The Death of Ivan Ilyich — by Leo Tostoy

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.