The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Master and Man

by Leo Tolstoy

  Everything always the same. Then hope glints—like a drop of water. A drop lost in a turbulent ocean of despair. And everything is pain again, pain and misery and everything always the same. It is dreadfully sad on his own; he longs to call somebody but knows in advance that it is even worse with others there. “If only I could have some morphine, I might lose consciousness. I’ll tell him, that doctor, he must think of something else. It’s impossible, impossible to go on like this.”

  In this way one hour passes, and another. But now the bell rings in the hall. Maybe it’s the doctor. Exactly so: it is the doctor—fresh, brisk, fat, and cheerful, with that expression that says—there you are, all in a panic for some reason, but in a minute we’ll put everything right. The doctor knows his expression is inappropriate here, but he has put it on once and for all and cannot take it off again, like a man who has put on tails in the morning and driven off to pay a round of calls with no opportunity to change.

  The doctor rubs his hands briskly, comfortingly.

  “My hands are chilly. It’s quite a frost. Let me just get warm,” he says, with that expression, as though they only need wait a little till he gets warm, and once he’s warm he’ll put everything right.

  “Well now, how—”

  Ivan Ilyich feels the doctor wanted to say, “How’s tricks?” but realizes one cannot talk like that, and says instead, “How did you pass the night?”

  Ivan Ilyich looks at the doctor with an expression that asks, Will you never feel ashamed of your lies? But the doctor does not want to understand his question.

  And Ivan Ilyich says, “It’s all so dreadful. The pain won’t stop, not even ease for a little. If only there was something!”

  “Yes, you sick men always say that. Well, now, I think I’ve got a little warmer, even Praskovya Feodorovna, such a stickler for correctness, couldn’t find fault with my temperature. Well, now, how do you do?” And the doctor shakes his hand.

  And, dropping all his former jocularity, with a serious expression, the doctor starts examining his patient’s pulse and temperature, and the tapping and listening begins.

  Ivan Ilyich knows definitely and indubitably that this is all nonsense, a hollow sham, but when the doctor gets down on his knees, stretches over him, pressing his ear now higher, now lower, going through a variety of gymnastic arabesques over his body with the most significant expression, Ivan Ilyich allows himself to be taken in, as in the old days he gave in to the lawyers’ speeches when he knew perfectly well that they were all lying and why they were lying.

  The doctor was kneeling on the divan, still tapping away at something, when Praskovya Feodorovna’s silk dress rustled at the door, and her voice was heard rebuking Piotr for failing to announce the doctor’s arrival.

  She comes in, kisses her husband, and immediately begins proving she was up long ago. She was only absent when the doctor arrived because of a misunderstanding.

  Ivan Ilyich looks at her, scrutinizes her all over, and takes exception to her plump, white, clean hands and neck, her shiny hair and bright eyes, full of life. He detests her with all the strength of his soul. And her touch makes him suffer from his surge of hatred.

  Her attitude to him and his illness is still the same. Just as the doctor has worked out an attitude to his patients which he can no longer shake off, so she has worked out her attitude to him—that he isn’t doing something he ought to be doing, and it’s all his fault, while she lovingly reproaches him—and is now quite unable to divest herself of this attitude.

  “He just won’t do as he’s told! He will not take the drops on time. But the main thing is, he lies down in a position that must surely be bad for him, with his legs in the air.”

  She tells how he makes Gerasim hold up his legs.

  The doctor smiles gently-derisively. What are we to do? These invalids sometimes think up the funniest things, but we can forgive them.

  When the examination was over the doctor looked at his watch, and only then did Praskovya Feodorovna announce that whether Ivan Ilyich liked it or not, she had invited the distinguished doctor to come today, to examine him and discuss his condition with Mikhail Danilovich (as the ordinary doctor was called).

  “Please don’t protest. I’m doing it entirely for myself,” she said ironically, implying that she did everything for him and only in this way could she forbid him the right to protest. He frowned and stayed silent. He felt that the lie surrounding him was now so entangled it was difficult to sort it out at all.

  Everything she did for him was done entirely for her own sake, and she told him she was doing for her own sake what she actually was doing for her own sake, as though this was so improbable that he was bound to understand the opposite.

  Certainly the eminent doctor did arrive at half past eleven. Once again there were tappings and listenings and significant conversations about the blind gut in his presence and in the next room, and questions and answers with such loaded looks that once again, instead of the real question of life and death which was now the only thing confronting him, the question that emerged was about his kidney and the blind gut which were doing something they shouldn’t be doing, and how Mikhail Danilovitch and the eminence were about to pounce on them, this very minute, and force them to behave.

  The eminent doctor said good-bye with a serious but not unhopeful expression. And at Ivan Ilyich’s timid inquiry, his raised eyes shining with terror and hope, whether there was any chance of recovery, the doctor replied that one could not promise anything but there was a possibility. Ivan Ilyich followed the doctor out of the room with such a pitifully hopeful look, Praskovya Feodorovna even started crying when she saw it. She left the room to pay the eminent doctor his fee.

  His spirits were lifted by the doctor’s encouragement only for a little while. Once again it was the same room, the same pictures, curtains, wallpaper, medicine bottles, and the same aching, suffering body. And Ivan Ilyich started groaning; he was given an injection, and lost consciousness.

  When he came to, dusk was falling. They brought him his dinner. He forced himself to drink a little broth; and it was all the same again and another night was falling.

  After dinner, at seven o’clock, Praskovya Feodorovna came into his room in evening attire, with plump, corseted breasts and traces of powder on her face. That very morning she had reminded him of their trip to the theater. Sarah Bernhardt32 was in town, and at his insistence they had taken a box. Now he had forgotten about it, and her finery jarred on him. But he hid his irritation when he remembered that he himself had insisted they should order a box and go, because it would be an improving aesthetic experience for the children.

  Praskovya Feodorovna came in well pleased with herself, but a little guiltily. She sat down beside him, asked how he felt—as he could see, in order to ask the question, not to find out the reply, knowing well enough there was nothing to find out—and started saying what was on her mind: that of course she wouldn’t have dreamt of going, but the box was booked, and Hélène and her daughter, and Petrishev (the examining magistrate, his daughter’s intended) were coming, and it would be quite impossible to allow them to go on their own. Of course she would have preferred so much more to sit with him. Only he must follow the doctor’s orders while she was out.

  “Oh yes, and Feodor Petrovich” (the suitor) “wanted to drop in. May he? And Liza.”

  “Let them come in.”

  In came his daughter, décolleté, her young body bared. His body made him suffer so. And she was putting hers on display. Strong, healthy, in love, impatient of illness, suffering, and death, which interfered with her happiness.

  In came Feodor Petrovich in tails, his hair curled à la Capoul,33 with long stringy neck richly enfolded in a white collar, huge white shirtfront, strong thighs tightly encased in black trousers, long white glove drawn over one hand, and opera hat.

  After them, in his turn, the young schoolboy crept in unobtrusively, in his miniature new uniform, poor little thing, and gloves, with dr
eadful shadows under his eyes whose meaning was obvious to Ivan Ilyich.

  He always felt sorry for his boy. And the boy’s frightened look of pity was terrible for him. Apart from Gerasim, it seemed to Ivan Ilyich that only Vasya understood and pitied him.

  Everyone sat down and inquired once again about his health. A silence fell. Liza asked her mother about the opera glasses. An altercation between mother and daughter followed about who had put them where. It became unpleasant.

  Feodor Petrovich asked Ivan Ilyich whether he had ever seen Sarah Bernhardt. At first Ivan Ilyich did not understand what he was being asked, and then said, “No; have you seen her?”

  “Yes, in Adrienne Lecouvreur.”34

  Praskovya Feodorovna said she had been particularly good in that. Her daughter disagreed. A conversation started about the elegance and realism of Bernhardt’s acting—that same old talk that is always one and the same.

  In the middle of the conversation Feodor Petrovich glanced at Ivan Ilyich and fell silent. The others looked and fell silent. He was staring straight in front of him with glittering eyes, obviously exasperated by them. This had to be put right, but it was quite impossible to put it right. Somehow the silence had to be broken. Nobody could pluck up courage; everyone was on edge that the polite lie would be blown and they would all have to face up to what was right in front of them. Liza was the first to take the plunge. She broke the silence. She wanted to hide what everyone was feeling, but she got the words wrong.

  “Well, if it’s time to go, it’s time to go,” she said, glancing at her watch,35 a gift from her father, and, barely perceptibly, smiled significantly at the young man about something only he knew about. She got up, her dress rustling.

  Everyone got up, made their farewells, and left.

  When they had gone out, Ivan Ilyich thought he felt easier. There were no lies; the lies had gone with them, but the pain remained. Always the same pain, always the same terror, making nothing easier, nothing more burdensome. Everything worse.

  Once again minute followed minute, hour by hour, still the same, still without an end, and the inevitable end still more terrifying.

  “Yes, send Gerasim here,” he said in answer to Piotr’s question.

  9

  His wife returned late that night. She came in on tiptoe, but he heard her, opened his eyes, and hastily shut them again. She wanted to send Gerasim out and sit with him herself. He opened his eyes and said, “No. Go.”

  “Are you suffering a lot?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Take some opium.”

  He consented and drank it. She went away.

  He was in an oppressive state of unconsciousness till three in the morning. It seemed to him that he and his pain were being painfully pushed into a long, narrow black sack, pushed in deeper and deeper, and yet could not be pushed right through. And this terrible business is agonizing for him. He is both afraid, and wants to fall through; he struggles against it, and he tries to help. And suddenly he tore free, and fell, and came to himself. There is Gerasim, sitting as usual at the foot of the bed, dozing peacefully and patiently. And there he is, lying with his emaciated, stockinged feet resting on Gerasim’s shoulders; there is the same shaded candle, and the same interminable pain.

  “Go away, Gerasim,” he whispered.

  “It doesn’t matter; I’ll sit awhile.”

  “No, do go.”

  He drew his legs down, lay sideways on his arm, and felt sorry for himself. He waited till Gerasim went next door, abandoned all restraint, and cried like a child. He was crying for his helplessness, his terrible loneliness, people’s cruelty, God’s cruelty, the absence of God.

  Why have You done all this? Why did You bring me here? What have I done that You torment me so dreadfully?

  He did not even expect an answer, and cried because there was no answer, and could be no answer. The pain rose up again, but he did not stir and did not call out. He said to himself, Go on, batter me! But what for? What have I done to You? What is it for?

  Then he grew quiet, stopped crying and even breathing, and grew all attention, as though he were listening not to a voice speaking in sounds but the voice of his soul, the train of thoughts rising inside him.

  “What do you want?” was the first clear notion he heard which could be put into words. What do you want? What do you need? he repeated to himself. What? “Not to suffer. To live,” he replied.

  And again he gave himself over to such tense attention that even his pain did not distract him.

  “Live? Live how?” asked the voice of his soul.

  “Yes, live like I did before; well, and pleasantly.”

  “Like you lived before, well, and pleasantly?” asked the voice. And in his imagination he began going over the best moments of his pleasant life. But—how strange—all those best moments of his pleasant life now seemed quite different from what they had then seemed. Everything, except the first memories of his childhood. There, in his childhood, was something really pleasant that you could live with, if it were to come again. But the person who had experienced that happy time was no more: it was like a memory of another person.

  As soon as those things began that resulted in Ivan Ilyich, the man he was now, so all those apparent joys melted away before his eyes, turning into something trivial and often bad. And the further he went from his childhood, the nearer he came to the present, the more trivial and dubious his pleasures became. It began with law school. There was still something genuinely good there; there was enjoyment, there was friendship, there were hopes. But in the final years these good moments already grew rarer. Then, in his service at the Governor’s, good moments reappeared again; they were memories of love for women. Then it all became confused, and there was still less that was good. Further on, even less was good, and the further he went the less good it became.

  Marriage . . . so accidental, and then disillusion, and the smell of his wife’s breath, and the sensuality and hypocrisy! And that deathly job, and those anxieties about money, and one year like that, and two, and ten, and twenty, and all the same. And the further you went, the more deathly it became. Exactly as though I was steadily walking down a mountain, and thinking I was climbing it. And so I was. In public opinion I was climbing up, and at just the same rate life was slipping away from under me. . . . It’s all up now—time to die!

  So what is this? What is it for? It can’t be. Surely it can’t be that my life was so pointless, so wrong? And if it was that wrong and that pointless, then why die, and die in pain? Something’s not right here.

  “Maybe I didn’t live as I should?” suddenly came into his head. “But how could that be, when I did everything as it should be done?” he said to himself, immediately driving off this, the one solution to the whole riddle of life and death, as though it were utterly out of the question.

  “Now what do you want? To live? Live how? Live as you lived in court, when the usher called: The court is in session!” The court is coming, the judge is coming,36 he repeated to himself. Here he comes, the judge! “But I’m not to blame!” he cried out bitterly. “What is my guilt?” And he stopped crying and, turning his face to the wall, started thinking about one thing and only one: What for? Why the misery?

  But however much he thought, he could not find an answer. And whenever the thought came to him, as it often did, that everything stemmed from his not living as he should have done, he immediately remembered all the propriety of his life and pushed away such a bizarre idea.

  10

  Another two weeks passed. Ivan Ilyich no longer got up from his divan. He did not want to go to his bed but lay on the divan. Lying nearly all the time with his face to the wall, he continued to suffer alone the same inexplicable sufferings and thought the same insoluble thought. “What is this? Can it truly be death?” And his inner voice replied, “Yes, truly.” “What is the agony for?” And the voice replied, “Just because, no reason.” Other than this, beyond this, there was nothing.


  From the very beginning of his illness, ever since Ivan Ilyich visited the doctor for the first time, his life split into two opposing and alternating moods: either despair and the expectation of incomprehensible and terrible death, or hope and the absorbing scrutiny of his bodily functions. Either his eyes were filled with the kidney or the gut, which had temporarily suspended their duties, or there was nothing but incomprehensible, unbearable death, which was impossible to escape.

  These two states of mind had alternated from the very beginning of his illness, but the further the illness progressed, the more fantastical and suspect grew the idea of the kidney and the more real his awareness of approaching death.

  He only needed to remember what he had been three months ago, and what he now was—to remember how steadily he kept walking down the mountain—and any possibility of hope was shattered.

  In the last days of loneliness, when he found himself lying with his face to the back of the divan, utterly alone in the many-peopled city with its innumerable friends and families, a loneliness which could not have been more complete, nowhere, not on the ocean floor nor deep in the earth—in the last days of this dreadful loneliness Ivan Ilyich lived only in his imagination of the past. One after another, pictures of his past presented themselves. They always began with the most recent in time, and led back to the most distant, to his childhood, and there they stopped. If he remembered the stewed prunes that had been offered him today, then there came to mind the moist, wrinkled French plums of his childhood, their particular taste and the rush of saliva when you sucked them down to the stone. And alongside this memory of taste a whole line of other memories of that time rose up—his nyanya,37 his brother, his toys. “I mustn’t think of that, it hurts too much,” Ivan Ilyich would say to himself, and heave himself back into the present. The button on the back of the leather divan, the wrinkles in the morocco. “Morocco is expensive but flimsy; we had a quarrel about it. But there was another morocco, and another quarrel, when we tore our father’s briefcase and were punished, but Mamma brought us cakes.” Once again it came to rest in his childhood, once again it hurt, and once more Ivan Ilyich tried to drive off the memory and think of other things.