. to live a decent life that everyone approved of,” “external dignity,” “that propriety of external forms required by public opinion” that governs every choice made by Ivan Ilyich. His moral desiccation is even more painfully apparent in his growing coldness, his frank distaste for his quarrelsome wife and daughter, and the deeply unsympathetic lovelessness that intensifies as his illness grows worse.

Thus Ivan Ilyich’s shriveled spirit comes to display the aridity Tolstoy experienced at Arzamas, that “painfully dry and spiteful feeling, no atom of kindliness, a dull and steady spitefulness” toward himself and the unfeeling world. The reader coming to “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” with no knowledge of the thoughts and experiences that culminated in its composition may not realize that Ivan Ilyich’s dying began long before his illness struck. Tolstoy, however, recognized at Arzamas that “it seems that death is terrible, but . . . it is one’s dying life that is terrible.” In his successful years Ivan Ilyich is like the angry cobbler’s wife before charity softens her. The smell of death is all around him.

Yet as Ivan Ilyich grows worse physically, his moral degeneration is gradually, barely perceptibly set in reverse. The denial of individuality inherent both in his practice of the law and in his own pursuit of a conventionally decorous life is rudely disturbed by his dawning sense that he is dying, that the dull general rule must also apply to him in all his inestimable singularity. He remembers the syllogism he learned as a boy: “Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal.” It had always seemed to him correct only in relation to Caius, not to himself. “[H]e was not Caius and not man in general. He was always quite, quite different from all other beings. He was little Vanya with Mamma, with Papa. . . .” All his lost quiddity is captured in one piercing, banal, tragic sentence: “Did Caius know the smell of the striped leather ball Vanya loved so much?” On his sickbed, memories of his earliest years return with increasing frequency. His mind moves from the stewed prunes offered to him at lunch that day to the dried French plums of his childhood—their peculiar flavor and the rush of saliva when he sucked their stones. With these sharply particular memories comes the gradual realization that from that time his life has steadily deteriorated, even as he thought he was doing so well:


Marriage . . . so accidental, and then disillusion, and the smell of his wife’s breath, and the sensuality and hypocrisy! And that deathly job, and those anxieties about money, and one year like that, and two, and ten, and twenty. Exactly as though I was steadily walking down a mountain, and thinking I was climbing it. And so I was.


However, as illness robs him of physical dignity, the moral drift downhill is gradually reversed. It is striking that Ivan Ilyich’s first selfless impulse is prompted by the smell of his night soil, which the young servant Gerasim is about to remove from the sickroom. Robbed of the decorum he sought all his life, weakly collapsed half naked on an armchair, his trousers around his ankles, he apologizes to Gerasim for his unpleasant task. It is his first kindling of humanity. Gerasim’s response differs from the politely encouraging lies of Ivan Ilyich’s family, doctors, and friends. Later, he is the only one to state the case frankly. What’s a little trouble when his master’s dying? Such truthfulness comes as a profound relief to Ivan Ilyich, and the informal intimacy between them grows.