they are like children in their need for attention and their dependence on the care of others.¹⁸ Screaming, of course, also fits the pattern of correspondences: that is how we come into the world and attract attention vital to our well-being. But also suggested is the inadequacy of language to convey the nature of his experience. Tolstoi, who used words so well, chose to make his moral statement in a different “language” here.¹⁹ Tolstoi described the function of art as “laying the rails” for the correct feelings. These rails are laid by paradox, metaphor, and Ivan's sudden insight.

We are told that during these three final days, time did not exist for Ivan, that he continued to struggle in a “black sack” or “black hole,” forced into it by an invincible power. But the source of his horror is ambiguous, both in his resistance and his yielding to the power forcing him deeper into the sack. The imagery suggests a high degree of disorientation, a life void of its customary points of reference:

He struggled as one sentenced to death struggles in the hands of an executioner, knowing that he cannot save himself; and with each moment he felt that, despite all efforts in the struggle, he was getting closer and closer to what terrified him. He felt that his suffering came both from being shoved into that black hole and, still more, from not being able to crawl into it. What prevented him from crawling into it was his claim that his life had been good [“khoroshaia”]. That very justification of his life enchained him and did not allow him to pass forward, and tormented him more than anything.

(26:112)

Trying to rationalize a bad life has kept Ivan from advancing to a higher state, though, paradoxically, this “advance” means “crawling” (“prolezt'”) deeper into the hole.²⁰ The unconventional nature of Ivan's journey is captured in paradoxes, in the notion of advancing by crawling deeper. Recognition of what is really important in life is impossible with conventional perspectives. Seeing the truth through the abandonment of rationalization is difficult and demands radical reorientation.

Ivan is still at the level of “torment” (“muchen'e”), which will be contrasted with a yet-to-come later state. There is a new development, however: now his thoughts, not his physical condition, are causing him pain. All that is associated with his physical being recedes more and more into the background as he sheds old ways of looking at the world.

Ivan's new orientation is intimately connected with the recurring image of the black sack (alternatively, the black hole) from which he cannot escape. The image possibly originates in his visualization of his illness: he has earlier tried to make concrete what was causing him pain, vividly imagining the “blind intestine” or cecum, which some of his doctors had identified as the source of his ills.²¹ The black sack also suggests the womb, an identification that makes Ivan's pains analogous to labor pains. Labor pains can then be linked with his recollections of childhood, his nonverbal communication, and ultimately his “rebirth.” Finally, the image of the black sack suggests the intestine again, and a particular situation: Ivan wishes to escape from a “constipated,” restricted life. Tolstoi's linkage of scatology and eschatology is not without philosophical precedent.²²

Within the “sack” Ivan is subjected to surrounding pressures; he wants to “crawl through,” but something “did not allow him to pass forward” (“ne puskalo vpered”). The concept of “passing” from one plane to another is crucial. Shortly, in a slip of the tongue, Ivan will make a perhaps unconscious request to pass on to the next plane: “Let me pass” (“propusti”). This is one of a large number of verbs with the prefix “pro-,” which though relatively common as a Russian prefix, appears in this section with uncommon frequency. Such a prefix, denoting actions and movements “through” something, as well as movements that are “complete,” underscores Ivan's need to “pass through” to a different state. Multiple perspectives, all designed to intensify the event's meaning, come to bear on Ivan's “passage.” First, while in pain, he feels a blow to the chest and side. The force impels him: “he fell through [“provalilsia”] into the hole, and there, at the end of the hole, something lit up.” Now all that happens is beyond conscious control, and Ivan acts as if a force is working through him.

The narrator compares the experience of falling and then seeing a light to the sensations of a person in a train who is confused about which way the car is going: first confusion, then orientation, a realization of the car's true direction. The train motif ironically closes what it began: it was on a train that Ivan first made the contact that led to his new job, a meeting that led to his move, his accident, his sufferings, his revelation, and his death.

Ivan's spiritual turnabout is expressed in vivid terms of violence and disorientation.²³ Coming to the truth is painful and involves radical reversals of former perspectives. Now Ivan understands that his past life was not right, and he explicitly says so:

“Yes, everything was wrong [“ne to”],” he said to himself, “but that doesn't matter.“

“It's possible, it's possible to do it the ‘right’ way [“sdelat' ‘to’”]. But what is the ‘right’ way?” he asked himself, and then grew quiet.

(26:112)

The moment of revelation comes at the end of the third day, only an hour before Ivan's death. This explicit reference to time, with its biblical suggestiveness, marks and sets up expectations for the approach of a redemptive moment, a “resurrection.” The imagery, however, suggests a new birth; and thus a clean slate or state of originary purity, rather than a resurrection, or returning to life from the dead. Rebirth evokes the black sack with the light at the end, the pressures to remain in the sack but also to escape, and the final liberation from constraint and emergence into the light. Moreover, present at this rebirth is the archetypal family—father, mother, and son. The perspectives are askew, however, for it is the father who is to be “born.” The presence of other characters during Ivan's final moments expresses Tolstoi's belief that morality is a matter of compassionate actions and sincere feelings directed toward others. The relational, contextual, and interpersonal emphasis Tolstoi gives here to moral behavior is at odds with the customary representation of his ethics as bound by rule and logic.²⁴

Ivan's son has crept (again a verb with a “pro-” prefix, “prokralsia”) into the room to join his mother and father. Ivan places his hand on his boy's head, with powerful effect on all: the boy grabs the hand and kisses it, tearfully expressing his compassion. This is a crucial scene, wordless, with a focus on spontaneous action, direct and unmediated human communication, not conscious and imitative behavior according to social dictate or moral rule. With a biblical suggestiveness derived from the emphasis on compassion and Vasia's role (Christ urged people to become “as little children“), the scene makes vivid a significant feature of Tolstoi's religion.²⁵

Disguised here is the general outline of Christ's crucifixion.²⁶ The central figure is condemned to death, and next to him are two others, also condemned (as mortals); Ivan's wife and son stand here as tokens for the two thieves. The analogy is reinforced by Tolstoi's choice of verbs. Vasia “crept” or, literally, “stole” into the room: the association with theft exists in both the Russian and the English. What happens next underscores the analogy, making it clear that Vasia represents the unnamed thief who suffered alongside Christ, the one Christ consoled (Luke 23:42-43). In Tolstoi's extensively revised version of the Gospels, Christ says that the thief by his action of ignoring his physical well-being and asking Christ to remember him in his “kingdom” is already in “paradise.” Paradise as something this side of death, as a state accessible to the living, is a notion with important implications for our understanding of Ivan's final experiences. Here Ivan's son, who already knows authentic compassion, is already in “paradise.” Whether he will remain there or be seduced by the world of the pleasant and the proper is an open question at the end of the story.

Vasia's intuition and compassion give him an unerring sense of what could help his father. And this help is nonverbal, silent, simply tears and the pressure of a hand. Emphasizing the simultaneity of events, Tolstoi repeats what has happened to Ivan in these moments: he has fallen through, seen the light, realized that his life has not been what it should have been. But in addition—and this is the new element—he recognizes that it is still possible to correct matters. Falling silent, he listens for an answer to his question about the “right” way of life. And at this point he feels his hand being kissed. Tolstoi presents the same temporally limited series of mental and physical events from different perspectives, reinforcing Ivan's realization and its connection with the authentic emotional contact represented by his son's compassionate gestures.

Rebirth is appropriately connected with the parent-child model. But here the roles are unconventional, the perspective and orientation are different; for it is the father and son, not the mother and son, who are emphasized. Now Ivan looks at his son and pities him. Vasia is the only one in his world whom he has pitied: earlier, in chapter 8, the narrator has said that Vasia “was always pitiable to him. …” And what is more, “besides Gerasim, it seemed to Ivan Il'ich that Vasia alone understood and pitied him” (26:105). The glow of compassion is now extended to include Praskov'ia as well; for as she approaches him, he feels sorry for her too. In practically all previous contacts with her in the story he has felt hatred for her; and we have learned that earlier in their marriage, he distanced himself from her emotionally because her querulousness and irritability during pregnancy were unpleasant to him, as they introduced into his well-ordered and rigidly controlled life an alien and threatening element. Immersing himself in his work and in his social games, he formalized the relationship with her so that Praskov'ia could not interfere with his “pleasant” life. But in the present, as his illness progressively worsens and as he comes closer to his “birth,” she treats him as he has treated her, refusing to regard him as a suffering human being. He begins to hate her even more, as she represents in his mind his old way of life, the pleasure principle with all of its hypocrisy; and much of his anger, though displaced, is directed at her. Something has happened now, however, at the hour of his death; something in the situation has helped him to answer his question about the “right” way of life, and he no longer hates but instead pities her.

This “something” is not the product of logical, rational thinking; rather, a new way of looking at the world has come to Ivan at a time when he is receptive to it, when he is ready to abandon rationalization for his past way of life. The model for realizing moral truth in Tolstoi's writing at this time is not one that depends on or utilizes conventional moral arguments. Tolstoi directs that we look at the world honestly, and not through the elaborate defenses and rationalizations society has instructed us to build, and then wait for the truth to be disclosed. The lies have heretofore distorted the one true perspective.

Ivan's new understanding of life is reflected in a new interest in others, an attention not to his own personal well-being but to the feelings of those around him. He recognizes that he is torturing his wife and son and that his death will make their life easier:

“Yes, I am tormenting them,” he thought. “They are sorry, but it will be better for them when I die.” He wanted to say this but did not have the strength to speak. “But why speak? I have to do something,” he thought. With a glance he indicated his son to his wife and said:

“Take him away … sorry for him … and for you too. …” He tried to say “Forgive” too, but said “Forward,” and no longer having the strength to correct himself, waved his hand, knowing that whoever needed to understand would understand.

(26:113)

The supreme moral attitude of compassion, the turn from the self to others, and the awareness of and concern for the suffering of others are emphasized repeatedly in the text, though English translations usually obscure this fact. The phrase “they are sorry” is too ambiguous in this context for “im zhalko”; better here is “they are sorry for him, they have pity for him.” The expression exactly parallels Ivan's previous expressions of pity for his wife and son (“Emu stalo zhalko ego,” and “Emu zhalko stalo ee”). The key word “zhalko” (an adverbial form for “pity” and “sorry for”) when used with noun or pronoun objects denoting people, suggests having pity for someone.

What is unusual now is that Ivan's wife, with mouth open, tears on her nose and cheeks, and an expression of despair, is perceived by him as showing pity—and may indeed be experiencing such a feeling. Compassion has united Ivan, his wife, and his son. Sympathy and feelings of pity are fundamental to Tolstoi's religion and to his ethics, and his attempts to spread his religion to others depend on the potential infectiousness of compassion. The scene illustrates this potential in exemplary fashion: authentic compassion is shown in all its glory. Its effects, however, are not lasting for Ivan's wife; for in the first chapter she is shown to be once again in the world of the pleasant and the proper. The moment leaves its imprint only on Vasia, who has remained virtually untainted by society's evil influence.²⁷

The didactic point of the story is transparent: examples of moral behavior have an infectious power, a power Tolstoi must rely on if his moral message is to be effective. The power can fade, however, once the example is gone and society's values have reestablished their dominance. The moral discussion focuses on behavior that is spontaneously and naturally moral: Ivan abjures talking, for he wants to do something. The need for action flows naturally from the feeling of compassion. Moreover, real compassion may be itself an action. The deed, not the words, is what is emphasized now. Action flowing spontaneously from the correct moral feeling has a much more important role than words and proper rituals.

The context makes it clear that Ivan has in mind not just action in general but completing an action already referred to (“sdelat'” is the verb); such an action could include dying, as well as showing compassion. But the verb has a mundane dimension as well. Ivan gives a concrete and very specific indication to his wife that she should remove their son from the room (“Uvedi,” “lead him away”); but even in this case there is ambiguity, for the imperative could also suggest leading him away from the kind of life she and Ivan have lived, and from the values their society has supported. Ivan adds, again, that he feel sorry for her as well (“zhalko … i tebia …”). Feeling and expressing his compassion constitute Ivan's last actions.

Ivan's attempt to say “Forgive me” has been subjected to various interpretations. His conscious intention to ask for forgiveness has been embraced by those who have understood it as an appropriate response to his causing suffering in others; moreover, it would be the conventional thing for Christians to say, an expression of repentance. But there are other possibilities as well: the words point to Christ's, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”; in this reading the attempt reinforces Ivan's Christ-like role. And perhaps what he planned to say is no longer as important as what he actually said under the influence of his new perception of the world.²⁸

Ivan could not say “forgive” (“prosti”) but uttered instead a word with the same first syllable (“pro-”): “Propusti,” “Let me pass” (or possibly, “Let it pass”). The usual English translation, “forego,” and to a lesser extent the word used in translating it above (“Forward”), obscures the possibilities inherent in Ivan's slip of the tongue: that he is asking to pass through into another state, to the light in the other realm, or, in effect, to death. On this reading what is shown is Ivan's unconscious assimilation of what Tolstoi would view as real moral understanding, understanding rooted in authentic religious feeling, not conventional religious doctrine. Ivan wishes his spirit to pass out of his body into another state, to merge with God.

Unable to correct what he said, Ivan nevertheless is confident that he has done what was required. Many English translations unjustifiably introduce a capitalized pronoun, suggesting that God is the one who would understand. The phrase in Russian is “… poimet tot, komu nado,” a very succinct “that one will understand who needs to.” There are no capital letters in Soviet or pre-Soviet editions, although the possibility that God is the one who will understand is not excluded. In any case, there is no reason to think that the “one” referred to is a divinity. Praskov'ia, Vasia, and readers are privy to what Ivan says, and if the message is compassion, then it has surely been understood.

Insights in these last moments come quickly:

And suddenly it became clear to him that that which had been wearing him down and which would not go away was suddenly and all at once going away, on two sides, on ten sides, on all sides. He felt pity for them, he had to do something so that it would not be painful for them. He had to release them and release himself from this suffering.

(26:113)

Again pity and the need for active good are conjoined: releasing his wife and son from suffering flows naturally from his feelings of pity. The verb for “release himself” is “izbavit'sia,” with connotations of the biblical “deliverance from.” Tolstoi's language aptly catches the exhilaration of freedom when everything that has been oppressing Ivan from all sides suddenly falls away. Deliverance here is very concrete and of this world: it is an action invoked and accomplished easily because it is derived from compassion. Freeing others from suffering, which is a variation of doing unto others as they would do unto you, is a notion shared by the conventional Christian ethos and Tolstoi's Christianity. But Ivan's behavior is not so much obedience to the rule as it is spontaneous action in accordance with it. And this spontaneity is an essential ingredient of Ivan's final experiences.

No longer subject to the power of the physical world, Ivan asks himself what happened to the pain. He even apostrophizes it: “How good, and how simple,” he thought. “And the pain?” he asked himself. “Where was it? Well, where are you, pain?”

The pain has diminished and almost disappeared. It is totally under the dominion of Ivan's new consciousness of the “right” way, his new understanding of life. And when he senses it, he accepts it: “Yes, here it is. Well, what of it? Let the pain be” (26:113). The parallel question, “Where is death? Where is it?”, leads to equally unexpected results:

He searched for his former habitual fear of death and did not find it. “Where is it? What death?” There was no fear because there was no death either.

Instead of death there was light.

“So that's it!” he suddenly pronounced aloud. “What joy!”

(26:113)

In this simple experience Tolstoi expresses his alternative to the customary religious conception of “resurrection.” It is a resurrection-rebirth that occurs before death, not after, and only after Ivan realizes how to live.

For him all this happened in a single instant, and the meaning of this instant did not change any more. For those present, his agony continued for another two hours. In his chest something rattled; his wasted body twitched. Then the rattle and the wheezing became less and less frequent.

(26:113)

The sufferings (“muchen'ia”) have now turned into agony (“agoniia”), the “predeath state of the organism.” In this state, there need be no mental or physical suffering, and in Ivan's case there is none; thus, the English can be misleading, for our word “agony” usually has strong connotations of pain. Ivan is no longer suffering, nor is he even in the realm of time and space, the physical and the changing (“the meaning of the moment remained unchanged”). The pain and mental torment that have preceded Ivan's death are replaced in his consciousness by light and life. There is just one more step:

“It's all over!” said someone above him.

He heard these words and repeated them in his soul. “Death is over,” he said to himself. “It is no more.”

He drew in his breath, stopped in the middle of a sigh, stretched out and died.

(26:113)

In Russian there is just a single word for “It's all over!”: “Koncheno!” Having been uttered by someone “above,” the word carries no little suggestiveness concerning divine origin. But because it provokes Ivan's response—his clarification that not life is over but, paradoxically, death—it is very doubtful that the word is God's. The meaning of Ivan's correction is clear: with his new knowledge of life, death no longer threatens him and no longer has any power over him. The solemnity and seriousness of the moment are enhanced by the religious connotations of the language and the context. It does not matter that the religious suggestiveness derives from a religion Tolstoi finds pernicious in its conventional forms. The feelings evoked by the scene are directed by Tolstoi.

The term “koncheno” is ripe with religious meaning. Ivan's final words, and the one uttered from above, parallel words spoken at Christ's death which suggested fulfillment of a divine plan (“It is accomplished!”). And of course this meaning is consistent with and finds its place in Tolstoi's ethics, which is also based on behavior according to a universal, “divine” plan. There is every reason to believe that Ivan's life is part of the same plan as Christ's: to Tolstoi, Christ was a man who died as men do.²⁹ In his exegetical writings, Tolstoi denied any form of personal resurrection after physical death. When Ivan gives the completed action “It's all over” a more specific referent, changing it to “Death is over; it is no more,” he is giving expression to his predeath “resurrection.” Death is now a meaningless concept to him, for he has been born, in fact, into a new comprehension of life. Tolstoi has mapped out a new area for the application of the terms “life,” “death,” and “rebirth.” Ivan's banishment of death and his rebirth are derived from his newly discovered religion; and in this new relationship (to Tolstoi, religion is one's relationship to the universe), he finds himself in harmony with the law of life, expressed as love and compassion for one's fellow human beings.

Death is a concept appropriate to the corporeal and the material sides of existence. It has no relevance to one who lives by the spirit. Tolstoi's new usage, translated into the old terminology, is that the rule of death over Ivan's life has been overthrown so that physical demands, including everything determined by or defined with concepts of space and time, no longer has any power.³⁰ His “rebirth” inheres in his new view. Convincingly orchestrating this rebirth required the use of an array of sophisticated artistic devices.

Knowing well the powers of art, Tolstoi used them to make his new picture of life, rebirth, and death convincing. Within the story's complex structure, there is a fascinating interplay of verbal elements that belies the usual claims made about Tolstoi's stylistic transparency and directness. We have already seen how he has manipulated conventional religious terminology to serve his purposes. If the music of Beethoven could lead to adultery and violence (The Kreutzer Sonata), then surely art's persuasive power could be utilized as a force for the good. His task was to put this power in the service of a higher moral purpose.

The devices he implemented in his moral strategy took a variety of forms. We have seen how he put the end of the story in the first chapter, how he suggested some of the major themes in the story through the perceptions of Peter Ivanovich, how he manipulated imagery (of the black sack, for example) to expand the meaning of Ivan's rebirth. In addition, phrases with one meaning in Ivan's early life—he was described as the “phoenix” of the family, and he received a medallion inscribed “Respice finem”—took on a deeper, ironic, meaning at the end of his life.

One of the most effective of Tolstoi's utilizations of language was his exploitation of the grammatical fact that the words for “pain” and “death” are both feminine and thus share the same pronoun (“ona”). Interweaving linguistic and psychological phenomena, he linked both words in Ivan's consciousness by their common pronoun (“it” in English) and used its indefinite referentiality to suggest the indefinite but paralyzing horror and fear Ivan experienced. Moreover, the interconnection of pain and death suggested an identical provenance, their common derivation from the same order or realm—the physical, the realm from which Ivan would eventually free himself. The preestablished connection of pain and death facilitated the natural turn from pain to death at the end of the story; both pain and death are by this time meaningless to Ivan, no longer oppressing him. And ironically, the victory over pain and death is a victory for “life,” also a feminine noun.

Other key words linked both thematically and linguistically are “light” and “death.” Thematically associated with the bottom of the black sack, “light” (“svet”) is also the word for “world”—a meaning that connects Ivan's seeing the light with his coming into the world (i.e., being born). The expression “that world” (“tot svet”) in Russian connotes a world beyond death, which in Tolstoi's philosophy means a life not in heaven but one lived on earth in accordance with God's plan. It is this life, which Ivan realizes he is now living, which moves Ivan to exclaim “What joy!”

The narrative account of Ivan's life had opened (chapter 2) with a statement from the narrator about Ivan's life being “most simple, ordinary, and horrible”: “Proshedshaia istoriia zhizni Ivana Il'icha byla samaia prostaia i obyknovennaia i samaia uzhasnaia” (26:68). We discover in these simple, profound words that it was simple in the wrong way. His way of living was not right; for it was anchored in society's values, in the pleasant and the proper. And near death, he discovers that the right way to live is really very simple (though his reorientation was difficult). The right way entails pity, compassion, and living for others. Key words are again associated by sound texture, mostly by initial consonant clusters; and their linguistic connection underlines their ironic relationship: “priiatno,” “prilichno” or “prilichie,” and “prostaia” (“it is pleasant,” “it is proper” or “properness,” “simple”) all lead, by way of “provalilsia,” “prokralsia,” “prosti,” “propusti,” and finally “puskai” (“fell,” “stole into,” “forgive,” “let pass,” and “allow”) to Ivan's realization. Stylistic and structural devices all work harmoniously to present the moral message.³¹

Tolstoi's use of the devices listed above can be approached from several perspectives. His linguistic play with prefix, pronoun, and metaphor is surely related to his plan of undercutting civilized, conventional life in society, with its ossified and complacent evasions, its card games and empty posturing designed to conceal authentic life. Tolstoi leads readers to look at this reality in new ways, to understand simple expressions like “it's a pity” in terms of real compassion—to distrust language, for it represents society's power to conceal authentic values. He dethrones language in its conventional forms through Ivan, who rejects it in favor of acting, or fails to say what he means, and who ultimately creates new meanings out of conventional terms. Compassion, pain, life, and death are revalued, uprooted from comfortable points of reference in the world of the pleasant and the proper.

Language is a sphere of power to Tolstoi; and he will use it, turn it inside out, and create his own moral order and world (which he will call the real world). Tracing Christianity along its own fault lines with an iconoclastic severity, he will tear it from the hands of clerics and the grips of mystery and miracle, and embed it in an overarching philosophy more compatible with his own moral and metaphysical longings. His iconoclasm comes to a head in his reversal of customary distinctions and cherished dogmas: life, death, rebirth and resurrection. Challenging the conventional connections between signifier and signified, exposing the flimsy basis of his society's linguistic and perceptual frames, he offers a new philosophy of life which he thinks captures the way things really are. In his quest for what is primary he never doubted that it existed, that there was an origin brimming with moral purity. Tolstoi took what people considered primary and made it secondary, derivative, and morally suspect. He revised, rephrased, and reformulated Christian dogma, using its semiotic system but altering most of its signifieds on the basis of empirically grounded common sense. What resulted, beyond his own apostasy, was a religion focused on this world, on actions and behavior.

Despite Tolstoi's insistent claims that his philosophy was in conformity with the demands of reason, the source of the good remained something vaguely mystical, a God within to which one must yield, an originary principle of love carrying overtones of Schopenhauer, Eastern religions, and mystical Christianity.³² This suprapersonal foundation (which Tolstoi did not find in conflict with reason) supported a very practical moral edifice. Loving one another, having compassion, giving of oneself for others—all this is eminently moral, and all this is possible in our everyday world. His philosophy of life is testable, for the consequences of perceiving the world the way he wants us to are observable in our behavior and authenticated in our personal experience.

If we want a reading of the story that coheres with what we know of the author and with other works by the author, then it is obviously necessary to consider Tolstoi's religious views, as he expressed them in a wide variety of writings from the late 1870s until his death in 1910. Striving for this kind of coherence does not, of course, amount to denying the significance of other frames of reference on other levels; thus an account of the story that examines it from a hermeneutic Heidegerrian perspective can be fascinating and illuminating,³³ even if such an approach carries with it concepts, assumptions, and terms quite unfamiliar to Tolstoi. Interpretations, of whatever cast, attain scope and power on the basis of what they do with whatever the text provides. Even moral-religious readings of a conventional sort can achieve a surface plausibility. But these sorts of readings, which run the usual risks associated with vague religious terminology and controversial theological conceptions, also come up against an even more formidable problem: it is hard to justify a reading based on notions we know the author inveighed against so persistently and vehemently for more than thirty years. One is then in the curious position of having to demonstrate that Tolstoi was an Orthodox Christian despite himself, and that, as V. V. Zenkovsky³⁴ maintains, he actually believed in the divinity of Christ and the truth of the Church and its sacraments.

But not all were willing to save Tolstoi for Christianity. The writer Vladimir Korolenko moved to the opposite position (which was equally unsatisfying), considering Tolstoi an atheist and Antichrist who concealed himself in religious rhetoric.³⁵ As George Kline observed, Tolstoi's radical reformulation of religious conceptions was bound to provoke opposition; and his habit of referring to his concordance and translation of the Gospels as “his” Gospels could only infuriate those steeped in the traditions of reverence for Holy Writ. Also infuriating was the apparent simplicity of Tolstoi's religion (Ivan says, “How good and how simple!”): Lev Shestov saw in this simplicity a potential compatibility with atheism, and Nikolai Berdiaev complained that there was no mystery, only rules.³⁶ What is missing in the vast literature concerned with The Death of Ivan Il'ich is a satisfactory reading in Tolstoyan terms, a reading that relates the work to the philosophical and religious issues he was struggling with in years following his “conversion.”

Although they were expressed in different ways in his essays, letters, and fiction, Tolstoi's ideas about the “right way of life” remained much the same from the 1880s on. His work in this period, in particular his translation and exegesis of the Gospels, clearly presents his religious views. Especially rewarding for our purposes is his discussion and translation of chapters of John (14-16) that relate Christ's final discourse (24:734-37) and his commentary on Christ's final hours and the meaning of his death (24:790-98).

Tolstoi's religious views rest on a distinction between carnal and spiritual life. Taking cues from the Bible, but always with a care to avoid its “mystifications,” he emphasizes the filial relation between God (the Father) and people. Those who fulfill God's basic teaching to love one another manifest the presence of God within them. “Life” is to be found in the proper understanding (he uses the term “comprehension”) of God's teaching and the filial relationship between God and people. A person who has comprehension lives spiritually, somehow beyond the limits and demands of physical existence. Life in this exalted spiritual sense cannot come to an end the way physical life does; for death, as well as our concepts of space and time, have no power over the spirit. Thus Christ, like Ivan, has no fear of death; both have the right notion of life. And Christ's teaching of love and sacrifice of one's life for another, which he expressed in the Sermon on the Mount, should be obeyed not as slaves blindly obey a master but as free people who understand what the meaning of life is.

Tolstoi underlines the primacy of love,³⁷ which is the source of life. It is God's plan that we love one another and act in behalf of the good. No one can know God, but people can nonetheless discover that love is the identifying mark of authentic life. People with the customary “comprehension” or understanding of life avoid pain and suffering and fear death as something alien, a violence from the outside. Death and suffering as they are customarily understood appear pointless and unfair, threatening, as they do, our very being and our right to exist. Ivan passes through the stage in which he deeply feels the injustice of his suffering, the unfairness of his dying when he has done nothing wrong. Only when he rejects this legalistic concept of life and death (a concept that exercises considerable control over Elena Stakhova in On the Eve) with its notion of unfair and incommensurate suffering, does he conquer the power of this suffering and his fear of death.³⁸

Tolstoi opposes to the customary view of life one that he ascribes to Christ. This view does not focus on justifying or accounting for death, endeavors that preoccupy conventional Christianity and all religions that promise that something better than present-day life will be given to people after they die. Tolstoi's focus is rather on the positive qualities of life, of which the most positive is the potential to love. This potential exists in everyone, but not all recognize it. If people would recognize love in themselves and yield to its power, “unite” with it, they would have no need to be concerned with death. Life is a gift, it is not “naturally” given, nor is it something people are in any way entitled to; it is given for a purpose, associated with love and goodness, which Tolstoi believes he has discovered. Individuals do not and cannot have eternal life in any personal sense. Death and suffering are problems only to those who do not realize that life itself is an extraordinary gift of love.

Tolstoi's support for his view is borne, if not by logic and philosophical rigor, by the energy of his conviction and the comforting force of his terminology. His unconventional definitions of familiar terms map out a fairly familiar world: it is obvious that here in his religious writing as in his story he is building on the familiar only to mold it to a shape of his making, which he hopes will capitivate readers. He argues that we should see our lives as something precious given to us by a higher power for a purpose that we can discover by using our reason. If we adopt his picture of life, a gift that raised us out of nothingness, we will not complain of the cruelty and unfairness of death. Ivan's horrible suffering before he realized the “truth” should not be understood as punishment for having lived the wrong way; the reward-punishment model is not appropriate for assessing the way one lives. Ivan's initial pain and fear of death are merely indications that he has not had the “right” view, not punishment for having the “wrong” one.

Ivan's joy before his death is, ultimately, the product of a chain of realizations, all deriving from a newly found sense of compassion. The transformation of grief into joy reflects an analogy used by Christ speaking to his disciples (in Tolstoi's version of the Gospels):

When I am no longer in the carnal life, my spirit will be with you. But you are like all people and will not always feel the strength of this spirit in yourselves. Sometimes you will weaken and lose this strength of spirit, and you will fall into temptation, and sometimes you will again awaken into true life. Hours of enslavement of the flesh will overcome you, but this will only be temporary; suffer and be born again in spirit, as a woman suffers in the pains of birth and then feels joy that she has brought a man into the world; you will experience the same when you, after enslavement of the flesh, rise up in spirit: you will feel then such bliss that there will be nothing left for you to desire.

(24:753)

The metaphor of sorrow passing into a joyful birth is obviously relevant to Ivan's experience. After much inner struggle Ivan rejected the customary comprehension of life—he let go of it—and he no longer conceived of life as avoidance of the unpleasant. He was eventually given or led to the “right” direction by his son's gesture of pity and love. He felt the good as having a powerful source, love; and he “united” with this source. In giving himself up to it, he vanquished death's grip, together with all the power of the earthly and the physical. Just as the woman gave birth after labor, Ivan labored and was reborn.

The key to moral behavior is first attaining “comprehension” and then yielding to the force of love it discloses (24:737); when one yields totally, one's actions are good because they flow spontaneously from a divine source within and are not the products of abstract reflection and deliberation. The polarities Tolstoi established, which he elaborated in his later essay, “On Life” (1886-1887), placed truth, life, and submission to a higher force at one end of the axis and the physical, animal, and personal life at the other (26:363-66). Again and again until the end of his life he would demand if not the “renunciation” of personality, its submission to a higher consciousness authenticated by reason (26:375-82).

Ivan's life and death are a vivid illustration of the lessons of love, self-sacrifice, and submission to “the God within”—lessons Tolstoi elaborated on in his exegetical writings and essays. Acting in accordance with God's plan means acting compassionately as the thief next to Christ did in Tolstoi's account of the crucifixion: “The thief had pity on Jesus, and this feeling of pity was a manifestation of life, and Jesus said to him: you are alive” (24:781). Authentic life, pity, and love are all intertwined. Right actions can be explained by reference to God's divine plan. God's plan stipulates our helping to realize divine goals, and helping in this way yields great joy.

The fundamental beliefs of other religions point to the same divine plan. To Tolstoi, the truths of other religions helped to prove that Christ's example was indeed a divine exemplification of the plan, not that Christ was a divinity. Using his empirical sensibility and his findings in the study of other religions, Tolstoi excised what he took to be irrelevancies and superstitions in Christian dogma. Above all, he appealed to common sense and reason, thereby undercutting the basic objection to moral theories based on revelation.

Though Tolstoi had no use for religion as an incentive for doing what is right—a system that is ultimately a form of egoism—he nonetheless utilized religion and religious example as well as the concept of a divine plan in establishing a foundation for his own moral theory. He found necessary a divine, nonhuman basis for his theory of right and wrong; for Tolstoi, God and his plan were concepts consistent with reason.

Faintly perceptible in Ivan's final hours are features of a conventional Christian conversion.³⁹ Tolstoi follows the outlines of the traditional Christian final rite, but he gives it a new content based on his own religious and moral views. Ivan recognizes what has been wrong in his past life and chooses to act differently. Instead of a priest, there is his son showing compassion. Instead of verbal refrains and incantations, there are compassionate actions. Instead of asking for forgiveness, Ivan asks to “pass through,” And instead of being guided through a time of terror, Ivan touches his son, in a gesture of authentic compassion.

By now it is clear why it is misleading to say Ivan, after his accident, becomes conscious of his sinful ways, becomes contrite, finds redemption through God's grace and the example of Jesus Christ, and ultimately finds salvation. This would be the interpretation of conventional Christianity, which Tolstoi explicitly rejected in favor of his own religious views. The Christian framework can be imposed only with great difficulty, for there is no mention of Christ, sin, contrition, grace, and redemption; in fact the role of the Christian church (represented by the priest who comes to see Ivan) is hardly flattering: the Church's aid to Ivan is ineffective, and its role in the story remains insignificant.⁴⁰ Finally, it is doubtful whether any kind of conventional Christian interpretation can be made without ignoring or distorting not only Tolstoi's views as expressed in his essays but also, and more importantly, passages in the text.

The problem is that the story's religious suggestiveness—its numerological references, its biblical terminology, its references to a voice above Ivan, its use of names (Peter Ivanovich as well as Ivan Il'ich—John, son of Elijah), its parallels with the story of Christ (including peripheral parallels such as the “son” bringing the message of true life, the “son” as one of the “thieves,” and the filial nature of compassion)—all this lends itself easily to “Christian” readings. But, as indicated above, Tolstoi uses the religious suggestiveness to enhance the seriousness of his statement and at the same time subtly to divert conventional views into new channels.

Although it is undeniably true that there are indirect allusions to Christ, they are deeply embedded, pointing to ironies that are far from obvious. Part of the subtext is readily apparent: both Christ and Ivan are condemned to death, both are in the hands of executioners, both suffer three days of torment (and wounds in their side), both experience a “resurrection,” both exemplify their love by willingly yielding up their lives, and both conquer death.⁴¹ Beyond the obvious is the parallel filial relationship: Ivan's early apostrophe to God (chapter 9): “Why do you torment me?” (which echoes Matthew 27:46, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”); Ivan's attempt to say “Forgive [me]”; and the expression from above, “It's all over!” (“Koncheno!” in both the story and Tolstoi's translation of the Gospels).

The surface similarities may be misleading, however. In his translation of the Gospels (24:781) Tolstoi renders the verses from Matthew as “My God, my God, in what hast Thou left me?” (which he elucidated in a note as “in what, in what kind of exhausted body have you held my spirit?”) and thus changes a complaint to a query suggestive of the spirit-flesh dualism he comprehends. Ivan, however, is made to echo traditional translations of Matthew in his words. But in what actually happened to him—his feeling of being in a black sack—it is Tolstoi's version of Christ's words that wins, in appropriateness, in the end. Finally, Ivan's slip of the tongue, with its emphasis on passing through rather than seeking forgivenesss, indicates the presence of something more powerful beneath the surface, a more authentic kind of “religion,” a force acting upon the individual's psyche and carrying him away with it.

But the most striking deviation of all from conventional Christianity is the concept of rebirth or resurrection. To Tolstoi there is no personal life after death, and both Christ and Ivan prosaically illustrate this fact. Ivan may have said that death is finished, but the narrator had the last word: “he stretched out and died.” Nothing could be more alien to Tolstoi's concept of morality than the notion that virtue will be rewarded in heaven with eternal life and vice punished in hell. Once again, Tolstoi disputes the picture of justice as fairness, as a strict balancing of actions with their appropriate rewards and punishments:

Perhaps it is fairer to suppose that awaiting a person after this worldly life lived in the exercise of personal will is an eternal personal life in heaven with all kinds of joys; perhaps this is fairer, but to think that this is so, to try to believe that for good deeds I will be rewarded with eternal bliss, and for bad deeds, eternal torments—to think this way does not contribute to our understanding of the teaching of Christ; to think this way means, on the contrary, to deprive Christ's teaching of its main support. All Christ's teaching promotes this goal: that his disciples, after understanding the illusoriness of personal life, will renounce it and convert it into the life of all humanity, the son of man [“syna chelovecheskogo”]. The doctrine of the immortality of the personal soul, however, does not urge us to renounce our own personal life but affirms personality forever.

According to the Jews, Chinese, Hindus, and all peoples of the world who do not believe in the dogma of the fall of man and his redemption, life is life as it is. People live, copulate, have children, raise them, grow old, and die. Children grow and continue the life of their parents which uninterruptedly leads from generation to generations exactly like everything in the existing world; stones, the earth, metals, plants, animals, stars, and everything in the world. Life is life, and we must use it as best as we can.

(26:398-99)⁴²

Immortality is impersonal, a spiritual potential dwelling in people, sometimes referred to as “truth” or the “spirit of truth” by Tolstoi. Christ “saved” people only by illustrating with his life the power and truth of his message: there is no fear when one is in the power of the good, when God's plan is manifested through one's being. Thus the peasant servant, Gerasim, has no fear of death and no fear or discomfort in dealing with someone who is dying. In contrast to people around Ivan, he accepts pain and dirt as a matter of course. Healthy, strong, uncomplaining, and brimming with vitality, he casually accepts the most disagreeable functions in helping Ivan through his final days. Like a parent caring for a baby, he does not judge Ivan but only serves him, easing his final days. Gerasim is an illustration of the positive ideal—someone living totally, and unconsciously, the “right” way.

There is an extraordinary spirit of defiance—of the conventional, of traditional authority—in Tolstoi's moral elevation not only of a peasant, but of an ordinary man like Ivan, whose banal, venal, and shallow life leads to a Christ-like revelation and death. The conventional Christian perspective is not Tolstoi's, and it is hardly plausible in this story. Even though other kinds of readings are possible,⁴³ religious and moral interpretations have dominated critical discussion. And these interpretations, insofar as they adhere to conventional religious and moral categories, have been misleading, often relating only superficially to the text.

The tale makes concrete and personal what Tolstoi's moral and social commentaries exposit, expand upon, and generalize. In their generalizing role, his essays elaborate on and thereby enhance the significance of Tolstoi's personal experiences; art also enhances this significance, and it does so by means of the feelings it generates. But feelings too can be interpreted and experienced in various ways. Tolstoi left the task of generalizing the personal to his readers, who read with their own frames of reference, through their own religious and philosophical glasses. Their feelings too were affected by their presuppositions; emotions generated and communicated are also part of a context that depends on interpretation, on what is brought to the text by the reader. Tolstoi relied on the power of the example he was giving to convey the appropriate moral truth—but more importantly to lay the rails for the proper emotional responses to questions about the meaning of life. These emotional responses, however, have varied widely.

The very demands of fiction, and especially moral fiction (which must be alert to heavy-handedness and overly specific reliance on special doctrines), conditioned the open texture of the story. The danger of the open texture of the moral example is that it can yield multiple and diverse readings that may fail to do what Tolstoi wanted. He may have underestimated the ability of people to mold and distort what is alien and discomforting. On the positive side, the story's enduring value may very well reside in its broad suggestiveness, in its insights into predeath experience—characterized by Tolstoi as including a rejection of materialism, loss of fear for death, an absence of pain, and a feeling that one is moving toward the light—whatever the specific nature of the philosophy of life projected through Ivan.⁴⁴

Tolstoi believed that the artist's responsibility was to promote feelings that would bring people together and make them recognize that love and compassion are reasonable, that they function as the source of what is good in life. To convince people of the power of these emotions and the benefits of yielding to the tremendous impersonal source within that nurtures them, he presents a vivid example of how an ordinary man can emerge victorious in a confrontation with death. In a contest that mortals can never win, the only option is to yield to the very forces aligned with death; by reevaluating what has seemed negative as now positive, one can salvage a victory. Whether or not Tolstoi's efforts were mere wishful thinking or self-delusion, his attempt to change the rules of the game left its lasting imprint: The Death of Ivan Il'ich continues to be vital to generation after generation, its moral revelations from a man on the edge of death serving as a seemingly never-ending source of provocative readings.

Notes

1. John Gardner, who praised the moral energy and commitment of Tolstoi's art, was a notable exception; see his “Death by Art; or, ‘Some Men Kill You with a Six-Gun, Some Men with a Pen,’” in Critical Inquiry 3:4 (1977): 741-71.

2. “What Is Religion and in What Is Its Essence?”, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: 1928-1958), 35:187-88. All textual citations refer to this ninety-volume Jubilee edition; translations are my own, except where otherwise noted.

3. The topic of Tolstoi's religious views in his later years deserves special study. As might be expected, his unorthodox thinking has generated considerable discussion and controversy. For a general account of how Russian philosophers have regarded Tolstoi's views, see George L. Kline, Religious and Anti-Religious Thought in Russia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 28-34; also see V. V. Zenkovsky, A History of Russian Philosophy, trans. George L. Kline, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), 392-96. George Steiner, in his Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 249-68, offers a fascinating discussion of the principal features of Tolstoi's religious philosophy; he focuses on Tolstoi's anti-Platonistic view of the kingdom of God, Tolstoi's attack on the theodicy of compensation, Tolstoi's chiliasm, his view of God as “enclosed” in man, and his concept of Christ as a man.

4. Edward Wasiolek, Tolstoy's Major Fiction (University of Chicago Press, 1978), 109-12, 168-69, 199. Tolstoy has many characters in his fiction whose self-denial and self-sacrifice are not virtues but empty abstractions impoverishing their lives. Tolstoy's model is an “individualism” characterized by “at-one-ness with one's being and the sensuous flow about one” (178).

5. In recent years readings have appeared that are more or less consistent with Christianity in its conventional forms. James Olney, for example, in his “Experience, Metaphor, and Meaning: The Death of Ivan Ilych,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 31 (1972): 101-14, emphasizes the power of Christ's example and the concepts of atonement, redemption, and grace (112); Olney's reading, complete with quotations from the Vulgate, molds the story into an acceptable Roman Catholic text. Robert Duncan adduces significant biblical allusions in the text to build a case for the centrality of repentance and faith in God as conventionally conceived: “Ivan Ilych's Death: Secular or Religious?”, University of Dayton Review 15 (1981): 99-106.

6. Wasiolek explores the basic assumptions of Tolstoi's narrative style in efforts to exonerate Tolstoi from the charge of being overbearing in “Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych and Jamesian Fictional Imperatives,” Modern Fiction Studies 6 (1960): 314-24 (reprinted in revised form in Tolstoy: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ralph E. Matlaw [Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1967], 146-56).

7. The quoted text ends by pointing up the difference between persuading by logical demonstration and by artistic presentation: “And universal art, by uniting the most different people in one common feeling by destroying separation, will educate people to union and will show them, not by reason but by life itself, the joy of universal union reaching beyond the bounds set by life” (What Is Art? and Essays on Art, trans. Aylmer Maude [New York: Oxford University Press, 1962], 288).

8. The powerful effect of Tolstoi's imagery is examined by C. J. G. Turner, “The Language of Fiction: Word Clusters in Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” Modern Language Review 65 (1970): 116-21; also see Robert Russell, “From Individual to Universal: Tolstoy's ‘Smert' Ivana Il'icha,’” Modern Language Review 76 (1981): 631.

9. See Gary R. Jahn, 231-33, in “The Role of the Ending in Lev Tolstoi's The Death of Ivan Il'ich,” Canadian Slavonic Papers (September, 1982): 229-38.

10. Mythic connections of the story with the stories of Job, Orestes and the Eumenides, and Satan are suggested by William V. Spanos, “Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych: A Temporal Interpretation,” in De-structing the Novel: Essays in Applied Postmodern Hermeneutics (Troy, N. Y.: Whitston Publishing, 1982), 1-64; see esp. 6.

11. See, e.g., Gary R. Jahn, “The Death of Ivan Il'ič—Chapter One,” in Studies in Honor of Xenia Gąasiorowska (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica Publishers, 1983), 37-43; also see Russell, 630-32; and Wasiolek (1978), 171.

12. L. P. Grossman, “Smert' Ivana Il'icha,” 26: 679-91; text of the story, 26:61-113. For a history of the writing and a discussion of textual changes in successive editions, see L. D. Opul'skaia, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi: Materialy k biografii c 1886 po 1892 god (Moscow: Nauka, 1979), 7-16.

13. William B. Edgerton, “Tolstoy, Immortality, and Twentieth-Century Physics,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 21 (1979): 293.

14. Mark Aldanov noted that Tolstoi first strove to “frighten the reader with death and then to reconcile him to it”; see his Zagadka Tolstogo (1923 Berlin; Providence, R.I.: Brown University Reprints, 1969), 60.

15. The importance of expressions referring to “pity” in the ideological fabric of the story is discussed by Russell, 631-32.

16. Thus I disagree with Spanos's pessimistic conclusion about the effects of Ivan's death on others: “What we discover—and are disturbed by—is that, despite the unspeakably terrible experience one of them has suffered, this ‘community’ has understood virtually nothing about it” (34).

    Conclusions about Ivan's redemption also seem questionable: “Ivan, that is, has redeemed his life, but he has died a terribly lonely, as well as painful, death. Unlike the Christ he imitates, his crucifixion has not redeemed the world” (34). I argue that Ivan's death is neither “lonely” nor “painful” and is, in Tolstoi's view, probably much like Christ's in its potential effectiveness.

17. Several efforts have been made to approach Ivan's death with a perspective derived from Elizabeth Kübler-Ross's On Death and Dying (New York: Macmillan, 1969). It has been argued that Ivan's decline for the most part follows the pattern of denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and acceptance, with a final depersonalization and step-by-step withdrawal from the physical world (“decathexis”). According to Kübler-Ross, reaching this final stage marks a healthy and normal detachment—one achieved only by patients who have worked through their dying (170). Ivan's final joy may mark a departure from the norm, however; usually the acceptance stage is totally devoid of feelings (113), though moments of emotion may precede it.

    For discussions using a thanatological perspective, see Y. J. Dayanada, “The Death of Ivan Ilych: A Psychological Study on Death and Dying,” Literature and Psychology 22 (1972): 191-98; Walter Smyrniw, “Tolstoy's Depiction of Death in the Context of Recent Studies of the ‘Experience of Dying,’” Canadian Slavonic Papers 21 (1979): 367-79; H. L. Cate, “On Death and Dying in Tolstoy's ‘The Death of Ivan Ilych,’” Hartford Studies in Literature 7 (1975): 195-205.

18. Kübler-Ross comments on the relationship of dying to early childhood experiences (112, 120). The complicated interconnections between deathbed regressions to childhood, feelings of rebirth, and immortality wish-formation recognized by psychoanalysis can easily be related to Ivan's story. For a discussion from a psychoanalytic perspective of experiences associated with dying and the feeling of rebirth, see Richard S. Blacher, “Death, Resurrection, and Rebirth: Observations in Cardiac Surgery,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 52 (1983): 56-72; G. H. Pollock, “On Mourning, Immortality, and Utopia,” Journal of American Psychoanalytical Association 23 (1975): 334-62. The connections of death and rebirth from a religious perspective are discussed by Duncan, 103-4.

19. Spanos, 38-48, gives a perspective discussion of Ivan's replacement of one kind of language (his society's) by another, more authentic kind; language serves as a measure of the quality of Ivan's life: the more he rejects “public” language, the closer he comes to experiencing “the thing itself.” While some may not agree with Spanos's ontological presuppositions and concerns, it is difficult to disagree with his perceptive observations on the relationship of various “languages” in the text.

20. As Kübler-Ross notes, “the harder they struggle to avoid the inevitable death, the more they try to deny it, the more difficult it will be for them to reach this final stage of acceptance with peace and dignity” (114).

21. Without denying the symbolic value of the black bag as womb or intestine, it is also possible to associate it with Ivan's ailment, as it was explained to him by doctors. Freud, in his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966) cites an 1861 study by K. A. Scherner which linked dreams with illness: “dreams seek above all to represent the organ that sends out the stimulus by objects resembling it” (95, 479). Also see Boris Sorokin's discussion of the image of the black sack in “Ivan Il'yich as Jonah: A Cruel Joke,” Canadian Slavic Studies 5 (1971): 487-501, 503-4.

22. W. R. Hirschberg gives a concise and convincing demonstration of how the image of the womb makes for a coherent and reasonable reading: “Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilich,” Explicator 28, item 26 (1969). The link with excretion is discussed by Sorokin (see n. 19); Spanos too (20-28) refers to the theme of excretion, although he does not mention the black sack in this regard.

    For Schopenhauer, whose works Tolstoi was familiar with, death is a natural part of the ongoing process of creation and destruction and does not differ in kind from excretion, which is also part of the process of creation and destruction within the body; something inessential is lost in both cases:

    The process of nourishing is a constant reproduction; the process of reproduction is a higher power of nourishing. The pleasure which accompanies the act of procreation is a higher power of the agreeableness of the sense of life. On the other hand, excretion, the constant exhalation and throwing off of matter, is the same as that which, at a higher power, death, is the contrary of generation. And if here we are always content to retain the form without lamenting the discarded matter, we ought to bear ourselves in the same way if in death the same thing happens, in a higher degree and to the whole, as takes place daily and hourly in a partial manner in excretion: if we are indifferent to the one, we ought not to shrink from the other.

    (The World as Will and Idea, trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1883], 357)

    Tolstoi's affinities with Schopenhauer are well known; especially relevant are his philosophical impersonalism (the moral order is attained by giving up the personal self), his emphasis on compassion and on denying the will to live, and his unconventional concepts of death and immortality; see Sigrid McLaughlin, “Some Aspects of Tolstoy's Intellectural Development: Tolstoy and Schopenhauer,” California Slavonic Studies 5 (1970), 187-245, esp. 233; also Zenkovsky, 391-92.

23. Jahn (1982) points out how Tolstoi had used a similar metaphor of disorientation in describing his own conversion (in “What I Believe,” cited on 232):

    It happened to me as it happens to a man who goes out on some business and on the way suddenly decides that the business is unnecessary and returns home. All that was on his right is now on his left, and all that was on his left is now on his right; his former wish to get as far as possible from home has changed into a wish to be as near as possible to it. The direction of my life and desires became different, and good and evil changed places.

24. Tolstoi is promoting here an ethics of care, one that is “relational,” emphasizing the universal need for compassion and care; see Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 73, 98. This is the positive side of the socio-moral program suggested in the story—a side Spanos's “ontological” perspective underplays (34).

25. Duncan, 104, draws attention to the Christian parallel: Jesus said children and servants are ranked high in the kingdom of God (Matthew 18: 3-4; Mark 10: 14-16, 44-45). Ivan's final contact with Vasia, as well as his recollections of his own youth, underlines the theme of “innocent childhood” and suggests a biographical and subtextual dimension; see David Matual, “The Confession as a Subtext in The Death of Ivan Il'ich,” International Fiction Studies 8 (1981): 25, 124-28.

26. Duncan and Jahn, for example, have conclusively demonstrated a biblical subtext, but how it relates to the story is still problematic.

27. Although it is true that Ivan's conversion does not have lasting results with respect to Praskov'ia, who continues to be caught up in the style of life of her class, for Vasia there is still hope: his father's conversion corresponds with the boy's incipient adolescence (the dark circles under his eyes are usually taken by critics to mean that he has begun to masturbate), and it was at approximately this age when his father first came under the corrupting influence of society. The force of Ivan's example, together with the boy's yet untainted sincerity and compassion, offer the only protection from the coercive pressure and mendacity that invariably accompany life led according to the pleasure principle. His father's rebirth and death serve as a rite of initiation as the boy enters the adult world. Thus it is not so clear that Ivan's death was a total failure as far as its effects on others are concerned; it has had an effect on Vasia, as well as on Peter Ivanovich: it indicates the “right” way, and now it is up to them to act on what they have learned.

28. Here critics part ways, depending on the significance they give to the power of the unconscious; most give prominence to Ivan's intention, not what he said, since it is a traditional request for forgiveness and suggests repentance (contrition) of a conventional sort. Hirschberg (and I) find a deeper meaning in Ivan's slip of the tongue: he is falling under the control of positive inner forces that will eventually direct him into the light. This reading has the advantage of coherence with what subsequently happens to Ivan, his passage from darkness into light: the expression “propusti” suggests that death will be a “transition” (see Edgerton, 298).

29. In his theological writing, Tolstoi emphasized not Christ as a savior, but as a man who lived and died in exemplary fashion. It is evil to strive for personal gain and pleasure, and the meaning of life will never be discovered by those who do. Living for others is the key to fulfillment and immortality. By showing compassion and by loving others one adds “something to the life and the salvation of others,” and this loving spirit lives on in others long after one's own physical death. Tolstoi accumulates numerous examples of how organized Christianity has perverted Christ's simple and eminently practical message of love for one's neighbors and salvation through this love; salvation is not eternal and personal salvation (in a heavenly paradise) but liberation from lies and deceptions. It is also joy now on earth. Christ was not teaching salvation by faith or asceticism (which Tolstoi respectively labels “salvation by deceit of the imagination” and “by voluntary tortures in this life”); rather, he taught a way of life that would give people less suffering and more joy by saving them from the pain of a personal life (“V chem moia vera,” 1882-1884, 23:401-2).

30. True life is beyond concerns of the flesh, beyond the limits of space and time; see “On Life” (“O zhizni”), 26:401-9.

31. The structural properties of the story, including its temporal development, have been examined in great detail by Jahn (1982); Gunter Schaarschmidt, “Theme and Discourse Structure in The Death of Ivan Il'ich,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 21 (1979): 356-66; Irving Halperin, “The Structural Integrity of The Death of Ivan Il'ič,” Slavic and East European Journal 5 (1961): 334-40; and Spanos, 8-35, who focuses on the temporal dimension.

32. See, for example, discussions by Edgerton, McLaughlin, and Zenkovsky.

33. See Spanos.

34. Zenkovsky, 394.

35. Cited in Edgerton, 293.

36. Kline, 28-29, 33.

37. Temira Pachmuss, “The Theme of Love and Death in Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych,” American Slavic and East European Review 20 (1961): 72-83.

38. Part of what makes Ivan's suffering seem so incommensurate with his sins is the assumption that the world is basically just and that life is fair. Tolstoi rejected this notion, replacing it with another: suffering does not vary with the quality of one's life; it is always there, sometimes very intense and sometimes less so. It can be minimized only by adopting the right attitude toward life (Tolstoi's comprehension). Adopting an alternative picture not dependent on our sense of balance and fairness is a tactic adopted by twentieth-century thinkers as well; for examples, see D. Z. Phillips, Death and Immortality (London: Macmillan, 1970), 52-55.

39. The issue of whether the story is secular or religious usually arises at this point. Duncan, for example, adduces the numerous New Testament parallels and allusions, together with Ivan's final “revelation,” to prove that Tolstoi's vision is religious in the broad sense, and Christian besides. R. F. Christian, however, rejects the Christian conclusion (of Mirsky) that Ivan at the end “sees the inner light of Faith, renunciation, and love” and states that Ivan does not see at the bottom of the sack “God's love or immortality, but only a release from suffering” (Tolstoy: A Critical Introduction [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969], 237). Tolstoi thus, according to Christian, avoids a “facile ‘religious’ conclusion.” While it is clear that Tolstoi avoids the “facile” solution, it seems equally clear that there is much more than “release” at the bottom of the sack: for Ivan, besides the absence of pain, there are the feelings of having vanquished death and of intense joy.

40. Duncan reads this differently; it is not a failure of conventional religion, represented by the priest and the rite of confession, but of Ivan, who is still clinging to his sinful ways and not yet ready to receive confession (102). This explanation will seem unsatisfactory, I suspect, to anyone who has read Tolstoi's vitriolic response to his excommunication, particularly his discussion of Church sacraments (34:245).

41. See Duncan, 103-4, for a discussion in biblical terms of the significance of “three,” the connections between death and baptism, rebirth (the black sack as a “womb”), and Ivan's “change of mind,” which to Duncan represent “repentance.”

42. Tolstoi devoted considerable discussion to the matter of Christ's resurrection and “life after death” in the conclusion to his harmonization and translation of the Gospels (24:790-98); as might be expected, he was highly critical of conventional, and theologically official, understandings of this important part of Christian dogma.

43. Wasiolek (1978) suggests Marxist and psychoanalytic possibilities (169-70); also see his “Wanted: A New Contextualism,” Critical Inquiry 1 (1975): 623-39. For a Marxist analysis of the story, see B. Tarasov, “Analiz burzhuaznogo soznaniia v povesti L. N. Tolstogo, ‘Smert’ Ivana Il'icha,”’ Voprosy literatury 3 (1982): 156-76. This approach seems particularly suitable for analyzing what was wrong with Ivan's life, viz., the constant flight from the facts of existence, such as birth, death, and love (171-72).

44. See Kenneth Ring, Life at Death: A Scientific Investigation of the Near-Death Experience (New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1980).