by Leo Tolstoy
V
So one month passed, then another. Just before the New Year his brother-in-law came to town and stayed at their place. Ivan Ilyich was in court when he arrived and Praskovya Fyodorovna was out shopping. When Ivan Ilyich returned and entered his study, he found his brother-in-law—a healthy, sanguine fellow—unpacking his suitcase by himself. He raised his head at the sound of Ivan Ilyich’s footsteps and, for a moment, gazed at him in silence. For Ivan Ilyich, this gaze revealed everything. His brother-in-law opened his mouth and nearly gasped, but checked himself in time. That confirmed it.
“I’ve changed, yes?”
“Yes… there is a change.”
And after that, no matter how much Ivan Ilyich tried to turn the conversation back to the matter of his physical appearance, his brother-in-law refused to say more. Praskovya Fyodorovna returned and the brother-in-law went out to greet her. Ivan Ilyich locked the door and began to examine himself in the mirror, first from the front, then from the side. He picked up a photograph of himself with Praskovya Fyodorovna and began to compare the portrait with what he saw in the mirror. The change was immense. Then he bared his arms up to the elbow, took a look, pulled his sleeves down again, lowered himself onto the ottoman and grew blacker than the night.
No, you mustn’t let yourself… he thought, jumped up, went to the table, opened a brief and tried to read it—but he could not. He unlocked the door and went into the reception room. The door to the drawing room was closed. He sneaked up to it on tiptoe and listened.
“No, you’re exaggerating,” Praskovya Fyodorovna was saying.
“Exaggerating? Can’t you see? He’s a dead man… Just look at his eyes—the light’s gone. What is it that he’s got, exactly?”
“No one knows. Nikolayev (this was another doctor) said something, but I don’t know. Leshchetitsky (the well-known doctor) doesn’t agree…”
Ivan Ilyich stepped away from the door, walked to his room, lay down and began to think: A kidney. A floating kidney. He remembered everything that the doctors had told him—how the kidney had come loose, how it was floating about. And by an effort of imagination he tried to catch this kidney, to stop it and fasten it in place; it seemed so little was needed to do so. No, I’ll go to see Pyotr Ivanovich. (This was the friend who was friends with the doctor.) He rang, ordered his sleigh and got ready to go.
“Jean, where are you going?” his wife asked in an especially mournful and unusually kind manner.
This unusual kindness exasperated him. He looked at her sullenly.
“I must go to Pyotr Ivanovich’s.”
He went to see his friend who was friends with the doctor. Then they both went to see the doctor. The doctor was in and he had a long consultation with Ivan Ilyich.
Going over the anatomical and physiological details of what, according to the doctor, was occurring within him, he understood everything.
There was one little thing, a tiny thing, in his blind gut. It could all be set right. If he were to stimulate the energy of one organ and weaken the activity of another, absorption would occur and all would be set right. He was a bit late for dinner. He ate, spoke gaily, but for a long time could not force himself back to his desk. At last he went off to his study and busied himself. He read briefs, did his work, but he could not rid himself of the sense that he was deferring an important, intimate matter to which he would return when all else was done. And when he had finished his work he remembered that this intimate matter was the thought of his blind gut. But he did not give in to it and instead went to the drawing room for tea. They had guests, including the examining magistrate whom the daughter wished to marry, and there was much talking, playing the piano, singing. Throughout the evening Ivan Ilyich was, as Praskovya Fyodorovna remarked, more cheerful than anyone, but he did not for a moment forget that he had deferred the important thought of the blind gut. At eleven o’clock he said goodnight and went to his bedroom. He had been sleeping alone since he fell ill, in a small room next to his study. He entered, undressed and took up a novel by Zola, but he did not read it; instead, he gave himself over to thought. In his imagination, the desired correction of the blind gut was taking place—the absorption, the expulsion, the restoration of normal functioning. Yes, that’s the way, he told himself. Simply a matter of assisting nature. He remembered his medicine, got up, took it and lay down on his back, paying close attention to the medicine’s healthful effect, its destruction of pain. Simply a matter of taking it regularly and avoiding harmful influences. I feel a bit better already, much better. He began to palpate his abdomen—it was no longer painful to the touch. I don’t feel a thing—yes, much better. He put out the candle and turned on his side… The blind gut was correcting itself, absorbing. But then he felt it: that old, familiar, dull, gnawing pain—silent, stubborn and serious. And in his mouth he felt that same disgusting taste. His heart sank and his head began to spin. “My God, my God,” he muttered. “Again, again—and it will never stop.” And suddenly the question presented itself quite differently. Blind gut! Kidney, he told himself. This isn’t a matter of the blind gut or kidney, it’s a matter of life and… death. Yes, I had life in me, and now it is leaving, leaving, and I cannot hold on to it. Yes. Why deceive myself? Is it not obvious to all but me that I am dying? That it’s only a question of weeks, of days—maybe now? There was light and now there is darkness. I was here and now I am there… Where? An icy coldness swept over him and his breath stopped. He heard only the beating of his heart.
I’ll be gone—and what then? Nothing. So where will I go, where will I be? Is this… is this death? No, no… He started up in bed, fumbled with trembling hands for the candle, dropped it on the floor and fell back on the pillow. What’s the use? It doesn’t matter, he told himself, staring into the darkness with wide-open eyes. Death. Yes, death. And not one of them knows it—not one of them wants to know, wants to take pity. They’re playing. (He heard the distant sound of singing with accompaniment from behind the door.) They don’t care—but they’ll die too. The fools. I’ll die before them, but they too will die, they’ll die all the same. And listen to them enjoying themselves… Beasts. He choked with malice and felt crushed by a terrible, unbearable weight. Is it possible that everyone was doomed to suffer this dreadful horror? He sat up.
No, something’s not right. I must calm down, think things over from the beginning. And he began thinking. Yes, the start of my illness. I bumped my side and not much changed, that day and the next; it ached a little, then a bit more, then the doctors, dejection, depression, more doctors… And the whole time I was getting closer, closer to the abyss. Losing my strength… Getting closer, closer… And here I am, wasted away. The light is gone from my eyes. And this is death—but I’m thinking about my gut. I’m thinking about repairing my gut—but this is death. Is it? Is it really death? And again he was seized with horror. Gasping for breath, he bent down and began to hunt for matches, pressing his elbow against the nightstand. The nightstand was in his way; it hurt him. He grew annoyed with it, angry, and pressed against it more forcefully, knocking it over. Panting in despair, he fell on his back, expecting death to come at once.
The guests were leaving then and Praskovya Fyodorovna was seeing them off. She heard the thud and entered his room.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. It was an accident.”
She went out and brought in a candle. He lay there, breathing heavily, rapidly, like a man who had run a mile, and stared up at her with unmoving eyes.
“Jean, what is it?”
“No…thing. An… acci…dent.” (What sense is there in telling her? he thought. She’d never understand.)
And indeed, she understood nothing. She picked up the nightstand, lit his candle and hurried away to see another guest off.
When she returned he was in the same position, lying on his back, staring up.
“What’s the matter? Are you feeling worse?”
“Yes.”
She shook her head
and sat down next to him.
“You know, Jean, I think we should ask Leshchetitsky to come and see you.”
This meant that they should call in a well-known doctor, never mind the cost. He gave her a venomous smile and said: “No.” She sat a while longer, then went over and kissed him on the forehead.
He hated her with every fibre of his being as she kissed him and had to force himself not to push her away.
“Good night. God willing, you’ll get some sleep.”
“Yes.”
VI
Ivan Ilyich saw that he was dying, and he was in constant despair.
Deep down, Ivan Ilyich knew that he was dying, but he not only failed to accustom himself to this fact, he simply did not and could not understand it.
That syllogism he had studied in Kiesewetter’s Logic8—“Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal”—had seemed to him throughout his whole life to be correct only in relation to Caius, but certainly not to himself. That was the case for the man Caius, man in the abstract, and it was perfectly just—but he himself was not Caius, not man in the abstract. He had always been an entirely unique being, quite separate from all others; he was Vanya—Vanya with his mama, his papa, with Mitya and Volodya, with his toys, the coachman, his nanny and then with Katenka, with all the joys, griefs and raptures of childhood, boyhood and youth. What had Caius to do with the smell of that striped leather ball which Vanya had loved so much? Was it Caius who had kissed Mother’s hand like that, and had the silk of her dress rustled in that special way for Caius? Had Caius led the charge for better pastries in law school? Did Caius fall so deeply in love? Was Caius capable of presiding over a session with such dignity?
Yes, Caius is definitely mortal, and it’s right that he should die, but me, Vanya, Ivan Ilyich, with all my feelings, my thoughts—no, with me it’s different. It is impossible that I should die. That would be too horrible.
That was how he felt.
If I were meant to die like Caius, then I would have known it—my inner voice would have told me so. But I sensed nothing, nothing of the sort. All my friends and I, we understood that with us things stood differently, that we were not like Caius. And now this, he thought. No, it can’t be. It can’t—but it is. How? How am I to understand it?
Indeed he could not understand it and so he tried to reject the thought as false, incorrect, unhealthy, and to supplant it with different, correct, healthy thoughts. Yet the thought—and not only the thought, it seemed, but the reality of it—kept returning again and again to confront him.
And in place of the thought he would call up a series of other thoughts, seeking in them a crutch. He tried to revert to his old ways of thinking, which had previously obscured the thought of death. But, strangely enough, all that had previously obscured, concealed, destroyed his awareness of death no longer had the power to do so. In recent days, Ivan Ilyich spent most of his time attempting to restore those old modes of feeling that had once obscured death. He would say to himself: I’ll go back to work. After all, I used to live by it. And so, dismissing all doubts, he would go to court. There he would engage his colleagues in conversation, take his seat and survey the crowd in his customary manner, absentminded, meditative, leaning both his emaciated arms on the arms of the oaken chair; as usual, he would bend towards his colleague, draw his papers nearer and exchange whispers, then, suddenly raising his eyes and sitting up straight, he would pronounce those well-known words and open the proceedings. But then, midway through the session, with no regard for the stage the proceedings had reached, the pain in his side would proceed with its own gnawing work. Ivan Ilyich would attend to the pain, would try to banish the thought of it, but the pain would go on about its work and it would return to confront him, staring straight at him—and he would be petrified, the spark would die out from his eyes and he would again ask himself: Can it really be the only truth? And his colleagues and subordinates would look on with surprise and dismay as he, a brilliant, subtle judge, grew confused and made mistakes. He would shake himself, try to come to his senses and would somehow bring the session to a close. And then he would return home, depressingly aware that his judicial work could no longer conceal from him, as it had always done before, what he so wished to conceal; his judicial work could not rid him of it. And worst of all, it drew his attention towards itself not so that he might do something about it, but only that he should look at it, stare straight into its eyes—that he should look at it, do nothing and suffer unspeakably.
To protect himself from this suffering, Ivan Ilyich looked for solace, for other screens; such screens were found and, for a short time, seemed to protect him, but all at once they would not so much crumble as turn transparent, as if it were able to penetrate anything and nothing could obscure it.
At times, of late, he would go into the drawing room he had decorated—the drawing room where he had fallen and for the sake of which (how bitterly absurd it now seemed) he had sacrificed his life, for he knew that his illness had begun with that bruise—he would go in and spot, say, a scratch on the lacquered table. He would search for the cause of the scratch and find it in the bronze ornamentation of an album, the edge of which had been bent. He would take up the expensive album, which he had compiled with love and care, and grow irritated at the negligence of his daughter and her friends—pages torn, photographs turned upside down. He would diligently set things right, bending the ornamentation back into place.
Then it would occur to him that the entire établissement with the albums ought to be placed in another corner, where the flowers were. He would call the footman, but either his wife or daughter could come to help; they would disagree with him, contradict him and he would argue, grow angry—yet all was well because it was forgotten, it was out of sight.
But then, as he was moving something himself, his wife would say: “Let the servants do it. You’ll just hurt yourself again.” And suddenly it would flash through the screen. He would catch sight of it—just a flash, so there was still hope that it might disappear, but, despite himself, he would turn his attention to his side: and there the thing was, gnawing away. And now he could no longer forget; now it was clearly staring at him from behind the flowers. Why bother at all?
Is it true? Did I really lose my life here, on this curtain, as at the storming of some fort? How terrible and how foolish… No, it can’t be true, it can’t… But it is.
He would go to his study, lie down and again be alone with it—face to face with it. And there was nothing to do with it but to look at it and grow cold.
VII
How this came about it was impossible to say, because it happened step by step, imperceptibly, but what happened was this: in the third month of Ivan Ilyich’s illness, his wife, his daughter, his son, his servants, his acquaintances, his doctors and, most importantly, he himself became aware that the only thing about him that was of interest to others was whether he would soon, at long last, vacate his place, liberate the living from the embarrassment caused by his presence and be himself liberated from his sufferings.
He slept less and less. He was given opium and, later, injections of morphine, but this did not relieve him. The dull depression he would experience in a state of half-sleep at first only brought him relief as something new, but then it became just as excruciating as the undisguised pain, perhaps even more so.
Special foods were prepared for him on doctors’ orders, but he found these foods ever more tasteless, ever more disgusting.
Special arrangements were also made for his evacuations and this proved a torment every time—a torment due to the filth, the indecency and the smell, and due to the consciousness that another person had to take part in it.
Yet it was through this most unpleasant affair that Ivan Ilyich found a degree of comfort. Gerasim, the butler’s helper, always came in to take the things away.
Gerasim was a clean, fresh peasant lad, grown stout on town fare—always cheerful, always bright. At first the sight of this fello
w in his clean peasant garb performing that nasty task perturbed Ivan Ilyich.
One time he rose from the vessel and, too weak to lift up his trousers, collapsed into a soft armchair and stared with horror at his naked, feeble thighs, their muscles standing out in such sharp relief.
Gerasim walked in with light, firm steps, filling the room with the pleasant scent of the tar from his thick boots and of fresh winter air, wearing a clean hempen apron and a clean cotton shirt, with its sleeves rolled up over his strong young forearms; and without looking at Ivan Ilyich—evidently holding back the joy of life that shone on his face, so as not to offend the sick man—he approached the vessel.
“Gerasim,” Ivan Ilyich called out in a weak voice.
Gerasim winced, evidently afraid that he had made some sort of mistake, and with a quick movement turned his fresh, kind, simple young face, which was just beginning to sprout whiskers, towards the sick man.
“Yes, sir?”
“This must be very unpleasant for you. I’m sorry. I have no choice.”
“For goodness’ sake, sir.” Gerasim’s eyes sparkled and he bared his young white teeth. “Why shouldn’t I do a little work? You’ve got a case of sickness.”
With deft, strong hands he performed his usual task and went out, stepping lightly. Five minutes later, stepping just as lightly, he returned.
Ivan Ilyich had not moved from the armchair.
“Gerasim,” he said, after the lad had set down the freshly washed vessel. “Please come here, help me.” Gerasim approached. “Lift me up. It’s hard for me to do it by myself, and I’ve sent Dmitry away.”