by Leo Tolstoy
One time they even gave a dance. Ivan Ilyich had a merry time, and all went swimmingly, but it did lead to an awful quarrel with his wife, over the cakes and sweets. Praskovya Fyodorovna had it all planned out, but Ivan Ilyich insisted on buying everything from an expensive confectioner. He bought quite a lot of cakes and the quarrel broke out because many of these were left untouched, while the confectioner’s bill ran to forty-five roubles. It was a big, nasty quarrel and Praskovya Fyodorovna ended up calling him a “sour old fool”, at which point he lost his temper, clutched his head with both hands and said something about divorce. But the dance itself was a merry affair. The finest people had come and Ivan Ilyich took a few turns with Princess Trufonova, whose sister had famously established the Society “Bear My Grief to Distant Shores”.7 The joy Ivan Ilyich derived from work was a matter of ambition; the joy he derived from social occasions was a matter of vanity; his true joy lay in bridge. He readily admitted that, whatever may come, whatever unpleasantness might befall him in life, the joy that shone like a bright candle, brighter than all others, was to sit down to bridge with good players and soft-spoken partners—four in all (with five it was terribly unpleasant to sit out a hand, though one pretended to enjoy it)—and to play an intelligent, serious game (if the cards were in favour of it), followed by supper and a glass of wine. And after a game of bridge, especially if he had won a little (to win too large a sum is unseemly), Ivan Ilyich always went to bed in a particularly good mood.
Such was their life. Their social circle was of the finest sort; they were visited by significant people, and by the young.
Husband, wife and daughter were unanimous in their view of their social set and, without coordinating their efforts, systematically rid themselves of all sorts of bedraggled friends and relatives who flocked, full of tender endearments, into their drawing room, with its Japanese plates on the walls. Before long these bedraggled friends no longer came flocking and the Golovins were surrounded by only the best people. Young men came to call on Lizanka. Petrishchev, an examining magistrate and sole heir to his father Dmitry Ivanovich Petrishchev’s estate, had begun to court her, and Ivan Ilyich had already spoken with Praskovya Fyodorovna about arranging a sleigh ride for the pair, or perhaps a little performance. Such was their life. On it went, without change, and all was well.
IV
All were in good health. It could not be said that Ivan Ilyich was in poor health just because he sometimes complained of an odd taste in his mouth or felt discomfort in the left side of his stomach.
But then that discomfort began to increase, transforming not quite into pain, but into a constant feeling of heaviness in his side, accompanied by a bad mood. And this bad mood, growing worse and worse, began to spoil the pleasantly easy and decorous way of life that had all but established itself in the Golovin household. As husband and wife began to quarrel more and more frequently, the ease and pleasantness soon fell away; that left only decorum, and it too was hanging on by a thread. Scenes, once again, became a common occurrence. Once again, there remained only islets on which husband and wife could meet without an explosion, and these islets were few and far between.
Now Praskovya Fyodorovna could say with some justification that her husband had a bad temper. And being prone as she was to exaggeration, she claimed that his temper had always been this dreadful and that it had needed all her kindness to endure it these past twenty years. It was true that he now instigated the quarrels. The nagging always commenced right before dinner, and often just as he began to eat, over soup. He might find some flaw in the plates or dishes, or the meal might fail to please him, or he might not like that his son had put an elbow on the table or the way his daughter had done up her hair. In his eyes, Praskovya Fyodorovna was invariably to blame. When this had first started, she would object and say unpleasant things to him, but on a couple of occasions he had flown into such a rage at the beginning of dinner that she realized the cause was a painful reaction to the intake of food, and so she began to restrain herself; she no longer objected, only hurried to get through the meal. Praskovya Fyodorovna took great pride in her self-restraint. Having decided once and for all that her husband had a dreadful temper and, indeed, that he had brought about her life’s misfortune, she began to pity herself. And the more she pitied herself, the more she came to despise her husband. She began to wish him dead, but she could not really wish that, because it would mean the end of his salary. And this only fed her irritation against him. She considered herself terribly unfortunate precisely because even her husband’s death could not save her; and so she was irritated, concealed it, and her concealed irritation intensified his irritation.
After one scene during which Ivan Ilyich had been especially unfair and after which, in an attempt to explain himself, he had admitted that he was indeed irritable, but that this was due to illness, Praskovya Fyodorovna said that if he was ill, then he had to seek treatment, and demanded that he go and see a well-known physician.
He went. It was all exactly as he had expected it would be, exactly as it always is. There was the wait, the physician’s affected air of importance—so familiar to him, since he affected that very same air in court—the tapping and auscultation, the questions that called for prepared and evidently unnecessary answers, and an appearance of significance that suggested, You just submit yourself to us and we’ll arrange everything; we know full well, without a shadow of a doubt, how to arrange everything, for it is always the same, for every person. It was all exactly as it is in court. The well-known doctor affected the same air in his presence as he himself affected when looking down at the accused.
The doctor said: So-and-so indicates that inside of you there is such-and-such; but if it is not confirmed by an analysis of this-and-that, then we must assume you have such-and-such. If we assume such-and-such, then… and so on. For Ivan Ilyich, only one question mattered: was his condition dangerous or not? But the doctor ignored this inappropriate question. From the doctor’s point of view it was an idle question, not worth considering; the problem at hand was to weigh the probabilities of a floating kidney, chronic catarrh or a disease of the blind gut. This was not a question of Ivan Ilyich’s life and death, it was a dispute between a floating kidney and the blind gut. And right before Ivan Ilyich’s eyes, the doctor resolved this dispute quite brilliantly in favour of the blind gut, with the reservation that should the urine analysis provide new evidence the case would be reviewed. All this was precisely what Ivan Ilyich had himself done a thousand times, in just as brilliant a manner, when looking down at the accused. The doctor was also brilliant in summing up the case, glancing triumphantly, even cheerfully, over his spectacles at the accused. The summing-up led Ivan Ilyich to the conclusion that things looked bad—the doctor and, perhaps, everyone else—couldn’t be bothered, but for him things looked bad. And this conclusion came as a painful blow, arousing in him a feeling of great self-pity as well as of great anger towards this doctor, who was wholly indifferent to so important a question.
But he kept this to himself, rose, put money on the table and said with a sigh: “We patients probably often pose inappropriate questions. But I would like to know, is this illness dangerous or not?”
The doctor gave him a stern one-eyed glance through his spectacles, as if to say: If the accused refuses to stay within the bounds of the questions posed to him, I will be compelled to order him removed from the court.
“I have already told you what I consider necessary and expedient. The results of the analysis will tell us more.” And the doctor bowed.
Ivan Ilyich went out slowly, seated himself mournfully in his sleigh and drove home. He spent the entire journey going over all that the doctor had said, trying to translate all those tangled, obscure, scientific words into plain speech and to make out in them an answer to the question: Is it bad—is it very bad, or is there still nothing to worry about? And it seemed to him that the burden of what the doctor had said was that things were very bad. Everything in the streets
looked bleak to Ivan Ilyich. The cabmen and the houses, the passers-by and the shops—they were all bleak. And the pain, the dull, aching pain that never ceased for a moment, seemed to acquire a new, more serious meaning in connection with the doctor’s obscure words. Ivan Ilyich now monitored it closely with a new, oppressive feeling.
At home he began to tell his wife what had happened. She listened, but in the middle of his story their daughter came into the room with a hat on: the two women had been preparing to go out. The daughter took a seat and made an effort to listen to all this dreary talk, but she could not stand it long and her mother did not let him finish.
“Well, that’s all very good to hear,” she said. “Now you’ll just have to make sure to take your medicine on time. Give me the prescription and I’ll send Gerasim to the chemist’s.” With that she went out to get dressed.
He had hardly paused for breath while she was in the room, and now that she was gone he heaved a deep sigh.
“Well, then,” he said. “Maybe it really is nothing…”
He began to take his medicine and to follow the doctor’s instructions, which had changed in light of the urine analysis. But here there was some confusion, a contradiction between the results of the analysis and what was supposed to follow from these results. It was impossible to reach the doctor himself, but what Ivan Ilyich was experiencing was not what the doctor had told him he would experience. The doctor had either forgotten, or lied, or was concealing something from him.
Nevertheless, Ivan Ilyich began to follow his instructions in every detail and at first found comfort in doing so.
After his visit to the doctor, Ivan Ilyich’s primary occupation became the exact execution of the doctor’s instructions regarding hygiene and the taking of medicine, as well as the monitoring of his pain and of all his bodily functions. Ivan Ilyich’s primary interests were now human illnesses and human health. Whenever he heard mention of someone falling ill, or dying, or recovering—especially when it concerned a disease similar to his own—he would listen closely, trying to conceal his agitation and would ask many questions, applying all that he heard to himself.
Ivan Ilyich’s pain did not decrease, but he made an effort to force himself to think that he was better. And he would manage to deceive himself, so long as nothing unnerved him. But as soon as he faced any sort of unpleasantness with his wife, difficulty at work or a run of bad cards at bridge, his illness would make itself felt in full force. In the past he could withstand such difficulties, remaining confident in his power to set things right, win the day, attain success, make a grand slam—but now they knocked him off his feet and plunged him into despair. He would say to himself: Just as I was starting to recover, just when the medicine was taking effect, this damned reversal… And he grew angry at the misfortune or at the people who were causing him trouble, who were killing him, and he could feel that the anger itself was killing him but he could not restrain it. It seems it should have been clear to him that his exasperation at circumstances and people aggravated his illness, and that he should therefore ignore all these unpleasant incidents, but his mind came to a wholly different conclusion: he said he needed peace, kept a close eye on anything that might disturb that peace and grew irritated at the slightest disturbance. His situation was made worse by the fact that he read medical books and consulted doctors. The deterioration of his condition was so gradual that he could deceive himself by comparing one day to another—there was hardly any difference. But when he consulted doctors, it seemed to him that he was indeed getting worse, and rather quickly too. Yet he consulted them constantly.
That month he visited another celebrity who told him almost the same thing as the first celebrity but put his questions differently. The consultation with this second celebrity only worsened Ivan Ilyich’s doubts and fears. A friend of a friend—a very fine doctor—determined his illness to be something else entirely, and although he promised a full recovery, his questions and assumptions confused Ivan Ilyich still further and increased his doubts. A homeopath made another diagnosis and offered medicine that Ivan Ilyich took for a full week, in secret. But when the week had passed, Ivan Ilyich felt no relief. He lost faith both in this and in all his previous treatments, sinking deeper in despair. One time a lady acquaintance of his was saying something about healing with the aid of icons. Ivan Ilyich caught himself listening attentively and coming to believe in the reality of this phenomenon. The incident frightened him. Has my mind really gone this soft? he asked himself. Absolute nonsense! No, I won’t give in to anxiety—I must choose one doctor and follow his course of treatment to the end. That’s exactly what I’ll do. No more of this. I won’t think about it—I’ll simply follow one course of treatment until the summer. Then we’ll see. For now, no more dithering! This was easy to say but impossible to do. The pain in his side was agonizing; it seemed to grow worse and worse, becoming constant. The taste in his mouth became ever more strange and it seemed to him that his breath stank of something awful. He was losing his appetite and his strength. He could no longer deceive himself: something terrifying, new and more significant than anything Ivan Ilyich had ever experienced in his whole life was transpiring within him. And he alone knew it. Everyone around him either did not understand or did not wish to understand, believing that all was going on as usual. This was what tormented Ivan Ilyich most. He saw that the members of his household—especially his wife and daughter, who were in the very midst of the busiest social season—understood nothing and were annoyed that he was so dispirited and demanding, as if this were his fault. Although they tried to hide it, he saw that he was a nuisance to them but that his wife had developed a definite attitude towards his illness and maintained it regardless of what he said or did. That attitude was the following:
“You know,” she would say to acquaintances, “Ivan Ilyich simply can’t do as decent people do and follow the course of treatment prescribed to him. Today he might take his drops, eat what he’s told to eat, and go to bed in good time. But the next day, if I take my eyes off him for a moment, he’ll forget to take his drops, will eat sturgeon—strictly forbidden—and will stay up playing cards till one o’clock in the morning.”
“Oh, come now, how often has that happened?” Ivan Ilyich would ask, rather chagrined. “Just that one time at Pyotr Ivanovich’s.”
“And last night with Shebek.”
“I couldn’t sleep anyway, because of the pain.”
“Excuses, excuses… The point is you’ll never get better this way and will go on tormenting us.”
Praskovya Fyodorovna’s external attitude towards her husband’s illness, which she expressed both to others and to Ivan Ilyich, was that her husband had only himself to blame, and that it was merely a new source of trouble for his wife. Ivan Ilyich felt that these thoughts escaped her involuntarily, but that did not make things any easier for him.
And in court Ivan Ilyich also noticed, or thought he noticed, a strange attitude towards himself: sometimes he sensed he was being watched as a person who was soon to vacate his place; and then, all of a sudden, his closest colleagues might begin to poke good-natured fun at his hypochondria, as if that awful, frightening, unheard-of entity that had lodged itself inside him—that was incessantly gnawing away at him, irresistibly dragging him off towards some unknown fate—was the most pleasant subject for a joke. Ivan Ilyich was especially irritated by Schwartz, whose playfulness, vitality and unfaltering savoir faire reminded him of himself ten years before.
His friends come for a game and sit down to play. They deal the cards, breaking in a new deck. He finds he has seven diamonds. His partner says “no trumps” and supports him with two diamonds. What else could he possibly want? He has every reason to be cheerful—a grand slam. But then comes that gnawing pain, that taste in his mouth, and it begins to seem absurd that he should find pleasure in a grand slam under these circumstances.
He watches Mikhail Mikhaylovich, his partner, who raps the table with a ruddy hand and politely, con
descendingly refrains from gathering up the tricks, instead nudging them towards Ivan Ilyich, so as to give him the pleasure of collecting them without having to stretch out his hand. What, does he think me too weak to stretch out my hand? Ivan Ilyich wonders, forgetting the trumps and over-trumping his own, thereby losing the grand slam by three tricks. And the most dreadful part is that he sees how all this upsets Mikhail Mikhaylovich, but to him none of it matters. And it is horrifying to consider why none of it matters.
They all see that he is struggling and so they tell him: “We don’t have to go on if you’re tired. You need your rest.” Rest? No, he is not at all tired and they finish the rubber. All are gloomy and silent. Ivan Ilyich feels that it is he who has cast this gloom over them and he cannot dispel it. They dine and depart, and Ivan Ilyich remains alone with the knowledge that his life has been poisoned and now poisons the lives of others, and that this poison does not weaken but penetrates ever deeper, permeating his entire being.
And with this knowledge, as well as the physical pain, as well as the horror, he had to go to bed and, frequently, lie awake, suffering, most of the night. The next morning he would have to rise again, dress, go to court, speak, write—or, perhaps, stay at home in the company of the same twenty-four hours of the day, every last one of which was torture. And he was forced to live this way, on the brink of annihilation, all alone, with not a single person to understand and pity him.