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