The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Master and Man

by Leo Tolstoy

  He drove home to tell his wife. She was going to hear him out, but in the middle of his account his daughter came in with her hat on: she was about to go out with her mother. With an effort she sat down to listen to this tedious stuff, could not contain herself for long, and her mother stopped listening.

  “Well, I’m delighted,” said Praskovya Feodorovna. “Now mind you take the medicine properly. Give me the prescription and I’ll send Gerasim to the chemist.” And she went to put her coat on.

  He had not paused for breath while she was in the room, and sighed heavily when she left.

  “Well, who knows,” he said. “Maybe it really is nothing much.”

  He began taking the medicines and followed the doctor’s directions, which changed after the urine analysis. But then, immediately, there was some sort of muddle over the analysis and consequent instructions. The doctor could not be reached, and it turned out that Ivan Ilyich was not doing what the doctor had ordered. Either the doctor had forgotten something, or lied about something, or concealed something from him.

  Nevertheless, Ivan Ilyich began following the instructions meticulously, and even found some comfort in this at first.

  After the visit to the doctor Ivan Ilyich’s main occupation became the precise fulfillment of his recommendations about hygiene, taking his medicine, and the attentive observation of his pain and all his bodily functions. His chief interests were people’s ailments and people’s health. When others spoke in his presence about sicknesses, deaths, recoveries, and particularly about illnesses similar to his own, he tried to hide his anxiety, listening intently, questioning closely, and finding similarities to his own condition.

  The pain grew no less, but Ivan Ilyich made great efforts forcibly to persuade himself that he felt better. And he was able to deceive himself so long as nothing upset him. But as soon as there was a disagreement with his wife, or something went wrong at work, or he had a bad hand at cards, he promptly felt the full force of the disease. In the past he met failure with sanguine expectation—I can put it right in a trice, I’ll get the better of him, I’ll wait for success, for a grand slam. But now with every failure he lost heart and despaired. He said to himself, “I was just getting better; the medicine was finally beginning to work—and now this dratted misfortune, this damned unpleasantness. . . .” And he raged against the mishap, or the people responsible for it who were killing him, and he could feel his own anger killing him but was unable to restrain himself. You might think he should have realized that his fury against people and circumstances aggravated his illness and consequently he should avoid paying attention to any unpleasantnesses, but his reasoning went the opposite way—he said he needed peace of mind, scrutinized everything that might disrupt his peace of mind, and the slightest disruption infuriated him. His situation was exacerbated by reading medical textbooks and seeking advice from doctors. The deterioration continued so smoothly he was able to deceive himself when he compared one day to the next—there was little difference. But when he asked for medical advice it seemed to him that everything was getting worse, and very quickly, too. And yet he continued to consult the doctors, regardless.

  That month he went to another eminent specialist, and that eminence said almost the same as the first one but posed the questions slightly differently. The advice of this eminence only intensified Ivan Ilyich’s doubts and fears. A friend of a friend—a very good doctor—diagnosed his illness completely differently, and even though he promised recovery, his questions and hypotheses further confused Ivan Ilyich and confirmed his doubts. A homeopath identified his illness in yet another way and gave him some medicine, which Ivan Ilyich took in secret for a week. But when he felt no improvement after a week he lost faith in that cure and all the others, and fell into even profounder gloom. On one occasion a lady of his acquaintance told him about healing icons. Ivan Ilyich caught himself listening attentively and crediting her facts. This episode frightened him. “Can I really have gone so weak in the head?” he thought. “What rubbish! It’s all nonsense. I mustn’t give in to hypochondria. I must choose one doctor and keep strictly to his course of treatment. That’s what I’ll do. There’s an end of it. I’ll stop thinking and stick strictly to one cure till the summer. And then we’ll see. Enough of this dithering.” It was easy to say, and impossible to do. The pain in his side kept wearing him down and seemed to be getting steadily more sustained and severe. The taste in his mouth grew more and more peculiar; it felt to him as though some revolting smell was coming out of his mouth, and his strength and appetite were both diminishing. He could not deceive himself: something terrifying, new, and incomparably significant—more significant than anything in Ivan Ilyich’s previous life—was taking place inside him. And he was the only one who knew about it. Everyone around him did not understand, or did not want to understand, and thought that everything in the world was going on as usual. This was what tormented Ivan Ilyich more than anything. The people at home—principally his wife and daughter, who were caught up in a positive whirl of visits—understood nothing, as he could see, and were irritated by how demanding and cheerless he was, as though this were his fault. Even though they tried to disguise it, he could see that he was a hindrance to them, but that his wife had worked out a definite response to his illness and stuck to it in spite of anything he might say or do. Her approach went like this: “You know,” she would say to their acquaintances, “Ivan Ilyich can’t follow a course of treatment strictly, like any other self-respecting person. One day he takes the drops and eats what he’s ordered, and goes to bed in good time, and the next day, if I don’t keep an eye on him, he forgets to take anything, eats sturgeon (which is against the doctor’s orders), and, what’s more, stays up for a game of vint till one in the morning.”

  “Oh come, when was that?” Ivan Ilyich says in vexation. “Only once, at Piotr Ivanovich’s.”

  “And yesterday at Shebek’s.”

  “What difference did that make? I couldn’t sleep for pain.”

  “What nonsense. Whatever you say, you’ll never get well like this—you’ll just go on making us miserable.”

  Praskovya Feodorovna’s attitude to her husband’s illness, which she expressed quite openly to others and himself, was that Ivan Ilyich was to blame for his illness and the whole illness was a new unpleasantness he was inflicting on his wife. Ivan Ilyich felt that she let this slip involuntarily, but it made matters no easier for him.

  At court Ivan Ilyich also noticed, or thought he noticed, the same curious attitude toward him. Sometimes he thought people were eyeing him like a man soon to vacate his post, and then his friends would suddenly start teasing him for being morbid—as though that terrible, terrifying, unheard-of thing infesting him from within, incessantly sucking away at him and irresistibly dragging him off somewhere, were the most delightful topic for a joke. He was particularly irritated by Schwartz’s lively, comme-il-faut playfulness, which reminded Ivan Ilyich of himself ten years ago.

  His friends would come over for a game of cards, and sit down. The new packs were fanned, shuffled, and dealt; Ivan Ilyich sorted his hand into suits. Seven diamonds. His partner said, “No trumps,” and led with the two of diamonds. What more could he want? Delightful, capital it should have been—they would make a grand slam. And suddenly Ivan Ilyich feels that pain sucking away at him, that taste in his mouth, and it seems grotesque to him that in the midst of this he could feel pleased by a grand slam.

  He steals a glance at his partner, Mikhail Mikhailovich, who raps the tabletop with an energetic hand and courteously, indulgently restrains himself from snatching up the tricks, moving them across to Ivan Ilyich instead, giving him the pleasure of collecting them without incommoding himself, barely stretching out his hand. “What does he think I am, so feeble I can’t even stretch my hand out?” thinks Ivan Ilyich. And he forgets the trumps,25 trumps his partner’s winning card, misses the grand slam by three tricks, and—which is worse than everything—sees how upset Mikhail Mikhailovi
ch is, while he doesn’t care. And it is dreadful to think what it is that makes him not care.

  Everyone sees it is difficult for him, and they say, “Why don’t we stop, if you’re tired? Have a rest.” A rest? No, no, he’s not in the least tired; they must finish the rubber. Everyone is silent and gloomy. Ivan Ilyich feels as though he has let this misery loose on them and can’t dispel it. They dine together and go their ways, and Ivan Ilyich is left alone in the knowledge that his life is poisoned and poisons the lives of others and that this poison does not diminish, but permeates his whole existence more and more profoundly.

  With this knowledge, and with his physical pain, and with his terror beyond that, he had to go to bed and often lie most of the night sleepless from pain. And then in the morning he had to get up again, get dressed, drive off to court, speak and write, or, if he did not go to work, he had to sit out those twenty-four hours of every day at home, of which every minute was a torment. And he had to live in this way, on the very edge of destruction, without a single being who might understand and pity him.

  5

  So one month passed, and another. Just before the new year his brother-in-law came to town to stay with them. Ivan Ilyich was in court. Praskovya Feodorovna was out shopping. When Ivan Ilyich returned, he found his brother-in-law, a healthy, ruddy-faced man, unpacking his case in Ivan Ilyich’s study. Hearing Ivan Ilyich’s footsteps, he lifted his head and glanced at him in silence for a few moments. For Ivan Ilyich that look made everything clear. His brother-in-law opened his mouth to gasp, and just stopped himself. That movement confirmed it all.

  “What, have I changed?”

  “Yes . . . there is a change.”

  And however hard Ivan Ilyich tried to turn the conversation to his appearance, his brother-in-law said nothing. Praskovya Feodorovna returned home, and her brother went to her quarters. Ivan Ilyich locked his study door and started scrutinizing himself in the mirror—full face first, then from the side. He picked up the portrait photograph of himself with his wife and compared it with what he saw in the glass. The change was enormous. Then he bared his arms to the elbow, looked at them, rolled down his sleeves, sat down on the ottoman, and grew black as night.

  “No, no; I mustn’t,” he said to himself, jumped up, went to his desk, took out his papers, and started reading them, but could not. He unlocked his door and went out into the hall. The door to the sitting room was shut. He tiptoed up to it and started listening.

  “Nonsense, you’re exaggerating,” Praskovya Feodorovna was saying.

  “What do you mean, exaggerating? You can’t see it—he’s a dead man, look at his eyes. There’s no light in them. What’s wrong with him, anyway?”

  “No one knows. Nikolayev”—that was another doctor—“said something, but I don’t know. Leschititsky”—that was the famous doctor—“said the opposite. . . .”

  Ivan Ilyich withdrew, went into his study, lay down, and began thinking “the kidney, the floating kidney.” He remembered everything the doctors had told him, how the kidney had torn loose and was floating about. And with all the force of his imagination he tried to catch his kidney, pin it down, and stop it wandering. So little was needed, it seemed to him. “No; I’ll go back to Piotr Ivanovich.” (That was the friend who had a doctor friend.) He rang, ordered the horse to be harnessed to the sleigh, and prepared to leave.

  “Where are you going, Jean26?” his wife asked, with a particularly sad and uncharacteristically kind expression.

  Her uncharacteristic gentleness riled him. He looked at her sourly.

  “I have to go to Piotr Ivanovich.”

  He drove off to his friend who had the friend who was a doctor. And with him he drove to the doctor. He found him in and had a long talk with him.

  Reviewing the anatomical and physiological details of what the doctor thought was going on inside him, Ivan Ilyich understood it all.

  There was some little thing, a minute little something, in the blind gut. It could all get better. It was just a matter of increasing the energy of one organ and diminishing the activity of another; absorption would take place and everything would get better. He was a little late for dinner, ate and talked cheerfully, but for a long time could not go to his room to work. Finally he went into his study and promptly sat down to his files. He read them, worked at them, but the consciousness that he had postponed an important, intimate business he would deal with as soon as he finished, did not leave him. When he finished his papers, he remembered that this intimate business was to think about his blind gut. But he did not succumb; he went into the drawing room for tea. There were guests; people were talking and playing the piano; there was singing; the examining magistrate, the desirable match for his daughter, was there. Praskovya Feodorovna observed that Ivan Ilyich spent the evening more cheerfully than anyone, but he did not forget for a minute that he had laid aside important thoughts about his blind gut. At eleven o’clock he excused himself and went to his quarters. Since the beginning of his illness he had been sleeping alone in a small room off his study. He entered, undressed, took up a novel by Zola, but instead of reading it he thought. And in his imagination the desired correction of his blind gut came about. Absorption was taking place; evacuation occurred, correct functioning was reestablished. “Yes, that’s how it should be,” he thought; “we just have to give nature a hand.” He remembered his medicine, sat up, took it, lay on his back, and attended to how the medicine was putting things right and diminishing his pain. “I just have to take it steadily and avoid adverse influences; even now I feel a little better—a lot better.” He began pinching his side and it did not hurt from the pinch. “Yes, I can’t feel it; it really is a lot better already.” He blew out his candle and lay on his side. The blind gut was setting itself right; it was becoming absorbed. Suddenly he felt the familiar old, dull, gnawing pain, stubborn, quiet, and grave. The familiar disgusting stuff in his mouth. His heart contracted, his head clouded. “My God! My God!” he said. “Again, and again, and it will never end.” And suddenly the whole thing appeared to him in a different light. “Blind gut! Kidney!” he said to himself. “It’s not a matter of the blind gut or the kidney but of life and . . . death. Yes, there was life and now it’s going, it’s going, and I can’t hold it back. Yes. Why should I deceive myself? Isn’t it obvious to everyone except me that I’m dying, and it’s only a question of how many weeks, days—even now, maybe. There was light, and now it’s dark. I was here, and now I’m going there! Where?” A chill ran through him; his breathing stopped. He could hear only the beating of his heart.

  “I’ll be no more, and then what will there be? Nothing. Then where will I be, when I will be no longer? Is this really death? Go away, I don’t want you.” He sat upright, wanting to light his candle, fumbled with trembling hands, dropped candle and candlestick on the floor, and fell back on his pillow. “What for? It doesn’t make any difference,” he said to himself, staring with open eyes into the dark. “Death. Yes, death. And none of them know, and none of them want to know, and none of them are sorry. They’re having fun.” (From beyond his door he heard the distant sound of voices and a musical ritornello.) “They don’t care, but they’ll die just like me. Idiocy. Sooner for me, later for them, but it will come. And they’re happy. Mindless brutes!” He was choked with resentment. And he grew agonizingly, unbearably sick at heart. It cannot be that everyone, always, is doomed to this awful horror. He sat up.

  “Something’s wrong. I must calm down and think everything through from the beginning.” And he started thinking it out. “Yes, there was the beginning of the illness. I knocked my side, but was the same before and after; it ached a bit, and then a bit more, and then there were doctors, and then depression, dreariness, doctors again, and I kept coming closer and closer to the abyss. Less strength. Closer and closer. And here I am, wasted away, no light in my eyes. This is death, and I’m thinking about my gut. I’m thinking about putting my kidney right, and this is death. Can this really be death?” Panic
overcame him again, he lost his breath, bent over to look for matches, and knocked his elbow on the bedside table. The table got in his way and hurt him; he lost his temper, pushed it harder in his vexation, and knocked it over. And, in despair, barely able to breathe, he fell back expecting instant death.

  At this time the guests were taking their leave. Praskovya Feodorovna was seeing them out. She heard something fall and came in.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. I dropped it, by accident.”

  She went out and came back with a candle. He lay there, breathing fast and hard, like a man who has run a mile, looking at her with a fixed stare.

  “What is it, Jean?”

  “N—nothing. I . . . dro—dropped it. . . .” (Why bother to say? She won’t understand, he thought.)

  Certainly she did not understand. She picked up his candle, lit it, and left hastily; there was a last guest to see to.

  When she returned, he was still lying on his back, staring above him.

  “What is it; are you worse?”

  “Yes.”

  She shook her head and sat by him awhile.

  “You know, Jean, I’m wondering whether we should get Leschititsky to visit you here.”

  That meant calling out the famous doctor without a thought for the expense. He smiled poisonously and said, “No.” She sat a little longer, went up to him, and kissed him on the forehead.