This aloofness could have saddened Ivan Ilyich had he thought it should not have been so, but by now he recognized that this situation was not only normal but the very aim of his role in the family. His aim increasingly was to free himself from these unpleasantnesses, to give them a character of harmless propriety, and he achieved this by spending less and less time with his family. When that was impossible, he tried to protect himself by having outsiders present. The main thing was that Ivan Ilyich had his work. All his interest in life was focused in his work. And this interest absorbed him. The consciousness of his own power, the potential to ruin anyone he wanted to ruin, the external pomp and real importance of his entry into court and his meetings with subordinates, his success in the eyes of high and low, and, above all, his mastery in conducting affairs, of which he was well aware—all this made him happy and, along with discussions with his friends, dinners and whist, filled his life. So that, all in all, Ivan Ilyich’s life continued to pass as he thought it should: pleasantly and properly.

So he lived another seven years. His oldest daughter was already sixteen15; another child had died, and there remained his schoolboy son, the subject of dissension. Ivan Ilyich wanted to enter him in the School of Jurisprudence, but Praskovya Feodorovna sent him to high school, purely to spite him. His daughter was educated at home and was growing up well, and the boy was not doing badly either.

3

Ivan Ilyich’s life continued in this way for seventeen years16 after his marriage. He was by now a public prosecutor of long standing, having declined various transfers, waiting for a more desirable post, when, quite unexpectedly, something unpleasant happened, which nearly destroyed his peaceful life altogether. He was waiting for the post of presiding judge in a university town, but somehow Hoppe sneaked ahead and got the job. Ivan Ilyich lost his temper, complained, and quarreled with Hoppe and his immediate superiors. They grew distant toward him and in the next reshuffle he was passed over again.

This was in 1880. It was the worst year of Ivan Ilyich’s life. In this year it became apparent that his salary was inadequate for his way of life, and, moreover, that everyone had forgotten him. What was more, the thing that seemed to be the most massive and grave injustice, as far as he was concerned, seemed to everyone else an ordinary matter. Even his father did not consider it his duty to help him. He felt that everyone had abandoned him, considering his position with an annual salary of 3,500 rubles quite normal, even fortunate. He alone knew that, what with his sense of how he had been slighted, the iniquities that had been done to him, his wife’s endless nagging, and the debts he had started to build up, living as he did above his means—he alone knew that his position was far from normal.

In the summer of that year, to economize, he took leave and spent the summer months with his wife at his brother-in-law’s place in the country.

In the country, without work, Ivan Ilyich experienced not only boredom but unbearable melancholy for the first time. He decided that living like this was impossible. It was essential to take some decisive action.

Having spent a sleepless night pacing the terrace, he made up his mind to travel to Petersburg and put pressure on the right people. He would transfer to a different ministry and punish the colleagues who failed to value him properly.

The next day he set off for Petersburg, in spite of his wife and brother-in-law’s attempts to dissuade him.

He traveled with a single aim: to solicit a post that would bring him an annual salary of five thousand rubles. He was no longer set on any particular ministry, type, or area of work. All he needed was a post, any post bringing five thousand rubles—in government administration, in the banks, or the railways, or in the Empress Maria’s institutions,17 or even the customs—but the five thousand rubles were imperative, and it was imperative to leave the ministry where his merits went unrecognized.

And, lo and behold, this journey undertaken by Ivan Ilyich was crowned with extraordinary, unexpected success. At Kursk an acquaintance of his, F. S. Ilyin, joined him in his first-class carriage, and told him about a telegram received by the governor of Kursk with the white-hot news that in a few days there would be a shake-up in the ministry, and Piotr Ivanovich’s place would be assigned to Ivan Simyonovich.

Apart from its importance for Russia, the predicted reshuffle18 was particularly important for Ivan Ilyich, because it would bring into play a new figure, Piotr Petrovich, and, self-evidently, his friend Zakhar Ivanovich—and this was particularly favorable to Ivan Ilyich’s own interests. Zakhar Ivanovich was an old friend and colleague of Ivan Ilyich.

The news was confirmed in Moscow.