Nabokov concurs: “I never could admit that a writer’s job was to improve the morals of his country, and point out lofty ideals from the tremendous height of a soapbox.” In his best work Tolstoy does not mount a soapbox, yet many readers resent his moralizing. Michael Beresford, the editor of the standard annotated Russian text of “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” writes as if Tolstoy believed in a punitive God: “The reason why all this pain and suffering have been inflicted on Ivan Ilyich [is] that he should come to see the error of the way he has lived and repent.” Yet the myth of redemptive suffering, Beresford points out sternly, is open to “serious objections” since “suffering afflicts good men as well as bad” and “pain does not necessarily ennoble men.” In his view, Ivan Ilyich “is granted the precious knowledge of love only in extremis, when it is too late for him to put it into practice, except to stutter a few incoherent syllables of forgiveness.”

Beresford is wrong. His reading postulates an avenging deity, an authorial alter ego, bent on the infliction of educative suffering on Ivan Ilyich. Tolstoy, on the contrary, points out from the start that Ivan Ilyich’s life had been “simple, commonplace, and most terrible.” He is not particularly good, nor particularly bad. Ivan Ilyich himself creates the moral deathliness of his life which is finally concretized in his illness. The focus of the story is not on “punishment” but on Ivan Ilyich’s response first to life and then to sickness and death. Moreover, Tolstoy is well aware that suffering is destructive as well as redemptive. Everything irritates Ivan Ilyich.


[H]e 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.


Love is not raised in the story’s last pages. It is his wife and son’s pity that rouses Ivan Ilyich’s reciprocal compassion. His last word, an attempt to say “prosti ” (“forgive me”) is a stumbled apology and not a pardon. Ironically enough, no one understands what he says.

John Bayley, too, dislikes “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” because he finds the story is subordinated to its moral: “Action and outcome are preconceived, and the purpose of the writer is paramount.” He objects to Ivan Ilyich’s dying sensation of being bundled into a black bag, and his final sense of liberation—on the extraordinary grounds that, “as Tolstoy had obviously experienced neither of these states that he wished upon his character, the ending of ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ is the supreme example of his conviction that he now knew best about everything.” Conversely, perversely, Bayley praises “Master and Man” because “there is no moral, or rather the moral is a highly ambiguous one.” Bayley thinks—unaccountably, against the text—that Vassili Andreyich warms his servant in order to warm himself. So “death for the master comes without either terror or meaning.”

Bayley is wrong. Vassili Andreyich does not warm Nikita in order to warm himself. True, his hands and feet begin to freeze, “[but] he wasn’t thinking of his legs, or his hands; he thought only about how he could warm the peasant lying under him.” His death is full of meaning that he understands well:


He understands that this is death, but this doesn’t trouble him either. He remembers that Nikita is lying under him, and that he was warmed and is alive, and it seems to him that he is Nikita and Nikita is he, and that his life is not in himself, but in Nikita. He strains his ears, and hears breathing, and even a light snore, from Nikita. “Nikita is alive, and that means I am living too,” he says to himself triumphantly.

And he remembers his money, his shop, his house, his buying and selling, and the Mironov millions, and it is hard for him to understand why that man, whom people called Vassili Brekhunov, troubled himself with all those things that troubled him. “Oh well, he didn’t know what it was all about,” he thinks, of Vassili Brekhunov. “He didn’t know, as now I know. . . .”


As for Bayley’s indictment of Tolstoy’s arrogance in describing Ivan Ilyich’s unknowable sensations at the moment of death—if writers could only describe what they experienced at firsthand, most literature would remain unwritten. Tolstoy’s tales of sickness, exposure, and death are germinated by his own experiences. But they are transformed by his powerful, detailed, and supremely realistic imagination.

Chekhov wrote to Suvorin,


You are right to require from the artist a conscious attitude, but you mix up two ideas: the solution of a problem and a correct presentation of the problem. Only the latter is obligatory for the artist. In Anna Karenina and Onegin not a single problem is resolved, but they satisfy you completely only because all their problems are correctly presented.


Nothing, though, can stop willful readers from extracting the wrong solution to the problem.

What’s more, Chekhov’s formulation is not universally applicable. Tolstoy’s moral fables—like “What Men Live By” and “How Much Land Does a Man Need”—do set out to pose problems and provide answers. James Joyce thought that “How Much Land Does a Man Need” was “the greatest story that the literature of the world knows.” In “What Men Live By,” the solutions the fallen angel Michael finds to God’s three fundamental questions are extraordinarily satisfying. Like the Ancient Mariner’s wedding guest, we listen like a three years’ child, and our wish for a moral is candidly and profoundly answered.

Many English and American kindergartens have a weekly session called Show and Tell.