It is a mark of literary greatness that puts into question all you have come to believe to be true and indefensible, that injects doubt into your inscrutable self-assuredness and certainty, that rattles the comforts of self-affirmation and imagined identity. It is that “difficult pleasure”, remarked the American critic Harold Bloom, we find in great books.
Few books possess this mark. Because books, as we have been taught unwittingly, are supposed to be pleasurable, comfortable like pillows, tools of entertainment to while away our free time, as if we have so much time in this world.
Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) belongs to that minority. As the title suggests nothing of it is promising in terms of entertainment. To entertain is the last thing in Tolstoy’s mind. A story of a petty high-court provincial judge suddenly struck by an unknown illness who on his death bed realizes “that his life had not been what it should have been.” To a certain degree it is a violent book by its capacity to violate our expectations of reality, it disappoints our well-guarded view of life and what it deems important: career, family, “the things that preoccupied people in society and work – all of this might have been wrong.”
Leading up to the year of publication of The Death of Ivan Ilyich in 1886, tremendous events happened in Tolstoy’s life. The immense success of Anna Karenina in 1878 was followed by the death of three of his children, his conversion to the Russian Orthodox Church which eventually he would oppose with fervor, and an agonizing period of writer’s block – all led to a deeper, excruciating self-interrogatory quality in his late fiction.
Indeed, it is in Ivan Ilyich where Tolstoy is most insufferable for his harsh inquiry into the unexamined life, for his provocative speculations upon living, and for his severe aesthetic meditations on death.
The book has the expression of a “reproach,” “a reminder to the living,” as commented by one of Ivan’s colleagues upon seeing the dead man’s face in the coffin. The late writings of Tolstoy are characterized by this gesture of reproach, and in Ivan the reproach is about coming to terms with our physical death. The force of the reproach resides in our unwillingness to even welcome the idea of death; like Ivan we live refusing to know that such a thing will come to us until mordantly it does come to us, and we the readers are made to feel that “maybe I didn’t live as I should have done,” forcing a worm of self-analysis—“that dull nagging pain that never went away, was taking on a new and more serious significance”—into the end of our days.
It is this unsettling capacity of great literature that pushes the reader to examine his life, dismantling his defenses, penetrating the core of his vulnerability, not giving answers—“he was weeping because there were not and could not be any answers”—replacing solutions with bafflement.
For Tolstoy it isn’t marriage, or family, or a good job, or a respectful standing in society that renders life its true meaning but rather death—that ultimate wielder of life’s meaning. The acute awareness of death for Tolstoy means to claim a love of life which has not been previously claimed in our good, undisturbed, secured times.
No other writer depicts modernity’s attitude towards death with unsettling frankness and horrifying ponderousness as the ageing Tolstoy. In those characters who surrounded Ivan in his funeral Tolstoy is unforgiving in invoking the parasitic hypocrisy of the wealthy class. He exploits this funeral scene to reveal a society incapable of grief, its willingness to resist the possibility of ending as though death will never come to them: Pyotr Ivanovich, Ivan’s old friend, comforts himself with the idea “that this had happened to Ivan Ilyich, not him;” Praskovya who’s “using the death of her husband to get some money from the treasury;” and Schwartz who thinks of the game of whist while in the middle of the funeral ceremony. Tolstoy doesn’t spare us when he remarks in devastating eloquence:
“the very fact of the death of someone close to them aroused in all who heard about it, as always, a feeling of delight that he had died and they hadn’t… ‘There you have it. He’s dead, and I’m not’ was what everyone thought or felt.”
To a certain degree our attitude towards death in these troubled times is not so dissimilar to that close circle of Ivan Ilyich. While half of the world was brought to its knees during the recent pandemic with countless deaths in a mere span of two years we couldn’t contain our irritation at the restrictions on our “personal freedoms” this pandemic has forced on us. That we stubbornly insist in returning to the unacknowledged insanity of normality, of our pre-Covid ways of life, to the same disaster and frivolity of our whole socio-politico-economic system that is continually predicated on the destruction of the natural world, the pandemic has revealed our extravagant failure to stir up the whole of our culture, our unjustified resistance to examine our lives, our society, our manners and beliefs.
“What if I really have been wrong in the way I’ve lived my whole life, my conscious life?” The question is not simple and the answer is risky and dangerous. “It’s as if I had been going downhill when I thought I was going uphill. That’s how it was. In society’s opinion I was heading uphill, but in equal measure life was slipping away from me.”
Indeed, we go on with our lives sustained by a soulless culture that is totally stranger to the natural world, that repudiates limits and endings, that looks at death as a kind of bad-luck, a tax collector that must be avoided at all costs; we are “too busy playing” and dying has been “reduced to the level of an unpleasant incident, something rather indecent” not allowing it to change what our living means. The lack of introspection, the incapacity to reflect, the inability to wonder at our dealings with the world and at how we as a species bear to one another and to the natural world as a whole—this very deficiency is what creates the lie that despite the countless endings that surround us we continue to think that “everything in the world [is] going on as before.”
“Ivan Ilyich’s torment was the lying—the lie, which was somehow maintained by them all, that he wasn’t dying, he was only ill, and all he had to do was keep calm and follow doctor’s orders and then something good will emerge. Whereas he knew that whatever was done to him nothing would emerge but more and more agony, suffering, and death. And this lie was torture for him—he was tortured by their unwillingness to acknowledge what they all knew and he knew; they wanted to lie to him about his terrible situation, and they wanted him—they were compelling him—to be a party to this lie.”
To be not a party to the lie means to be claimed by the awareness of death. Allowing that awareness to touch our days, to wound us with a resolute conviction that “something new and dreadful was going on inside…something significant, more significant than anything in his whole life.”
Reading and rereading a book of such depth and profound sensibility convinces me that great literature is a kind of preparation for death. It acquaints us and confronts us with the nature of endings. It compels us to pause in a time when nothing stops, when instant gratification is high currency. Great literature forces us to stop, to take things slowly, to put our feet on the ground once more to wonder about the consequences of our being here.
What does being claimed by the awareness of death imply? For Tolstoy it implies not waiting for a terminal diagnosis, or another pandemic, or another war to claim our love of life. To allow endings to find our way back into the world with a gentler, nourishing, grief-skilled love of the world, a love without our self-assured superiority as species. Thus to learn to grieve, to make room for grief to allow life to grab us with a purpose wiser than our ambitions before it’s too late, because as Tolstoy portrays in Ivan Ilyich with suffering irony: there is such a thing as too late.
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