Ivan Ilyich: Signs of Life

Well it looks like it took us two and a half months to read a novella of fewer than a hundred pages. Of course I did finish it somewhat sooner - it was sheer procrastination that prevented any action on the site. To be honest, with the Canadian election going on, there was a serious possibility that Stephen Harper would lose power, thus making our entire raison d'être, already geographically ludicrous, quite anachronistic. So thank you, Canadian public, for choosing a government that lets two people on the other side of the world continue to harbour literary pretensions!
 

It's actually quite appropriate that this blog has been so moribund lately, as it ties in with a theme in Ivan Ilyich. Just as you, our unfortunate readers have been searching for signs of life in this space, so too is poor Ivan searching for signs of life as he confronts his imminent death. Hurray for tenuous links!

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After Ivan realizes that his final days are at hand, he begins naturally enough to question his life, wondering if he had lived as he ought. Surely, he lived ‘properly’ according to the world’s standards, a perfect example of how a civil servant should function – he lived so ‘well and pleasantly’ in fact that for a long time he cannot even admit the possibility that his was not a good life.

Yet the niggling doubt will not leave him. He is desperate for a sign of life, both literally in his increasingly hopeless search for a cure, and metaphorically as he seeks to justify himself, to prove to himself that his life had been worthwhile. He can find no such sign, coming to the conclusion that ‘there was nothing to defend’ about his life – the only time in his entire life when he had been truly happy had been his childhood. It is then that he realizes that his life is over, and this realization causes three whole days of screaming, marking his final descent into total despair.

           

Or not quite final: for at the instant of death, he has something of an epiphany, a remarkably sudden about-turn. For the first time perhaps in his entire life, or at least since taking ill, he feels sorry for someone other than himself. His relationship with his wife, governed by societal rules of acceptability, degenerated very early on into a sort of mutual disdain. Neither did he have much time for his son, shuffling him off to boarding school at a young age. His illness exacerbated this situation, as he fell more and more to self-pity and self-obsession. At the end, however, Ivan quite suddenly feels compassion for his family, realises his own mistreatment of them, and asks for their forgiveness.

I would suggest, then, that The Death of Ivan Ilyich refers not so much to his physical death, but to the whole of Ivan’s time on earth, and that the moment when he breathes his last is for Tolstoy the moment when true life begins. We see the same thing happening in War and Peace, when Prince Andrei, who spends his whole life in a state of flux, never satisfied with who he is, discovers joy, love and peace as he lies dying after Borodino. Like Andrei, until his last few hours Ivan is a ‘dead soul’ (to lazily appropriate some Turgenev). We are left with fear in our hearts for other dead souls, such as Peter Ivanovich, Ivan’s colleague who resembles Ivan almost exactly, in his career, his ‘correct’ way of life, and his complete denial of his own mortality.

- Samuel

Soundtrack: The Death Of Ivan Ilyich

Here's another gimmick to add to our list of gimmicks! For every book we attempt, one of us has to suggest a soundtrack to our reading, the perfect music to get us immersed in the atmosphere of our material. It might be something which is especially evocative of a particular historical era or simply something that matches the mood or tone of the writing. Think of it as a Melbourne University style brand of interdisciplinary madness. Or better yet, don't!
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First up is Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, for a which a score actually sprung to mind while I was reading it: Slavonic Dances by the Czech composer Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904). Yes, I realise that Czech and Russian are by no means the same thing. However, I pray that you will forgive that slight lapse!

The Slavonic Dances were composed in two sets (Op. 46 and Op. 72) in 1878 and 1886. The period of their composition and publication therefore neatly intersects with the period in which Ivan Ilyich was conceived and written - Tolstoy's work was published in 1887 and was his first major work of fiction since Anna Karenina in 1877. Modelled on the rhythms and melodies of his native Bohemian folk music, the dances are a fine example of the romantic nationalist music of the era which reacted against the dominance of German and French ideas of music, asserting the value of local folk and religious traditions.

Why Dvorak, though? There were certainly well-respected Russian nationalist composers writing at the same time as the Czech, including the Big Five (Balakirev, Cui, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin). To be perfectly honest, it is simply because I prefer Dvorak's music to that of any of his contemporaries, up to and including Brahms. He is compulsively tuneful, and has the most wonderful and intuitive way of playing with chords, constantly changing keys and modes unexpectedly yet naturally and melodically. He is also deeply evocative of the era and of the Slavic spirit of the times (this power of evocation was apparently very transferable, as he later became famous for his 'New World' music, which did for America what the Slavonic Dances did for Bohemia).

Of course, alternatively you could just listen to some Smiths or something like that, just to get you thinking about death and being sad and stuff!

(Here's a slightly idiosyncratic version of a couple of dances from Op. 72 by Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman. They show off a bit...)

- Samuel

We have Followers!

Thank you! That's all I wanted to say.

We're chuffed by your attention, and your encouragement.

Do leave comments, and tell us what you think.

Here's hoping we'll be up to scratch, in entertaining you. :)

Tolstoy: 5 Pages in

During a lunch-break of my Greek intensive, I pulled out The Death of Ivan Ilyich to have with my lentil and tomato salad. It was a bold move, and I was rewarded by a few compliments from fellow diners. ("So you like Classics, eh?", "What's it about? Death?" and "Tolstoy? He's the one that wrote War and Peace, right?")

I'd hacked my way through Anna Karenina in a month, in Berlin. So I was ready for it to be slow going, at first. Tolstoy always picks up, once you get yourself into the prose, and the slow, measured pace, and the Russian names that are always hard to keep straight; my cheap Wordsworth edition of Anna Karenina was impossible to put down, after a while.

Ivan Ilyich, 5 pages in, is slowly developing. So far, I know it's about Ilyich, a lawyer, and his death. And, as always, with all deaths, the effect of a death upon the living.

(D'uh!) (Well, no spoilers, at least.)

My favourite sentence, so far, is this:

The past history of Ivan Ilyrich's life has been straightforward, ordinary and dreadful in the extreme. 


It's wonderfully economical, and packs a punch at the end, doesn't it?

Ok! More updates as I plod. (Trying not to look askance at the Agatha Christie Novel that's Book Number 3!)

- Bei-En

Je ne suis pas Canadienne

Well, I suppose I should 'fess up and say that I am not remotely Canadian. With the exception of Prince Edward Island, which I looked up assiduously in my Collins World Atlas during my Anne of Green Gables phase, I have hitherto dwelt very little on that northern landmass.

However, Samuel has introduced me to the niceties of Canada. These include Kate Beaton's sly and sparkling comic: Hark! A vagrant, and the band, the New Pornographers.

Hmm, actually, right now I can't remember anything else I like about Canada. Except that they like us, Australians. But I am sure all the glories of that Maple-bedecked land will come back to me.

(There is a rather hilarious episode of the West Wing, when Kate Harper, the Deputy National Security Advisor, discovers that there's an actual US contingency plan - "Operation Northern Lights" - to invade Canada. You can watch it here.)

What I do like, however, is this marvelously free-ranging and frolicksome booklist from Yann Martel, on which we're basing our reading and talking. In this list of 100 books ('read by numbers', geddit?) there's everything ranging from Norse mythology to pop culture analysis; not one, not two, but five collections of poetry; and (impressively), a book by a Chinese author.

I like the way Martel's approached this as well. It's a political stunt, sure. But one that's done respectfully, without superciliousness. As Martel writes, his purpose is "not to educate [Harper] ... less than that ... [but] to make suggestions to his stillness."

It's also a creative project, that functions as a philosophical apologia pro vita sua, too.

Martel argues that busyness is the opiate that drugs us; deludes us to thinking that what we do is so very important, and by corollary, we too, as human beings, must be important. However, it's in stillness, that we become more human. Our hearts are for expanding, our souls for extending, and our minds ache for understanding and beauty. But for these requirements of of existence, we must have quietness:

To read a book, one must be still. To watch a concert, a play, a movie, to look at a painting, one must be still. Religion, too, makes use of stillness, notably with prayer and meditation. Just gazing upon a still lake, upon a quiet winter scene—doesn’t that lull us into contemplation? Life, it seems, favours moments of stillness to appear on the edges of our perception and whisper to us, “Here I am. What do you think?” Then we become busy and the stillness vanishes, yet we hardly notice because we fall so easily for the delusion of busyness, whereby what keeps us busy must be important, and the busier we are with it, the more important it must be. And so we work, work, work, rush, rush, rush. On occasion we say to ourselves, panting, “Gosh, life is racing by.” But that’s not it at all, it’s the contrary: life is still. It is we who are racing by.


So, in the midst of my Greek intensive, and in between marking research essays, I shall find some time, not only to pray, and to read my Bible, but also, hopefully to read Tolstoy, and Lu Xun, and memorise some odd lines of Sappho and Simon Armitage.

Why don't you join us?

- Bei-En

Let's just clear that up

Well, now that my 'colleague' has thoroughly muddied the waters, allow me to explain.

Yann Martel is a renowned Canadian novelist (you may know him from such novels as The Life Of Pi) who resolved in 2007 to send the Prime Minister (not a mere 'politician,' Bei-En!), Stephen Harper, a book every two weeks. Each work would, to quote Martel, "make a suggestion to his stillness." To date, Martel has sent Harper 100 books, ranging from Russian novellas to German epics to modern Canadian novels.

What does Martel mean by 'stillness,' exactly? I believe he is suggesting that even a man so busy as the Canadian Prime Minister, the hockey-loving family-man economist must have his moments of stillness, moments of thoughtful reflection where he is receptive to the literature and art and beautiful transcendence. Martel identifies the religious and the artistic as the only two "sets of tools with which the rich soil of life can be worked." Of course, I rather think Harper has the former (which is rather more important) covered, as a devout Christian of the evangelical persuasion.

But the REALLY important thing about this website is that it has inspired myself and Ms. Zou to read! Whether or not the Right Honourable Mr. Harper ever takes the time to read The Death Of Ivan Ilyich, at least we shall! That is our goal - to read each and every book recommended by Martel and write about our experiences here. It is as simple as that. It's as much for our own pleasure and aedification as it is for any hypothetical members of the public.

For the record, I am the (sort of) Canadian in the room, born in small-town British Columbia. Oh the fair smell of cedar on the Fraser! I'm a Melbournite now, though I still feel the pangs of fealty to the True North.

The website that inspired us can be found at: http://www.whatisstephenharperreading.ca/

Yours &c.,

Samuel

Ahem!

So! The dreaded first post. I'll leave Samuel to fill you in on the details*, but suffice to say that this blog will be about reading, lists, Yann Martel and a Canadian politician, and perhaps, mayhaps, we might even dribble out some comments on book covers. Who knows?

Your hosts - Sir Samuel of Serendip, and yours truly.

Our first book: Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych.
 



*I think this is symptomatic of how this blog will run: I sally in, where angels fear to tread, and poor Samuel has to come and mop up the mess.