by André Alexis
A second thing that ties the stories together is their depiction of “inner grotesqueries.” Both describe pointedly unpleasant versions of human consciousness. In both, the authors exaggerate negative human responses or describe only those states of mind that are relevant to the mood of the story. In The Death of Ivan Ilych, no one — save a servant named Gerasim — is humane, no one curious about anything but his or her own life and fortune. Ilych’s wife, Praskovya, is thoughtless and more or less selfish, as is his daughter. The Death of Ivan Ilych presents us with a version of life from which almost every speck of altruism has been erased, in the interest of Tolstoy’s point: the aloneness of human existence. Tolstoy has created a world in which no one cares about Ivan Ilych, a fact Ivan Ilych belatedly discovers when, while dying, he realizes he is an embarrassment to all those he thought loved him. In a way, it is a story of the enforced loneliness of human existence: no one knows us, nor do we know anyone else; no one understands our pain; we die alone. The Governess of The Turn of the Screw is also radically alone. Hers is the only perspective we have on the story, hers the only reality. She is trapped in a terrifying solipsism, one in which neither she nor we can tell fact from fancy. No one seems to quite believe her: not the children she is minding, nor Mrs. Grose, her one confidante, nor even the reader, who has plenty of proof that the most terrifying creature in the story is not a ghost but rather the Governess herself. James’s Governess and Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilych are both prisoners of their own consciousness.
Finally — or “finally” for me, anyway, as I don’t mean to exhaustively compare the two stories — both The Turn of the Screw and The Death of Ivan Ilych are stories which build up to and finish with oddly inflected deaths. In James, the death of a child is ambiguously — not to say obscurely — described:
. . . “What does he matter now, my own? — what will he ever matter? I have you,” I launched at the beast, “but he has lost you for ever!” Then, for the demonstration of my work, “There, there!” I said to Miles.
But he had already jerked straight round, stared, glared again, and seen but the quiet day. With the stroke of the loss I was so proud of he uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss, and the grasp with which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall. I caught him, yes, I held him — it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.
In Tolstoy, it is the death of Ivan Ilych himself, which is a “not quite” death, since the end of the story takes us back to its beginning, that is, to Ivan Ilych’s funeral.
In place of death there was light.
“So that’s what it is!” he suddenly exclaimed aloud. “What joy!”
To him all this happened in a single instant, and the meaning of that instant did not change. For those present his agony continued for another two hours. Something rattled in his throat, his emaciated body twitched, then the gasping and rattle became less and less frequent.
“It’s all over!” said someone near him.
He heard these words and repeated them in his soul.
“Death is all over,” he said to himself. “It’s no more!”
He drew in a breath, stopped in the midst of a sigh, stretched out, and died.
My point in comparing these stories is to suggest that The Death of Ivan Ilych achieves some of its effects in the way any ghost story — and The Turn of the Screw is one of the best — or frightening tale does: with pace, grotesqueries, intimations of the otherworldly, and a journey to the border between life and death, the place where the dead are living and the living dead. This place is, of course, uncanny and it is akin to the crossroads where the Soucouyant must collect and count her grains of rice.3
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Tolstoy was a master of the significant detail, the detail that sticks because it rings true or because it is odd. From Frou-Frou’s broken back, in Anna Karenin, to Dolokhov sitting on a high window ledge drinking a bottle of rum in one draught, from War and Peace, Tolstoy has provided any number of lasting, moving and troubling moments.
Perhaps the most famous image from The Death of Ivan Ilych is that of the black bag into which Ivan Ilych Golovin feels he is being pushed:
For three whole days, during which time did not exist for him, he struggled in that black sack into which he was being thrust by an invisible, resistless force. He struggled as a man condemned to death struggles in the hands of the executioner, though knowing that he cannot save himself. And every moment he felt that despite all his efforts he was drawing nearer and nearer to what terrified him. He felt that his agony was due to being thrust into that black opening and still more to his not being able to get right into it.4
This passage leaves us with a visceral idea of dying. It’s justly renowned. But I’d like to look at a passage that is much less dramatic, less well known, and slightly puzzling. It is from the story’s first chapter, and we are accompanying Ivan Ilych’s friend, Peter Ivanovich, as he views his friend’s dead body a final time:
Peter Ivanovich, like everyone else on such occasions, entered feeling uncertain what he would have to do. All he knew was that at such times it is always safe to cross oneself. But he was not quite sure whether one should make obeisances while doing so. He therefore adopted a middle course. On entering the room he began crossing himself and made a slight movement resembling a bow. At the same time, as far as the motion of his head and arm allowed, he surveyed the room. Two young men — apparently nephews, one of whom was a high-school pupil — were leaving the room, crossing themselves as they did so. An old woman was standing motionless, and a lady with strangely arched eyebrows was saying something to her in a whisper. A vigorous, resolute clerical person in a frock coat was reading something in a loud voice with an expression that precluded any contradiction. The butler’s assistant, Gerasim, stepping lightly in front of Peter Ivanovich, was strewing something on the floor. Noticing this, Peter Ivanovich was immediately aware of the faint odour of a decomposing body.
I read that paragraph over and over until the source of my puzzlement struck me: I wanted to know what it was that Gerasim strewed over the floor. What did the Russians use to cover the smell of dying bodies before the turn of the twentieth century? Moreover, why should Peter Ivanovich become aware of the smell of decomposition after seeing Gerasim strew whatever it was he was strewing? Would he not have smelled the corpse first? Or was it, rather, that Gerasim, passing lightly in front of him, stirred the air and so brought the smell of rotting flesh to Peter Ivanovich’s notice?
These questions are, relatively, trivial. Tolstoy did not feel he had to be more specific. Towards the end of the first chapter, Peter Ivanovich leaves the house of his dead friend and we read the following:
Peter Ivanovich found the fresh air particularly pleasant after the smells of incense, the dead body, and carbolic acid.
That is, Tolstoy gives a short catalogue of the memorable smells: incense (which Gerasim would not, of course, have been strewing), decomposition, and carbolic acid (used, in the old days, like formaldehyde, to keep the corpse from rotting, though carbolic went out of favour because, though it kept the cells of the dead from decomposing, it turned the skin of the dead an unreal white).5 Why, I wondered, didn’t Tolstoy simply say, “Gerasim was strewing wolf’s bane . . .” or “Gerasim was strewing lavender . . .”? Both lavender and wolf’s bane (also called monk’s hood) were used to cover up the smell of the dead in the nineteenth century.6
The mistake I made was, of course, to assume that Gerasim was strewing about something that smelled, something to cover up the smell of putrifaction. If that had been the case, Tolstoy would almost certainly have said so. The Death of Ivan Ilych is a work in which smell plays a significant part. No, the important thing in this paragraph was the sense of smell, not any specific smell. If you take a look, you’ll
see that it is a paragraph in which each of the five senses is mentioned or alluded to:
1. Touch: On entering the room he began crossing himself
2. Hearing: “. . . a lady with strangely arched eyebrows was saying something to her in a whisper. A vigorous, resolute clerical person in a frock coat was reading something in a loud voice . . .”
3.Taste: “The butler’s assistant, Gerasim, stepping lightly in front of Peter Ivanovich . . .” (or, as Anthony Briggs translates: “Gerasim, the peasant who waited at table . . .”)
4. Sight: “Noticing this, Peter Ivanovich was immediately aware . . .” (Louise and Aylmer Maude translated the beginning of the sentence thus: “Seeing this, Pyotr Ivanovich . . .”)
5. Smell: “Peter Ivanovich was immediately aware of the faint odour of a decomposing body.”
It is a paragraph in which we follow a living being, Peter Ivanovich, whose sentience is insisted on as he approaches the corpse of his childhood friend. Peter Ivanovich touches his forehead as he makes the sign of the cross, hears both soft and loud sounds, remembers seeing Gerasim at the Golovins’ dinner table, sees Gerasim strewing something on the floor, and smells the odour of putrescence. (Great word, that: “putrescence” . . .) And yet, in the logic of the story, Peter Ivanovich, though alive and capable of using his senses, is dead in that he is living precisely the kind of death-in-life that Ivan Ilych lived until the moment Ivan Ilych actually died: unwilling to deal with reality (that is, death), careless of any emotions but his own, unable to deal with the suffering of others. In The Death of Ivan Ilych, the senses are insufficient signs of life.
Well, what then is death — as opposed to death-in-life — in the story?
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Tolstoy gives us a clue to how he felt about the border between life and death when, in his diary, he describes an episode he had while house-hunting in provincial Russia.
In September 1869, Tolstoy spent the night in the town of Arzamas. He was on his way to the province of Penza to look at an estate that interested him. He had just published War and Peace, which had brought him fame and money. The journey to Penza was arduous. His coach broke down. He had to hire horses to continue on his way, and by the time he got to Arzamas, he was too exhausted to go on, and too exhausted to sleep. In a letter to his wife, he wrote:
It was two o’clock in the morning. I was terribly tired, I wanted to go to sleep and I felt perfectly well. But suddenly I was overcome by despair, fear and terror, the like of which I have never experienced before. I’ll tell you all the details of this feeling later: but I’ve never had such an agonizing feeling before and may God preserve anyone else from experiencing it.
But the fullest account of the incident we have is Tolstoy’s unfinished short story called “Diary of a Madman.”
“Diary of a Madman” isn’t a successful story, but it is a revealing fragment. To begin with, the fear of death is what terrifies the narrator and, significantly, it strikes him while he is away from home, in Arzamas. The narrator is “tormented” by the room in which he must sleep. Here’s the passage in Volokhonsky and Pevear’s translation:
A clean, whitewashed, square room. How tormenting it was to me, I remember, that this little room was precisely square. There was one window, with a curtain — red. A table of Karelian birch and a sofa with curved armrests . . .
The following morning, after an unpleasant, fearful night, things are better once the narrator gets on the road:
In the open air and in movement it got better. But I felt that something new had settled on my soul and poisoned my whole former life.
Once home, the narrator no longer experiences the fear he felt in Arzamas. He begins to pray and attend church, but life goes on as before. And then, some time later, on a trip to Moscow, he stays at an inn. Once again, he is tormented by a room, and this time the fear is worse than it was in Arzamas:
. . . We arrived, I went into the small room. The heavy smell of the corridor was in my nostrils. The porter brought my suitcase. The floor maid lit a candle. The candle flared up, then the flame sank, as always happens. Someone coughed in the next room — probably an old man. The maid left; the porter stood asking if he should undo the straps on my suitcase. The flame revived and threw its light on the blue wallpaper with yellow stripes, a partition, a scratched table, a small sofa, a mirror, a window, and the narrow dimensions of the whole room. And suddenly the whole Arzamas terror stirred in me. “My God, how am I going to spend the night here,” I thought.
Perhaps because I’ve had similar moments of terror and “lostness,” I find it fascinating that the narrator’s (Tolstoy’s) fear of death should be brought on by the condition and dimensions of a room . . .
While I was on an author tour in Minnesota, I woke up in a hotel in Minneapolis and for a good five minutes did not know where I was. The room was indistinguishable from any number of hotel rooms I’d been in, and looking out the window gave me no clue. There was no one for me to call, and it wasn’t until I turned on the radio that I came to myself. While I was “lost,” it was as if I were adrift in some deserted corner of my own consciousness. The feeling of pure, animal panic reverberated in my psyche for days.
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It’s difficult to convey the feeling of “lost-ness.” It’s like a futility and it’s like the feeling you have when you’re feverish and you think the same thought over and over again. There is a mental agony to the reappearance of the same trees, the same ground, your tracks adding up but leading nowhere. Part of the difficulty, in trying to convey the feeling, is how to suggest both the specific somewhere that has become a concrete nowhere. It is somewhere, because you know it well. You traverse it over and over. Your footprints are there. You know the place. You start to recognize the trees and the ground. And yet, it is not a place. It is a not-home. It is, suddenly, a part of the world cut off from the world: nowhere and somewhere at once. A place with which you are unwillingly, inescapably intimate. The place is itself a kind of violation of your consciousness, of your self.7
Here’s how Tolstoy describes being lost:
. . . And suddenly I felt I was lost. Home, the hunters were far away, nothing could be heard. I was tired and all in a sweat. Once you stop, you freeze. If you keep walking, you lose strength. I called out, all was quiet. No one responded. I walked back again. My legs were tired. I felt frightened, stopped, and the whole terror of Arzamas and Moscow came over me, only a hundred times greater. My heart pounded, my arms and legs trembled. To die here? I don’t want to. Why die? What is death? I wanted to question, to reproach God as before, but here I suddenly felt that I didn’t dare, that I shouldn’t, that I couldn’t have accounts with God, that he had said what was needed, that I alone was to blame.
I take it that this is the feeling at the heart of The Death of Ivan Ilych, the feeling that lies at the heart of the “death” Tolstoy speaks of: the sensation of being nowhere, of being lost. But in The Death of Ivan Ilych, Tolstoy doesn’t refer to lostness directly. Ivan Ilych does not die in a foreign city or in a forest. He dies at home, but it is a “home” which has become foreign, an “un-home” that is as terrifying as nowhere, a “home” stripped of the possibility of belonging.
Just as life and death have exchanged places in The Death of Ivan Ilych (living being a form of death, death being a form of life), so too have belonging and lostness. There where he should feel he has a place — that is, in his own home — Ivan Ilych Golovin comes to feel lost: alienated from the affections of his wife, daughter, and son, a problem for his servants, a speck of disorder in this place (his home) where he had thought himself the origin of order, the father, the one on whom “home” depends:8
. . . Whether it was morning or evening, Friday or Sunday, was all the same, all one and the same: a gnawing tormenting pain, never subsiding for a moment; the awareness of life ever hopelessly going but never quite gone; always the same dreadful, hateful death approaching — the sole reality now
— and always the same lie. What were days, weeks and hours here?
“Would you care for tea, sir?”
“He needs order, so his masters should have tea in the mornings,” [Ivan Ilych] thought, and said only:
“No.”
“Would you like to lie on the sofa?”
“He needs to tidy up the room, and I’m in the way, I am uncleanness, disorder,” he thought, and said only
“No, let me be.”
So, there it is: nowhere home. No longer belonging where he once belonged, Ivan Ilych Golovin is in transit.
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I began this essay, among other reasons, because I wondered if the “death” Tolstoy imagined in The Death of Ivan Ilych was like the “death” nestled in my own imagination. I assumed, to be honest, that “death” for a northerner (that is, Tolstoy), with its snows and lakes and wolves, would be different from the “death” in the mind of a South American (that is, myself, though Trinidad isn’t quite South America): mountains, floods, poisonous snakes. I’m still convinced there is a cultural difference in how we figure “death,” but the more I read the story, following its sense through the translations of Louise and Aylmer Maude, Bernard Guerney’s revision of the Maudes, Anthony Briggs, and Volokhonsky and Pevear, the more I came to feel that Tolstoy and I do have something in common: the idea of “death” as the foreignness of “home.” That is, I’ve come to see that one of the reasons The Death of Ivan Ilych has meant so much to me, one of the reasons it has held my attention through the decades since I first read it, one of the reasons I read it over and over, is that it articulates a nightmare of my immigrant’s consciousness. Its truth is the truth not of “death” (whatever that might be) but of something else:
