The Death of Ivan Illych by Leo Tolstoy

The Death of Ivan Illych by Leo Tolstoy is a short story that revolves around the life of a man, Ivan Illych, and his spiral towards death.

From his perspective, we see a wide-eyed man enamoured by life and the joys to be found in it. We see him carving a reasonable spot in society for himself, enjoying his life, until finally, he enters a loveless marriage to be more acceptable to society. Seeing the errors in his marriage, he becomes more devoted to his work and spends less time with his family. He has children, some die and some survive, and the darkness starts from here. Spats ensue, he spends less time with his family, he has to spend more on them, their budget grows tighter, he feels trapped but learns to manage it with decency and indifference and slowly his hatred for his wife grows.
Now all he cares about is money. He works to get money and improve his family’s living situation, is ecstatic about it for a while but soon the joy dissipates and he feels short again. He can never be satisfied at this point, but he learns to manage.

It is around this point that the result of his pursuit of wealth and royalty brings a darkness into his life. The bruise on his left side from the doorknob injury he sustained develops into an incurable disease. He grows more irritable and his quality of life deteriorates. The things he finds solace in only help to remind him of the illness and the days before it. He grows incapable to function, to escape the unhappiness and unrest his illness has brought him.

Later down the line, some time after his illness has fully developed and he grows hopeless with no escape or activities to pursue in his emaciated state, he secludes himself and begins to ponder on his life. Growing to hate everything about himself and his environment and the fake people that surrounded him, feigning sympathy in exchange for profit at his death, he doesn’t see any reason to live. He thinks back to his childhood and remembers what true happiness is. He grows to be disgusted by what he had been pursuing all his life. He thought he had been going up to pursue happiness but in truth was in a downward spiral. He had entered a loveless marriage and pursued money for what for 20 years. He grows despondent. He tries to pull himself out of his childhood thoughts, out of a past that could never again be attained or felt but is unable. He realizes that he had spent his life the wrong way but could not figure out what the right way to live was.

He sees his life as false and hates it even more. He loses faith in it and hates his family. But near the hour of death, his son weeping by his side reminded him that he could at least make amends for the ones he hurt, his wife and his son and tries to do just that. He tries to beg for forgiveness from those he had hurt by dragging them down with him into his misery. As he does this, his pain is alleviated, his mission complete. He is ready to accept death. He lets the light wash over him and goes willingly. He dies settled.

My main issue with this story is that it didn’t feel raw enough. I could understand the situations, the characters and the prose, but it wasn’t vivid enough, it felt lacking. It would be unfair but I really expected it to be on the level of Crime and Punishment but that might be too high a standard. All in all, I felt the prose to be dry and detached.

Also, I find it really hard to derive a message, a lesson perhaps from this story. That money, wealth and the pursuit of it results in a bitter death? That we shouldn’t pursue things for the sake of society but for our own happiness? I don’t know and I don’t think the story hit as hard as it should have at the end. Maybe I will understand when I am older.

Was it that, like his life, life is a deception, concealing both life and death from us. We keep living to keep the thought of death in the back of our minds. We don’t live up to our ideal, most fulfilling life because we don’t even know what that is. We do things in the present to prevent that regret from entering the forefront of our consciousness. We live life to pacify our minds. Ironically enough we live life to escape reality, to escape from truth that can’t be absolved and thoughts of death that scare us. We live life to escape the unknown, the unanswerable questions that scare us. We live in the moment to prevent this, this darkness creeping inside us knowing everything is not alright and we will never know why, knowing we will never understand why it is we do what we do and for who, but still living anyway, staving off the looming questions and trying not to live in fright of the vastness of our lack of acknowledgement, of the important things we don’t even know like why we exist and what really matters. And we will almost always be filled with regrets or questions at the end no matter how seemingly well we live it.