by Leo Tolstoy
“Well, if we are going to go, then we had better go,” she said, glancing at her watch, a present from her father. She then gave the young man a barely noticeable smile, which seemed to hint at something known only to them, and rose with a rustle of her dress.
Everyone rose, wished Ivan Ilyich good night, and went out.
When they left the room Ivan Ilyich seemed to feel relief: the lie was gone—they had taken it with them. But the pain remained—that same pain, that same fear, which made it so that nothing was harder and nothing was easier. Everything was worse.
Again minute followed minute, hour followed hour, and all was the same, there was no end to it, and yet the end was inevitable and grew more and more horrifying.
“Yes, send in Gerasim,” he said in response to a question of Pyotr’s.
IX
His wife returned late in the evening. She entered on tiptoe but he heard her coming; he opened his eyes then quickly shut them again. She wanted to send Gerasim away and sit with him herself. He opened his eyes and said: “No. Go.”
“Is it very bad?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Take some opium.”
He agreed and drank it. She left.
Until about three o’clock he lay in agonizing oblivion. It seemed to him that he was undergoing the painful process of being stuffed into a black bag, narrow and deep—that he was being pushed ever further into the bag, but could not be pushed through completely. And this terrible process was causing him great suffering. He was afraid but wished to fall in; he struggled but tried to help. And suddenly he broke through, fell and came to his senses. There sat Gerasim, same as before, drowsing quietly, patiently at the foot of the bed. And he himself was lying on his back, with his emaciated, stockinged legs on Gerasim’s shoulders. There was the same shaded candle, and the same incessant pain.
“Go, Gerasim,” he whispered.
“It’s no trouble, sir—I’ll stay.”
“No, go.”
He lowered his legs, turned sideways onto his arm, and suddenly felt sorry for himself. He waited until Gerasim had gone into the next room, then he let himself go and began to weep like a child. He wept over his helplessness and his terrible loneliness, over people’s cruelty, over God’s cruelty, over the absence of God.
Why have You done all this? Why have You brought me here? What… what have I done to deserve this unbearable torment at Your hands?
He expected no answer, yet he wept that there was not and could not be an answer. The pain became more violent again, but he did not move, did not call for help. He went on talking to himself: Go on, then—beat me! But what for? What have I done to You? Why?
Then he grew quiet and not only stopped weeping but stopped breathing and was all attention—as if he were listening not to an audible voice but to the voice of his soul, to the stream of thoughts rising up within him.
What do you need? was the first clear, verbally expressible notion he heard. What do you need? What do you need? he repeated to himself. What do I need? Not to suffer. To live, he replied.
And again he committed himself to a state of such concerted attention that even pain could not distract him.
To live? To live how? asked the voice of his soul.
Yes, to live. To live as I used to live—a good, pleasant life.
What was so good and pleasant about your life? asked the voice. And in his imagination he began to sort through the finest moments of his pleasant life. But, strangely enough, the finest moments of his pleasant life now seemed to be something else entirely, nothing like what they had seemed then—all of them, aside from his earliest childhood memories. There, in childhood, there really had been something pleasant, something with which one might live if it were to return. But the person who had experienced that pleasure no longer existed; it was like remembering someone else.
As soon as he reached the start of what had resulted in him at present, in Ivan Ilyich, those things that had once seemed joys melted before his eyes and turned into something insignificant, often horrid.
And the further he departed from childhood, the closer he came to the present, the more insignificant and dubious were the joys. It began with law school. There he had still found some truly good things: fun, friendship, hope. But in the upper classes such things were already becoming rare. Then, during the first years of his service with the local governor, a few good moments appeared again: these were memories of love for a woman. Then all grew confused and there was even less that was good. Further on there was still less—and the further he went, the less there was.
The marriage… So accidental… The disillusionment, the smell of his wife’s breath, the sensuality, the pretence… And the soul-deadening work, the worries about money—a year of that, then two, ten, twenty—all the same. Only more deadening with each step… It’s as if I had been trudging steadily downhill, all the while imagining that I was going uphill. That’s precisely how it was. I was going up in public opinion, yet life was slipping away from under me at exactly the same pace… And now it’s all done—go ahead and die.
But what is this? Why? It can’t be… Is life really so senseless, so horrid? And if it is so horrid and senseless, then why die, why die in agony? Something’s not right.
And suddenly it would occur to him: Maybe I did not live as I ought to have lived? But then he would say to himself: How could that be, if I did everything correctly? And with that he would dismiss the one and only solution to the whole riddle of life and death as something entirely inconceivable.
So what do you want now? To live? How? To live as you live in court when the bailiff proclaims, “The court is now in session”? The court is in session, the court, he repeated to himself. “I’m on trial. But I’m not guilty!” he shouted angrily. “What for?” He stopped crying, turned his face to the wall and brooded over that single question: Why this horror—what is it for?
But try as he might, he could find no answer. And whenever the thought occurred to him, as it often did, that the horror had stemmed from his not having lived as he ought to have lived, he would immediately recall the impeccable correctness of his life and banish the strange notion from his mind.
X
Two more weeks passed. Ivan Ilyich no longer left the sofa. He did not wish to lie in bed and so he lay on the sofa. He spent nearly the whole time with his face to the wall, tormented in loneliness by the same insoluble suffering, and brooding in loneliness over the same insoluble question: What is this? Can it truly be death? And the inner voice would reply: Yes, it truly is. He would ask: Why must I suffer like this? And the voice would reply: No reason. That’s just how it is. Beyond and aside from this, there was nothing.
From the very beginning of Ivan Ilyich’s illness, since his first visit to the doctor, his life had been divided between two opposite and alternating moods: now it was despair and the expectation of an incomprehensible, terrible death; now it was hope and the fascinated observation of his bodily functions. Now before him appeared only the kidney or gut, which had temporarily shirked its duties, and now only incomprehensible, terrible death, from which he would not escape.
These two moods had alternated from the very beginning of his illness, but as the illness progressed, his notions about the kidney came to seem ever more dubious and fantastic, while his awareness of impending death became ever more real.
It was enough to reflect on what he had been three months earlier and what he was now, to reflect on how steadily he had gone downhill, and every possibility of hope was shattered.
In the latest stages of the loneliness that enveloped him as he lay with his face to the back of the sofa, that loneliness in the midst of a crowded town, his many acquaintances, his family—a loneliness more complete than could be found at the bottom of the sea or deep inside the earth—in the latest stages of this dreadful loneliness Ivan Ilyich lived only in his memories of the past. Images rose before him, one after the other. They always began with what was nearest and l
ed back to what was most remote, to childhood, where they would linger. If Ivan Ilyich should recall the stewed prunes he had been offered that day, he would then recall the raw, shrivelled French plums of his childhood, their special taste and the way his mouth would fill with saliva as he sucked their stones—and the memory of that taste would give rise to a whole series of memories from that time: his nanny, his brother, his toys. No, don’t think about that… it’s too painful, Ivan Ilyich would say to himself and return to the present—to the button on the back of the sofa and the wrinkled morocco. Morocco is expensive but it doesn’t last. We had a quarrel about it. But it was a different kind of morocco and a different quarrel when Father punished us for tearing his briefcase and mama brought us little pies. And again Ivan Ilyich’s thoughts lingered on his childhood, causing him pain, and he tried to banish them, to think of something else.
And again, right alongside that string of recollections, another string worked its way through his soul—memories of how his illness had progressed and grown worse. There, too, the further back he went, the more life there was. There had been more of what was good in life, and more of life itself. The two merged together. Just as my suffering keeps growing worse and worse, so my whole life kept growing worse and worse, he thought. There had been one bright spot back there, at the beginning of life, and then it all grew more and more black, more and more quickly. In inverse proportion to the square of the distance from death, thought Ivan Ilyich. And that image of a stone falling with ever-increasing speed sank into his soul. Life was a series of increasing torments, hurtling ever more quickly towards its end in the most dreadful of torments. I’m falling… He shuddered, stirred and wanted to resist, but he knew that resistance was now impossible; and again, with eyes weary of looking but unable not to look at what lay before them, he stared at the back of the sofa and waited—waited for that dreadful fall, collision and destruction. There’s no resisting it, he told himself. But if I could only understand what it’s all for… That, too, is impossible. One could explain it by saying that I had not lived as I ought to have lived. But it’s impossible to admit that now, he said to himself, recalling the whole legality, correctness and decency of his life. It’s impossible to admit that, he said to himself, his lips grinning as if someone could see his smile and be deceived by it. There is no explanation. Suffering, death… What for?
XI
Two weeks passed in this way. During that time there occurred an event that Ivan Ilyich and his wife had desired: Petrishchev made a formal proposal. This happened in the evening. The next day Praskovya Fyodorovna entered her husband’s room, pondering how best to announce Fyodor Petrovich’s proposal, but that very night Ivan Ilyich’s condition had taken another turn for the worse. As usual, Praskovya Fyodorovna found him on the sofa, but in a new position. He lay flat on his back, groaning and staring straight in front of him with fixed eyes.
She began to talk about medicines. He turned his eyes towards her. She did not finish what she had started to say; his eyes were filled with such anger—anger aimed directly at her.
“For Christ’s sake, let me die in peace,” he said.
She wanted to leave but just then their daughter came in and went up to say good morning. He gave the daughter the same look he had given his wife, and in response to her enquiry about his health drily declared that they would all soon be free of him. They both fell silent, sat a while and left the room.
“How is any of this our fault?” Liza asked her mother. “It’s as if we were somehow to blame! I feel sorry for Papa, but why should we be made to suffer?”
The doctor arrived at his usual time. Ivan Ilyich replied to all questions with “yes” or “no”, never taking his angry eyes off him, and at the end he said: “You know you can do nothing to help me, so go away.”
“We can ease your suffering,” said the doctor.
“You can’t even do that. Just go away.”
The doctor came into the drawing room and told Praskovya Fyodorovna that things looked very bad indeed and that the only possible way to ease her husband’s suffering, which must be terrible, was opium.
The doctor meant that Ivan Ilyich’s physical suffering was terrible, and this was true; but more terrible than his physical suffering was his moral suffering, the source of his greatest torment.
His moral suffering stemmed from the question that occurred to him that night as he looked at Gerasim’s sleepy, good-natured face with its high cheekbones: Could my whole life—my whole conscious life—have been wrong?
It occurred to him that what he had formerly imagined to be a perfect impossibility, the notion that he had lived his life not as he ought to have done, could in fact be true. It occurred to him that his faint, feeble impulses to struggle against what the people of highest standing considered to be good—those feeble impulses he had immediately rejected—might have been the real thing, while everything else was false. His professional duties, his mode of life, his family, his social and professional interests—all, all might have been false. He tried to defend it all to himself—but then he suddenly felt the absolute weakness of what he was defending. There was no use defending it.
But if that’s the case, he said to himself, and I’m leaving life in the knowledge that I have ruined everything given me, and that it cannot be rectified, what then? He lay flat on his back and began to sort through his life in an entirely new way. In the morning, when he saw first the footman, then his wife, then his daughter, then the doctor, their every word, every movement confirmed the terrible truth that had been revealed to him during the night. In them he saw himself and everything he had lived for, and he saw clearly that it was all false—it was all a dreadful, enormous lie that concealed both life and death. This knowledge increased his physical suffering tenfold. He groaned and thrashed about and tugged at his clothes, which he felt were choking and stifling him. And for this he hated them all.
He was given a large dose of opium and lost consciousness, but at lunchtime it began again. He sent everyone away and kept tossing from side to side.
His wife came in and said: “Jean, darling, do this for me”—for me?—“It won’t do any harm, but it often helps. Really, it’s nothing. Even perfectly healthy people…”
He opened his eyes wide.
“What? Take communion? What for? No, I don’t need… Well, perhaps…”
She began to cry.
“Yes, my dear? I’ll send for our priest. He’s such a lovely man.”
“Yes, yes, very good,” he said.
When the priest came and heard his confession, Ivan Ilyich mellowed and believed he felt relief from his doubts and, consequently, from his suffering; for a moment there was hope. He began to think about his blind gut again, about the possibility of setting it right. He received communion with tears in his eyes.
When they laid him down afterwards he felt a moment’s relief and, once again, hope that he might live. He began to think of the operation that had been suggested to him. I want to live, to live, he was telling himself. His wife came in to congratulate him and, after saying the usual words, added: “You’re feeling better, aren’t you?”
Without looking at her he replied, “Yes.”
Her attire, her posture, the expression on her face, the sound of her voice—they all told him the same thing: False. Everything you have lived for and continue to live for is a lie—a deception that conceals life and death from you. And as soon as he thought this, hatred welled up within him—and with the hatred came unbearable physical suffering, and with the suffering came the awareness of inevitable, fast-approaching death. Something new took hold of him: wrenching, shooting pains that squeezed the breath out of his body.
The expression on his face as he said “Yes” was horrifying. Having said it and looked straight into her eyes, he rolled over with extraordinary speed for a man in his condition and began to shout: “Go away! Go away! Leave me alone!”
XII
From that moment began the howling
that did not cease for three days, a howling so terrible that it struck one with horror through two closed doors. At the moment he answered his wife he realized that he was doomed, that there was no going back, that it was over, all over, while his doubts remained unresolved, remained doubts.
“O! O! O!” he howled with various intonations. He had begun by howling “No!”—and continued to howl its last letter, “O”.
Throughout those three days time did not exist for him. He was thrashing about inside the black bag into which he was being thrust by an invisible, irresistible force. He struggled as one condemned to death struggles in the hands of the executioner although he knows he will not save himself; with every passing moment he felt that despite all his efforts he was coming closer and closer to what terrified him. He felt that his torment was caused by his being thrust into that black hole and, even more so, by his inability to make it through. He was prevented from making it through by his conviction that his life had been a good one. This justification of his life dug its claws into him, would not let him go forward, and tormented him more than anything else.
All of a sudden some force shoved him in the chest and in the side and made it still more difficult to breathe; he fell into the hole and there, at its bottom, saw a glimmer of light. What he experienced now was like what he had sometimes experienced in railway carriages, when one thinks one is going forward but is actually going backwards, and then suddenly comes to realize the real direction.
