The Death of Ivan Ilyich — by Leo Tostoy

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.

And again, just here, together with this train of thought, there was another sequence of memories running through him, how his illness had strengthened and grown. And again, the further back he went, the more life there was. There was more kindness in his life, and more of life itself. And the one thing and the other ran into each other. “Just as my suffering grows worse and worse now, so the whole of my life went worse and worse,” he thought. There was one spot of light far back, at the beginning of his life, and then it got blacker and blacker and quicker and quicker. “Inversely proportional to the square of its distance from death,” thought Ivan Ilyich. And the image of a stone hurtling down with increasing speed plummeted deep into his soul. Life, a sequence of ever-increasing sufferings, hurtles faster and faster to its end, to the most appalling suffering. “I’m falling. . . .” He jolted, stirred, and wanted to resist; but he knew already that he could not resist, and once again stared at the back of the divan with eyes that were tired of staring but unable not to stare at what was in front of them. And he waited, waited for that terrifying fall, the shock of impact, and the shattering. “I can’t resist,” he said to himself, “but if only I could understand what it’s for? And that’s impossible. It could only be explained if one could say I hadn’t lived as I should. But that is quite inadmissible,” he said to himself, remembering his law-abiding, correct, and proper life. “To accept that would be quite impossible,” he said to himself, compressing his lips in an ironic smile, as though someone could see it and be taken in by it. “There is no explanation! Suffering, death . . . for what?”