Therefore the judge of what is good and necessary is not what people do and say, and not Progress, but I in my own heart.


The death of his brother Dmitri, Tolstoy says, delivered the second blow to his crumbling faith. Dmitri died in great pain, “not knowing why he lived and even less why he died. No theories could give any answer to these questions, neither to me nor to him.” After some fifteen years of married life, from 1862 to 1877, Tolstoy’s uncertainties intensified. After the night at Arzamas in 1869, there were further experiences that gathered to a great depression, a fundamental spiritual crisis:


So I lived, but five years ago something very strange started happening to me. I would get moments—at first of blankness, pauses in life, as though I didn’t know how to live, or what I was meant to be doing, and I would get confused and disheartened. But the moments passed, and I would go on as before. Then the blank moments grew more and more frequent and unvaried. And these pauses in life were always expressed in the same words—“For what? And then what?”

At first these just seemed to me to be pointless questions. All this was well known, I thought. If I ever wanted to bother with resolving them, it wouldn’t be worth it. Just at the moment there was no time, but as soon as I had time to pause and think, I’d find the answer. And then the questions posed themselves more and more often till, like spots falling always in the same place, all these questions without answers ran together into one big black stain.

What happened to me was the same as what happens to every terminally ill person. At first there appear trivial signs of inadequacy, which the sick person ignores; then the symptoms repeat themselves more and more often and merge into one continuous suffering. The suffering grows, and the invalid has no time to turn before he recognizes that what he took for slight infirmity is the most important thing in all the world, and that is death.


This passage from A Confession bears a significant relationship to “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” where the metaphor of sickness is literalized, and Ivan Ilyich’s growing sense of spiritual desolation is given a compelling physical cause. Essentially, Ivan Ilyich, in the course of a short mortal illness, recognizes the moral malaise Tolstoy had been fighting for decades.

2

“The Death of Ivan Ilyich” was begun in 1884 and completed in 1886.* Tolstoy’s finest parable, “What Men Live By,” was written in 1881. The unfinished “Memoirs of a Madman” was begun in 1884. The composition of A Confession (1879–1883) overlapped with them all. All four texts throw light on each other.

“Memoirs of a Madman,” though presented as fiction, is essentially autobiographical. It describes Tolstoy’s experience at Arzamas, a similar night of terror in a Moscow hotel, and a comparable experience lost in the snow when out hunting. Each time, the horror lies in his solitary fear of death and his inability to recognize death’s validity: “ ‘Is this death? I won’t have it! Why death? What is it?’ ” The narrator is an ostensible “madman” who is about to be certified. His lunacy lies in his choice of a radical morality that society thinks crazy—the renunciation of worldly goods for a life of selfless charity (hence the story’s first title, “Notes, Not of a Madman”). The ponderous Dostoyevskian irony of the “mad” narrator is unsuited to Tolstoy’s habitual simplicity. Moreover, the genuine, and genuinely disturbed episodes at Arzamas and Moscow do not contribute clearly to the story’s moral conclusion—the practice of love and charity—even though we can see that logically they are Tolstoy’s answer to the horrific futility of life.

Tolstoy illustrates the ideal of love by describing an early episode from the narrator’s childhood. His nanny is about to put him into his cot beside his brother, when he demands to climb in by himself. He has an intense sensation of universal harmony. It might be James Joyce or Stanley Spencer speaking:


I jumped into bed still holding her hand, and then let it go, kicked about under my bedclothes, and wrapped myself up. And I had such a pleasant feeling. I grew quiet and thought: “I love Nurse; Nurse loves me and Mitya; and I love Mitya, and Mitya loves me and Nurse. Nurse loves Taras, and I love Taras, and Mitya loves him. And Taras loves me and Nurse.