The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Master and Man

by Leo Tolstoy

  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?”

  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!”

  12

  From that minute began the three days of unremitted screaming, so dreadful it could not be heard beyond two closed doors without horror. The moment he answered his wife, he understood that he was lost, there was no return, the end had come, the very end, but still his doubt had not been resolved and remained a doubt.

  “Oh!” he cried in various intonations. “Ouh! Ouuuh!” He had started by screaming, “no!” and went on screaming “ouuuh.”

  Throughout those three days, when time had ceased to exist for him, he floundered in the black sack that an unseen, irresistible power was forcing him into. He struggled as a man condemned to death struggles in the hands of the executioner, knowing he cannot save himself, and with every minute he felt that in spite of all his labor, he was coming closer and closer to the thing that terrified him. He felt his agony came from his being thrust into the black hole, and even more from his inability to crawl into it. And the belief that
his life had been good prevented him crawling into it. It was this very justification of his life that plucked him back, held him tight, and tormented him most of all.

  Suddenly some kind of force jolted him in the chest, in his side, stifled his breath even harder; he tumbled into the hole, and there, at the end of it, something glimmered. He experienced that sensation he sometimes got in a railway carriage, when you think you are moving forward while actually going backward, and suddenly realize your true direction.

  “Yes, it was all wrong,” he said to himself, “but that doesn’t matter. It can be done, it can. But what is it?” he asked himself, and suddenly grew still.

  This was on the third day, an hour before his death. Just then the little schoolboy crept into his father’s room and came up to his bed. The dying man was still screaming desperately and throwing his arms about. His hand fell on the boy’s head. The boy caught hold of it, pressed it to his lips, and burst into tears.

  It was just at this point that Ivan Ilyich fell through, saw the glimmer of light, and it became clear to him that his life had not been what it should have been, but that it could still be put right. He asked himself, what is it, and fell still, listening. Here he felt someone kissing his hand. He opened his eyes and glanced at his son. He felt sorry for him. His wife came up to him. He glanced at her. She was gazing at him with a look of despair on her face, her mouth open, unwiped tears on her nose and cheeks. He felt sorry for her.

  “Yes, I’m making them miserable,” he thought. “They’re sorry for me, but it will be better for them when I’m dead.” He wanted to say that, but didn’t have the strength. “Besides, why talk? I must just do it,” he thought. He glanced at his wife, indicating his son, and said, “Take him out . . . sorry for him . . . for you. . . .” He wanted to add prosti, “forgive me,” but said propusti, “let me pass,” and, lacking the strength to correct himself, gave up, knowing that the one who needed to know would understand him.

  And suddenly it was clear to him that what had been exhausting him and would not leave him was suddenly leaving him, falling away on two sides and ten sides and all sides. He was sorry for them, he had to stop them suffering. Free them and free himself from all this pain. “How good and how simple,” he thought. “And the pain?” he asked himself. “Where’s it gone? Come on, where are you, pain?”

  He started listening.

  “Yes, there it is. Well, never mind, let it be.”

  “And death? Where is it?”

  He sought his old, habitual fear of death and could not find it. Where was death? What death? There was no fear, because there was no death.

  Instead of death there was light.

  “So that’s it!” he suddenly said aloud. “What joy!”

  For him it all happened in a moment, and the meaning of that moment did not change. For those around him his agony continued two hours. Something was gurgling in his chest; his wasted body was twitching. Gradually the snoring gurgle came less frequently.

  “It is finished!” someone above him said.

  He heard these words and repeated them in his soul. “Death is finished,” he said to himself. “There is no more death.”

  He drew the air into himself, stopped in mid breath, stretched, and died.

  Sleigh at Yasnaya Polyana by Leonid Pasternak (1862–1945).

  MASTER AND MAN

  1

  It happened in the seventies, the day after the winter festival of St. Nicholas.1 There was a celebration in the parish, and the local landowner, Vassili Andreyich Brekhunov, a merchant of the Second Guild,2 had to attend. First he had to go to church, where he was warden, and then he had to entertain his family and friends at home. But now the last guests had driven off. Vassili Andreyich promptly prepared to set out for a neighboring landowner to buy a forest he’d been haggling over for some time. He was in a hurry to get off, because he didn’t want buyers from the town to snap up the bargain before him. The only reason why the young landowner was asking ten thousand rubles3 for the woodland was because Vassili Andreyich was offering seven. And seven thousand was just a third of its real value. An even better price was possible, because the land lay in his area and there was a long-standing agreement among the local traders not to bargain up prices in someone else’s patch. But Vassili Andreyich had found out that timber merchants from the town were also planning to negotiate for the Goriachkin woodland. He decided to set out at once and clinch his deal with the owner. So, as soon as the festival was over, he took seven hundred rubles out of his chest, added to them two thousand three hundred rubles from the church funds in his care,4 and, having carefully counted the three thousand rubles and put them away in his wallet, he got ready to go.

  Nikita, the only one of Vassili Andreyich’s laborers not drunk that day, ran out to harness the horse. A habitual drinker, he was sober because he had drunk away his coat and leather boots on the eve of the last fast, and then sworn off alcohol and succeeded in keeping his word for two months. He was still sober, despite the temptation of everyone else drinking heavily during the first two days of the holiday.

  Nikolai was a fifty-year-old peasant from the nearby village, “no householder,” as people said of him, because he had spent the better part of his life out in service, rather than in his own home. He was valued everywhere for being hardworking, deft, and strong, and above all for his pleasant, kindly character. But he never settled down because a couple of times a year, and sometimes more often than that, he got drunk, and then, apart from drinking away the clothes off his back, he became quarrelsome and aggressive. Vassili Andreyich had also turned him out more than once, but took him back again, valuing his honesty, love of animals, and above all his cheapness. Vassili Andreyich didn’t give Nikita the eighty rubles such a good worker deserved, but forty, paying it out randomly, either in cash, or more often in kind, in goods from his shop charged at a high rate.

  Nikita’s wife, Marfa, once a beautiful, feisty woman, was in charge of his home, his teenage son and two daughters. Nikita was not invited to live with her. She had been living for the last twenty years with a barrel maker, a peasant from another village who had settled himself in very nicely with her. And, in any case, however much she ordered her husband about when he was sober, she was terrified of him drunk. Once when he got really drunk at home, Nikita broke into his wife’s chest and—presumably to pay her back for his submissiveness when sober—pulled out all her most valued possessions, took his axe, and diced her best smocks like a cucumber on the chopping block. Everything Nikita earned went to his wife, but he didn’t object. Only two days before the festival Marfa came over to Vassili Andreyich to pick up white flour, sugar, and a half quart of vodka worth three rubles in all, as well as five rubles in cash, and thanked him for it as though it were a special kindness when in fact, at the lowest possible rate, Vassili Andreyich owed them at least twenty rubles.

  “After all, what agreement did we ever make between us?” Vassili Andreyich used to say to Nikita. “If you need anything, take it. You can work it off later. I’m not like the others, making their men wait and then cooking up reckonings and fines. You serve me, and I won’t let you down.”

  As he said this Vassili Andreyich honestly believed that he was doing Nikita a favor. He had the knack of speaking with such conviction that everyone relying on him financially—not least Nikita himself—went along with the fiction that he was doing his very best for them, not cheating them.

  “Of course I understand, Vassili Andreyich, it’s like working for my own father. I understand perfectly,” Nikita replied, understanding perfectly clearly that Vassili Andreyich was cheating him but feeling at the same time that there was no point in trying to sort out their accounts. He should just go along with it, and take what he was given till he found work elsewhere.

  Now, ready and cheerful as usual, Nikita followed his master’s orders to harness up, and went with his pigeon-toed, springy, light step into the shed. Taking the heavy, tasseled leather bridle off its nail
and jingling the rings of the bit, he went into the closed stall where the horse he was to harness stood on its own.

  “Getting bored were you, honey?” Nikita replied to the horse’s mild, welcoming whinny. He was a dark dappled bay stallion, of middling height with a sloping crupper, standing alone in his stall. “We’re nearly there—let me water you first,” he went on, talking to the horse exactly as we do to creatures that understand us, and, brushing his plump, dusty back with the skirt of his coat, he eased the bridle over the young bay’s handsome head, freed his ears and mane, and slipping off his halter, led him out to drink.

  Stepping delicately out of the byre heaped high with dung, Mukhorty5 playfully kicked out with his hind leg as though trying to get at Nikita, running at a trot beside him to the water pump.

  “Steady now, silly boy!” Nikita kept repeating, knowing very well how Mukhorty kicked out with his hind hoof—carefully, just to graze his muddy coattails, not hurt him. It was a trick Nikita was particularly fond of.

  His thirst slaked by the icy water, the horse sighed. Wrinkling his strong wet lips, their hairs shedding transparent drops into the trough, he grew still as if deep in thought. Suddenly he snorted noisily.

  “Well, if you don’t want any more, don’t have it. We’ll understand; just don’t ask again,” Nikita said to Mukhorty in all seriousness, painstakingly making things clear. Taking him by the reins, he ran back to the barn, dragging the cheerful young bay frisking all the way across the yard.

  There were no laborers about, only an outsider, the cook’s husband, who had come for the festival.

  “Go and ask what sledge they want harnessed, there’s a good chap,” said Nikita. “Is it the wide one or the tiddly one?”