The Death of Ivan Ilyich — by Leo Tostoy

11

Two weeks passed in this way. During this time an event occurred that Ivan Ilyich and his wife both desired: Petrishev made a formal proposal. It happened in the evening. The next day Praskovya Feodorovna went in to her husband, wondering how to tell him about Feodor Petrovich’s proposal, but the same night Ivan Ilyich had suffered another change for the worse. Praskovya Feodorovna found him on the divan in a new position. He was lying on his back, moaning, and staring fixedly in front of him.

She started talking about medicines. He shifted his gaze to her. She did not finish what she had begun—such hatred, specifically for her, was in that look.

“For the love of Christ, let me die in peace,” he said.

She wanted to go out, but at that moment his daughter came in and went up to him to say good morning. He looked at his daughter as he had at his wife, and in reply to her questions about his health, dryly replied that they would soon be free of him. Both fell silent, sat awhile, and went out.

“How are we to blame?” Liza asked her mother. “It’s just as though we were doing it to him! I’m sorry for Papa, but why should we be made miserable?”

The doctor arrived at the usual time. Ivan Ilyich answered him yes and no, not lowering his baleful stare, and toward the end he said, “You know perfectly well you can do nothing, so leave it alone.”

“We can alleviate your suffering,” said the doctor.

“Not even that. Leave it.”

The doctor went out into the drawing room and informed Praskovya Feodorovna that things were very bad, and only opium could lessen his pain, which must be intense.

The doctor said his physical suffering was intense, and that was true, but his spiritual suffering was worse, and that was what tormented him most of all.

His spiritual suffering lay in the fact that during the night, looking at Gerasim’s kind, sleepy face with its high cheekbones, it suddenly occurred to him: what if in reality the whole of my life, my conscious life, was “not done”—“not the right thing”?38

It occurred to him that what had previously seemed to him a downright impossibility, that he had lived his whole life not as he should, could actually be true. It occurred to him that his barely recognized promptings to fight against what people in the highest positions deemed good, faintly perceptible impulses which he had promptly shrugged off—it could be these that were the reality, and all the rest was not the right thing. And his work, and the construction of his life, and his family, and those social and professional interests—all of them might be not the right thing. He tried to defend all these things to himself. And suddenly felt all the feebleness of what he was defending. And there was nothing to defend.

“And if this is so,” he said to himself, “and I am leaving life in the knowledge that I have ruined everything that was given me, and it can’t be put right, then what?” He lay flat on his back and started reconsidering his life in a completely different way. In the morning, when he saw the footman, and then his wife, and then his daughter, and then the doctor—their every movement and every word confirmed for him the dreadful truth that had come to him in the night. He saw himself in them, everything he had lived by, and saw clearly that all of it was not the right thing, all of it was a dreadful, vast lie heaped over life and death. This realization increased his sufferings, multiplied them tenfold. He groaned and thrashed about and tore at the bedclothes, which seemed to be choking him. And for this he hated them all.

They gave him a heavy dose of opium and he lost consciousness, but at dinnertime it all started again. He drove everyone away and turned restlessly from side to side.

His wife came to him and said, “Jean, sweetest, do this for me.” (For me?) “It can’t do any harm, and it often helps. Come on, it’s nothing. Healthy people often—”

He opened his eyes wide.

“What? Take communion? What for? There’s no need. And yet . . .”

She started crying.

“Will you? My dear friend? I’ll send for our priest, he’s so nice.”

“Excellent, very good,” he said.

When the priest came and heard his confession, he was softened, and felt a kind of ease from his doubts and consequently from his sufferings, and a moment’s hope came to him. He started thinking again about his blind gut and the possibility of putting it right. He took the sacrament with tears in his eyes.

When they laid him down again after the sacrament, he felt better for a moment, and his hope of life rose again. He started thinking about the operation he had been offered. “To live, I want to live,” he said to himself. His wife came to congratulate him; she said the conventional greeting, and added, “It’s true, isn’t it? You’re better?”

Without looking at her, he said, “Yes.”

Her clothes, the way she was put together, the expression on her face, the sound of her voice—everything said one thing to him: “Not the right thing. Everything you once lived by and now live by is a lie, a fraud, hiding life and death from you.” And as soon as he thought that, his gall rose and with the gall agonizing physical suffering and with the suffering the knowledge of inevitable, imminent death. And something new started, a screwing, shooting pain and strangulated breathing.

The expression on his face when he uttered “yes” was dreadful. Saying that “yes,” looking her straight in the eyes, he threw himself facedown extraordinarily quickly, considering how weak he was, and cried out, “Go away! Get out! Let me be!”