by Leo Tolstoy
obvious and the truth become plain to all. Lisa was the first to
pluck up courage and break that silence, but by trying to hide what
everybody was feeling, she betrayed it.
"Well, if we are going it's time to start," she said, looking
at her watch, a present from her father, and with a faint and
significant smile at Fedor Petrovich relating to something known
only to them. She got up with a rustle of her dress.
They all rose, said good-night, and went away.
When they had gone it seemed to Ivan Ilych that he felt
better; the falsity had gone with them. But the pain remained --
that same pain and that same fear that made everything monotonously
alike, nothing harder and nothing easier. Everything was worse.
Again minute followed minute and hour followed hour.
Everything remained the same and there was no cessation. And the
inevitable end of it all became more and more terrible.
"Yes, send Gerasim here," he replied to a question Peter
asked.
IX
His wife returned late at night. She came in on tiptoe, but
he heard her, opened his eyes, and made haste to close them again.
She wished to send Gerasim away and to sit with him herself, but he
opened his eyes and said: "No, go away."
"Are you in great pain?"
"Always the same."
"Take some opium."
He agreed and took some. She went away.
Till about three in the morning he was in a state of stupefied
misery. It seemed to him that he and his pain were being thrust
into a narrow, deep black sack, but though they were pushed further
and further in they could not be pushed to the bottom. And this,
terrible enough in itself, was accompanied by suffering. He was
frightened yet wanted to fall through the sack, he struggled but
yet co-operated. And suddenly he broke through, fell, and regained
consciousness. Gerasim was sitting at the foot of the bed dozing
quietly and patiently, while he himself lay with his emaciated
stockinged legs resting on Gerasim's shoulders; the same shaded
candle was there and the same unceasing pain.
"Go away, Gerasim," he whispered.
"It's all right, sir. I'll stay a while."
"No. Go away."
He removed his legs from Gerasim's shoulders, turned sideways
onto his arm, and felt sorry for himself. He only waited till
Gerasim had gone into the next room and then restrained himself no
longer but wept like a child. He wept on account of his
helplessness, his terrible loneliness, the cruelty of man, the
cruelty of God, and the absence of God.
"Why hast Thou done all this? Why hast Thou brought me here?
Why, why dost Thou torment me so terribly?"
He did not expect an answer and yet wept because there was no
answer and could be none. The pain again grew more acute, but he
did not stir and did not call. He said to himself: "Go on!
Strike me! But what is it for? What have I done to Thee? What is
it for?"
Then he grew quiet and not only ceased weeping but even held
his breath and became all attention. It was as though he were
listening not to an audible voice but to the voice of his soul, to
the current of thoughts arising within him.
"What is it you want?" was the first clear conception capable
of expression in words, that he heard.
"What do you want? What do you want?" he repeated to himself.
"What do I want? To live and not to suffer," he answered.
And again he listened with such concentrated attention that
even his pain did not distract him.
"To live? How?" asked his inner voice.
"Why, to live as I used to -- well and pleasantly."
"As you lived before, well and pleasantly?" the voice
repeated.
And in imagination he began to recall the best moments of his
pleasant life. But strange to say none of those best moments of
his pleasant life now seemed at all what they had then seemed --
none of them except the first recollections of childhood. There,
in childhood, there had been something really pleasant with which
it would be possible to live if it could return. But the child who
had experienced that happiness existed no longer, it was like a
reminiscence of somebody else.
as soon as the period began which had produced the present
Ivan Ilych, all that had then seemed joys now melted before his
sight and turned into something trivial and often nasty.
And the further he departed from childhood and the nearer he
came to the present the more worthless and doubtful were the joys.
This began with the School of Law. A little that was really good
was still found there -- there was light-heartedness, friendship,
and hope. But in the upper classes there had already been fewer of
such good moments. Then during the first years of his official
career, when he was in the service of the governor, some pleasant
moments again occurred: they were the memories of love for a
woman. Then all became confused and there was still less of what
was good; later on again there was still less that was good, and
the further he went the less there was. His marriage, a mere
accident, then the disenchantment that followed it, his wife's bad
breath and the sensuality and hypocrisy: then that deadly official
life and those preoccupations about money, a year of it, and two,
and ten, and twenty, and always the same thing. And the longer it
lasted the more deadly it became. "It is as if I had been going
downhill while I imagined I was going up. And that is really what
it was. I was going up in public opinion, but to the same extent
life was ebbing away from me. And now it is all done and there is
only death.
"Then what does it mean? Why? It can't be that life is so
senseless and horrible. But if it really has been so horrible and
senseless, why must I die and die in agony? There is something
wrong!
"Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done," it suddenly
occurred to him. "But how could that be, when I did everything
properly?" he replied, and immediately dismissed from his mind
this, the sole solution of all the riddles of life and death, as
something quite impossible.
"Then what do you want now? To live? Live how? Live as you
lived in the law courts when the usher proclaimed 'The judge is
coming!' The judge is coming, the judge!" he repeated to himself.
"Here he is, the judge. But I am not guilty!" he exclaimed
angrily. "What is it for?" And he ceased crying, but turning his
face to the wall continued to ponder on the same question: Why,
and for what purpose, is there all this horror? But however much
he pondered he found no answer. And whenever the thought occurred
to him, as it often did, that it all resulted from his not having
lived as he ought to have done, he at once recalled the correctness
of his whole life and dismissed so strange an idea.
X
Another fortnight passed. Ivan Ilych now no longer left his
sofa. He would not lie in bed but lay on the sofa, facing the wall
nearly all the time. He suffered ever the same unceasing agonies
and in his loneliness pondered always on the same insoluble
question: "What is this? Can it be that it is Death?" And the
inner voice answered: "Yes, it is Death."
"Why these sufferings?" And the voice answered, "For no
reason -- they just are so." Beyond and besides this there was
nothing.
From the very beginning of his illness, ever since he had
first been to see the doctor, Ivan Ilych's life had been divided
between two contrary and alternating moods: now it was despair and
the expectation of this uncomprehended and terrible death, and now
hope and an intently interested observation of the functioning of
his organs. Now before his eyes there was only a kidney or an
intestine that temporarily evaded its duty, and now only that
incomprehensible and dreadful death from which it was impossible to
escape.
These two states of mind had alternated from the very
beginning of his illness, but the further it progressed the more
doubtful and fantastic became the conception of the kidney, and the
more real the sense of impending death.
He had but to call to mind what he had been three months
before and what he was now, to call to mind with what regularity he
had been going downhill, for every possibility of hope to be
shattered.
Latterly during the loneliness in which he found himself as he
lay facing the back of the sofa, a loneliness in the midst of a
populous town and surrounded by numerous acquaintances and
relations but that yet could not have been more complete anywhere -
- either at the bottom of the sea or under the earth -- during that
terrible loneliness Ivan ilych had lived only in memories of the
past. Pictures of his past rose before him one after another.
they always began with what was nearest in time and then went back
to what was most remote -- to his childhood -- and rested there.
If he thought of the stewed prunes that had been offered him that
day, his mind went back to the raw shrivelled French plums of his
childhood, their peculiar flavour and the flow of saliva when he
sucked their stones, and along with the memory of that taste came
a whole series of memories of those days: his nurse, his brother,
and their toys. "No, I mustn't thing of that....It is too
painful," Ivan Ilych said to himself, and brought himself back to
the present -- to the button on the back of the sofa and the
creases in its morocco. "Morocco is expensive, but it does not
wear well: there had been a quarrel about it. It was a different
kind of quarrel and a different kind of morocco that time when we
tore father's portfolio and were punished, and mamma brought us
some tarts...." And again his thoughts dwelt on his childhood, and
again it was painful and he tried to banish them and fix his mind
on something else.
Then again together with that chain of memories another series
passed through his mind -- of how his illness had progressed and
grown worse. There also the further back he looked the more life
there had been. There had been more of what was good in life and
more of life itself. The two merged together. "Just as the pain
went on getting worse and worse, so my life grew worse and worse,"
he thought. "There is one bright spot there at the back, at the
beginning of life, and afterwards all becomes blacker and blacker
and proceeds more and more rapidly -- in inverse ration to the
square of the distance from death," thought Ivan Ilych. And the
example of a stone falling downwards with increasing velocity
entered his mind. Life, a series of increasing sufferings, flies
further and further towards its end -- the most terrible suffering.
"I am flying...." He shuddered, shifted himself, and tried to
resist, but was already aware that resistance was impossible, and
again with eyes weary of gazing but unable to cease seeing what was
before them, he stared at the back of the sofa and waited --
awaiting that dreadful fall and shock and destruction.
"Resistance is impossible!" he said to himself. "If I could
only understand what it is all for! But that too is impossible.
An explanation would be possible if it could be said that I have
not lived as I ought to. But it is impossible to say that," and he
remembered all the legality, correctitude, and propriety of his
life. "That at any rate can certainly not be admitted," he
thought, and his lips smiled ironically as if someone could see
that smile and be taken in by it. "There is no explanation!
Agony, death....What for?"
XI
Another two weeks went by in this way and during that
fortnight an even occurred that Ivan Ilych and his wife had
desired. Petrishchev formally proposed. It happened in the
evening. The next day Praskovya Fedorovna came into her husband's
room considering how best to inform him of it, but that very night
there had been a fresh change for the worse in his condition. She
found him still lying on the sofa but in a different position. He
lay on his back, groaning and staring fixedly straight in front of
him.
She began to remind him of his medicines, but he turned his
eyes towards her with such a look that she did not finish what she
was saying; so great an animosity, to her in particular, did that
look express.
"For Christ's sake let me die in peace!" he said.
She would have gone away, but just then their daughter came in
and went up to say good morning. He looked at her as he had done
at his wife, and in reply to her inquiry about his health said
dryly that he would soon free them all of himself. They were both
silent and after sitting with him for a while went away.
"Is it our fault?" Lisa said to her mother. "It's as if we
were to blame! I am sorry for papa, but why should we be
tortured?"
The doctor came at his usual time. Ivan Ilych answered "Yes"
and "No," never taking his angry eyes from him, and at last said:
"You know you can do nothing for me, so leave me alone."
"We can ease your sufferings."
"You can't even do that. Let me be."
The doctor went into the drawing room and told Praskovya
Fedorovna that the case was very serious and that the only resource
left was opium to allay her husband's sufferings, which must be
terrible.
It was true, as the doctor said, that Ivan Ilych's physical
sufferings were terrible, but worse than the physical sufferings
were his mental sufferings which were his chief torture.
His mental sufferings were due to the fact that that night, as
he looked at Gerasim's sleepy,
good-natured face with it prominent
cheek-bones, the question suddenly occurred to him: "What if my
whole life has been wrong?"
It occurred to him that what had appeared perfectly impossible
before, namely that he had not spent his life as he should have
done, might after all be true. It occurred to him that his
scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was
considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely
noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have
been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his professional
duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and
all his social and official interests, might all have been false.
He tried to defend all those things to himself and suddenly felt
the weakness of what he was defending. There was nothing to
defend.
"But if that is so," he said to himself, "and i am leaving
this life with the consciousness that I have lost all that was
given me and it is impossible to rectify it -- what then?"
He lay on his back and began to pass his life in review in
quite a new way. In the morning when he saw first his footman,
then his wife, then his daughter, and then the doctor, their every
word and movement confirmed to him the awful truth that had been
revealed to him during the night. In them he saw himself -- all
that for which he had lived -- and saw clearly that it was not real
at all, but a terrible and huge deception which had hidden both
life and death. This consciousness intensified his physical
suffering tenfold. He groaned and tossed about, and pulled at his
clothing which choked and stifled him. And he hated them on that
account.
He was given a large dose of opium and became unconscious, but
at noon his sufferings began again. He drove everybody away and
tossed from side to side.
His wife came to him and said:
"Jean, my dear, do this for me. It can't do any harm and
often helps. Healthy people often do it."
He opened his eyes wide.
"What? Take communion? Why? It's unnecessary! However..."
She began to cry.
"Yes, do, my dear. I'll send for our priest. He is such a
nice man."
"All right. Very well," he muttered.
When the priest came and heard his confession, Ivan Ilych was
softened and seemed to feel a relief from his doubts and
consequently from his sufferings, and for a moment there came a ray
of hope. He again began to think of the vermiform appendix and the
possibility of correcting it. He received the sacrament with tears
in his eyes.
When they laid him down again afterwards he felt a moment's
ease, and the hope that he might live awoke in him again. He began
to think of the operation that had been suggested to him. "To
live! I want to live!" he said to himself.
His wife came in to congratulate him after his communion, and
when uttering the usual conventional words she added:
"You feel better, don't you?"
Without looking at her he said "Yes."
Her dress, her figure, the expression of her face, the tone of
her voice, all revealed the same thing. "This is wrong, it is not
as it should be. All you have lived for and still live for is
falsehood and deception, hiding life and death from you." And as
soon as he admitted that thought, his hatred and his agonizing
physical suffering again sprang up, and with that suffering a
consciousness of the unavoidable, approaching end. And to this was
added a new sensation of grinding shooting pain and a feeling of
suffocation.
The expression of his face when he uttered that "Yes" was
dreadful. Having uttered it, he looked her straight in the eyes,
turned on his face with a rapidity extraordinary in his weak state
and shouted:
"Go away! Go away and leave me alone!"
XII
From that moment the screaming began that continued for three
days, and was so terrible that one could not hear it through two
closed doors without horror. At the moment he answered his wife
realized that he was lost, that there was no return, that the end
had come, the very end, and his doubts were still unsolved and