All in all, there is nothing much for this man to be ashamed of. No wonder he has few regrets when illness begins to make him review his life. He knows that it has not worked out too well, but when he starts to consider the reasons for this he cannot blame himself for having got things seriously wrong. ‘How can that be when I did everything properly?’ It is true that at the very end Ivan Ilyich appears to grasp Tolstoy’s truth that a life lived wrongly is an obstacle to an easy death. He does conclude that his only real happiness was in childhood and just afterwards, and that there was something disgustingly unsatisfactory about the second half of his life. Finally he sees the light, and is permitted to die. But the purity of this vision of an unhappy adulthood is subject to some doubt. Is this not a fairly common experience, even without the promptings of severe illness? Did not the author himself see his life as pointless at precisely the same age (Ivan is also forty-one)? And, in any case, is he not suffering from blurred perceptions because of the pain he has suffered and the opium he is now being treated with?

This is to say that there is something amiss with Tolstoy’s moral purpose here. But there is one thing we can be reasonably sure of: if a miracle had occurred and he had survived, Ivan Ilyich would probably not have gone on to live his life differently, soulfully, newly inspired by his close encounter with death. He would have been more likely to return to his fractious family life and his cards. The life of this man has been trivial rather than despicable, and it is unfair of the author to adopt such a disparaging attitude towards his protagonist. To accept Tolstoy’s implied disparagement would be to condemn and dismiss the lives of millions of people carrying on as best they can in a difficult world without doing much harm to others. The idea implicit in this story that we should emerge from reading it determined to reshape our misguided lives is rather unrealistic.

THE DEATH OF IVAN ILYICH

Yet there is no doubt about the devastating power of this harrowing narrative. Its literary quality, founded on grim descriptive realism and remarkable psychological insight, stands beyond dispute. Many people have claimed this as Tolstoy’s finest work apart from the big novels, and it has gained an international reputation. To take a well-known example, among its many admirers was the French writer Guy de Maupassant, for whom this was the last work of literature that he read before he died, and after reading it he is reported to have signed off with these unhappy words: ‘I realize that everything I have done was to no purpose and that my ten volumes are worthless.’4 The reasons behind this widely acknowledged success are not far to seek.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich is an object lesson in style, construction and the sensitive use of language (much of which is apparent even in translation). The author has abandoned the rich, descriptive and discursive style of his long novels. Here the pace and tone throughout are brisk and businesslike; once the funeral is over (Chapter I) there is nothing digressive, leisurely or poetic. The narrative process is one of relentless compression, a steady tightening of resources until the pressure becomes all but unbearable. Like life itself, the story begins expansively, gradually narrows and then ends in small sections rapidly falling away. The first six chapters decrease in size one by one, then Chapters 7 and 8 open out again to slightly greater length, before issuing in a swift succession of the very shortest chapters to end the story. Even the paragraphs and sentences get shorter and shorter; time shrinks, and the sense of gathering urgency is unmistakable.

Increasingly, as the illness progresses and Ivan’s understanding of it develops, the author grinds out his agonizing story with forensic efficiency. This is directed not at the illness itself, which remains a mystery to us. One day, hanging curtains in his new flat, Ivan has a bit of a fall and bumps his side. From this trivial accident he sustains an illness that most commentators have taken to be cancer, though in our era it is considered rare for physical trauma to have any such result, just as some of the symptoms (such as a bad taste in the mouth) do not seem particularly relevant. But the details do not matter, and in any case Tolstoy held the medical profession in such contempt that he would have been delighted to defy any of their theories or pronouncements. This story loses no opportunity to excoriate the doctors with bitter satire. Tolstoy’s clinical exactitude is directed at the progress of Ivan’s condition and its effect on the sufferer, an inexorable progression from bemusement through panic to a crescendo of intolerable pain as this terrible affliction crushes the sufferer simultaneously in body and mind.

Terrible contrasts sharpen our perception of what is going on: the wholesome past versus the unhealthy present; young flesh compared with an ageing and decaying body; large swathes of hypocrisy and indifference set against spontaneous love emanating (rather unrealistically) from only two people, Ivan’s servant Gerasim and his son Vasya; the turning of the tables as Ivan Ilyich Golovin changes from arbiter to supplicant when faced with a doctor:

It was just like being in court. The way he looked at the accused in court was exactly the way he was being looked at now by the famous doctor.

The judge is judged; the sentencer is being sentenced. The power of such writing does justice to the awful importance of its theme.