And Mamma loves me and Nurse, and Nurse loves Mamma and me and Papa—and everybody loves everybody and everybody is happy.”

Then suddenly I heard the housekeeper run in and angrily shout something about a sugar basin and Nurse answering indignantly that she had not taken it. And I felt pained, frightened, and horror, cold horror seized me.


This is his first intimation of madness, as his childish faith in universal love is shattered.

In “What Men Live By” Tolstoy transfers the madman’s visionary clarity to a more authoritative central figure—Michael, a fallen angel. The story was originally written for children. Irony is replaced by directness. God punishes the angel for disobedience by casting him down to earth, naked and destitute. He is to live as a man till he learns the answer to three fundamental questions.

The angel is taken in by a poor cobbler and his wife, and serves them for seven years. In seven years he smiles three times. The first time comes right at the beginning, when the cobbler’s wife is furious with her husband for bringing home this godforsaken down-and-out, the unrecognized angel. She is softened by her husband’s rebuke, fetches the outcast a shirt, and gives him soup. The angel later recalls that when the woman was angry with her husband, “ ‘the spirit of death came from her mouth; I could not speak for the stench of death that spread around her. She wished to drive me out into the cold, and I knew that if she did so she would die.’ ” But when her husband speaks to her of God and she relents, the angel smiles for the first time. “ ‘I saw that death no longer dwelt in her; she had become alive, and in her, too, I saw God.’ ”

In “Memoirs of a Madman” a callous world deems charity insane. In “What Men Live By” Tolstoy goes further—life without love is a living death.

In “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” the laconic parable of “What Men Live By” is replaced by incontrovertible realism. The story opens with the news of Ivan Ilyich’s death. The immediate response of his lawyer colleagues is relief that “he is dead, not I,” and pleasant calculations about the promotions consequent on his vacated place. Tolstoy writes from the point of view of ordinary mankind, whose egotism is natural and immediately recognizable. There is no fallen angel here to tell us this attitude is deathly, no madman to warn us that this response is the world’s folly. “Well, there you go, he’s dead, but I’m not” is a sentiment, as Dr. Johnson would have said, “to which every bosom returns an echo.” And why not? When Ivan Ilyich’s friend Piotr Ivanovich visits the house of mourning, he turns away from the corpse, with its stern reminder for the living. “Such a reminder seemed to Piotr Ivanovich to be out of place here, or at least of no relevance to himself.” Throughout the story’s first section, inevitable death is repeatedly ignored. The faint odor of decaying flesh is dissipated by Gerasim the servant, unobtrusively sprinkling the death chamber with disinfectant. The mourners, formal respects duly paid, hasten away to their evening card tables. And yet the inconvenient fact of death remains—irrepressible as the springs of the ottoman that so discomfit Piotr Ivanovich as he expresses his condolences to Ivan Ilyich’s widow.

In the remaining narrative Tolstoy makes his readers inhabit the death from which Piotr Ivanovich and the other mourners so assiduously avert their eyes. We live it entirely through Ivan Ilyich’s appalled perceptions, as he sickens, suffers, and dies. Tolstoy forces us to confront dying head-on—in the way the lady of “Three Deaths” and his own brother Dmitri writhed against. We watch it with the horrified clarity that has haunted Tolstoy ever since Arzamas.

In the eyes of the world, in the eyes of Ivan Ilyich himself, he has had a successful career—from cheerful child to bright law student; from special assistant to a provincial governor to provincial examining magistrate of the fifth rank to public prosecutor; from the provinces to Petersburg, step after orderly step—till, in the blundering words of Nabokov’s Pnin, he “fell and got in consequence kidney of the cancer.”

And yet, implicitly, indirectly, Tolstoy shows Ivan Ilyich’s smoothly absorbed progress to be a gradual spiritual death. This is subtly, almost imperceptibly charted in his diminishing concern for justice and growing appetite for power. It is evident in his scrupulously professional preference for the efficient administration of general codes over individual factors and personal predicaments—his habitual practice “to exclude all the raw, living matter that inevitably clogs the smooth running of official business.” With deathly consistency he applies the same principles to his own life, methodically denying every aspect of his own individuality in the pursuit of unimpeachable conformity and the public registers of success. Never has a story dwelt so insistently on “decorum,” “high propriety,” the “duty . .