Gerasim spends many nights patiently sitting with his master, supporting his legs high on his shoulders, which seems to ease the continuous pain.

That literally topsy-turvy scene suggests the inverted relationship evolving between master and servant. In his suffering Ivan Ilyich wants to cry, to be petted and cried over, to be pitied as a sick child is pitied. When his friends come, decorum and old habit force him to suck in his lips and give dry opinions on the latest court judgments. But in Gerasim he can feel the compassion he craves and his unabashed physical dependence is liberating.

Master is subordinated to man, and the judge is condemned to death. When Ivan Ilyich, Public Prosecutor, first consults a celebrated specialist, he is incensed to find the twinkling detachment he himself habitually employed, in passing court judgments on others, turned on himself. Now he is the wretch on trial, and “the doctor made his summing-up just as brilliantly, looking over his spectacles triumphantly and even gaily at the accused.” In the last stages of his illness, struggling to reassess his own life, Ivan Ilyich is still unable to recognize that he, who always lived with such scrupulous decorum, could ever have done anything wrong. However, his memory of the usher’s cry, “The court is in session!” modulates to an inadvertent admission of guilt: “The judge is coming! . . . Here he comes, the judge! ‘But I’m not to blame!’ ” And on his very last day, he struggles against the terrifying sensation that he is being bundled into a black sack by an invisible, irresistible force, “as a man condemned to death struggles in the hands of the executioner.”

Yet the black bag is both fearful and longed for. Ivan Ilyich suffers less from physical pain than from his revulsion from death—and the simultaneous, apparently unrealizable imperative to give way to it. Tolstoy, at Arzamas, felt “always the same horror . . . something tearing within that yet could not be torn apart.” Ivan Ilyich is “both afraid, and wants to fall through” the sack, “he struggles against it, and he tries to help.” Women in labor, I think, sometimes experience something of this difficult yearning to give way to an inevitable physical process, without knowing how to let themselves go, how to set it in motion. In the end, what makes it happen? “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.” Then pity finally liberates Ivan Ilyich.


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. . . .

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.

3

Soon after the completion of “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” Tolstoy reflected yet again on his trip to the distant Penza province in search of cheap land, the trip that brought him to unforgettable Arzamas. “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” (1886) is a simple parable in the manner of the fallen-angel narrative of “What Men Live By.” The peasant Pahom, by dint of hard work and good management, succeeds in building up a smallholding.