The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Master and Man (2 page)

T
HE
D
EATH
OF
I
VAN
I
LYICH

AND

M
ASTER
AND
M
AN

I
NTRODUCTION

Ann Pasternak Slater

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“The Death of Ivan Ilyich” and “Master and Man” are Tolstoy’s late masterpieces. Written well after
War and Peace
and
Anna Karenina,
both stories directly confront the long, uneventful process of dying, some two decades before Tolstoy’s own death at the railway station of Astapovo. Yet both stories also draw on experiences described in his earliest work and resolve some of the questions overwhelming him during his crisis of faith in the 1880s.

The story begins in late January 1854. Tolstoy was twenty-five years old and on his way home from fighting in the Caucasus. It was the worst of the winter. There were no trains. Tolstoy’s diary is laconic:

On the road. Was lost all night at Belogorodtsevskaya, 100 versts from Cherkassk, and the idea occurred to me of writing a story, “The Snowstorm.” . . . Nothing on the road cheered me so much and so reminded me of Russia as a baggage horse which laid back its ears and despite the speed of my sledge tried to overtake it at a gallop.

“The Snowstorm” was written two years later. It is a scrupulously flat account of a night’s sleigh ride across a featureless steppe through an intense blizzard. The narrator distrusts his surly driver who, he suspects, is a novice. They set out at dusk, and soon lose their way. They halt repeatedly. The coachman climbs down and plunges about in the snow trying to find the road. They decide to turn back. Bells jingling tunefully, three troikas carrying the mail drive past. They turn again, follow the troikas, and lose them. They get lost once more. This time, the narrator dismounts and casts about in the snow. In the force field of the blizzard, he loses his bearings.

A moment’s anxiety before he touches the invisible sleigh right next to him.

Once again they decide to turn back—and meet the troikas returning. They follow them. En route, they overtake a long, slow wagon train. Then they lose the road. For a long time they have no sense of direction. They seem to be going in circles—and here is the baggage train they had left behind them, a dark line on the horizon ahead, still moving steadily onward.

It is bitterly cold. His fellow passengers fret about death from exposure, but the narrator insists on continuing their blind journey. He dozes off and remembers with incomparable vividness a hot day on the estate, when a young peasant drowned in the pond. . . .

Many details of this patiently monotonous story contribute to “Master and Man,” another journey through a snowstorm, written forty years later. But the two stories have a radically different atmosphere. In “The Snowstorm,” the characters reach their destination safely as the sun rises. There is a much larger cast of travelers. In company, danger seems more remote, whereas in “Master and Man” there is a strong sense of headstrong, vulnerable isolation. In “The Snowstorm,” death is a hypothesis repeatedly canvassed—and ignored. The actuality of death is raised only obliquely in the episode of the drowned peasant. This casualness seems characteristic not only of the youthful narrator but of Tolstoy himself. When he completed the story in February 1856, he wrote in his diary: “Quarreled with Turgenev, and had a girl at my place. . . . Finished ‘The Snowstorm.’ I’m very pleased with it.” There is an apparent thoughtlessness here that would be unthinkable for the later Tolstoy.

And yet the diary entry is disingenuous. In 1856, his elder brother Dmitri lay dying of tuberculosis. “I’m terribly depressed,” Tolstoy noted baldly. “From tomorrow I want to spend my days in such a way that it will be pleasant to recall them. I’ll put my papers in order . . . do a fair copy of ‘The Snowstorm.’ . . .” Later, Tolstoy wrote in his
Reminiscences:
Dmitri “did not want to die, did not want to believe he was about to die.” Did Dmitri’s deliberate denial, his blind refusal, become “The Snowstorm’s” insouciance in the face of death? Is that insouciance therefore ironic—carrying its own charge of covert criticism? Should we rather look death directly in the face?

A year later, in Paris in March 1857, the tourist Tolstoy took in the sights and touched on the same bruised spot:

Got up at 7 feeling ill and went to see an execution. A stout, white, strong neck and chest. He kissed the Gospels and then— death. How senseless! The impression it made was a strong one and not wasted on me. Morality and art. I know, I love, and I can.

The last line of that diary entry is significant, and will reverberate through Tolstoy’s later work.

One immediate consequence was a slight story, “Three Deaths,” written in January 1858. It contrasts the deaths of a lady, a peasant, and a tree. Predictably, the lady anticipates death with terrified evasion. She is traveling to Italy in vain hope of a cure, her entourage of bullied lady’s maid, doctor, and weak husband reluctantly in tow. The stuffy carriage smells of eau de cologne and dust. Terminally tubercular, fretful, and self-deceiving, the lady is, as Tolstoy wrote to a friend, “pitiful and bad.” Every failure to help her face death is sentimentally justified: “Oh my God!” her husband says. “Think of me, having to remind her about her will. I can’t tell her that.”

At a coaching inn where they stop for refreshments, a dying peasant coughs on the Dutch oven in the kitchen. Sergei, the coachman’s boy, asks him a favor: “I expect you don’t need your new boots now; won’t you let me have them?” “Need them indeed!” the cook snaps. “What does he want with boots? They won’t bury him in boots.” The euphemistic lies of the gentry contrast sharply with brutal peasant honesty. In mild acquiescence, the dying man gives up his unused new boots. The coachman’s boy agrees to put a stone on his grave in exchange.

That night the peasant dies in his sleep. Next spring, the lady dies in her town house, without ever reaching Italy. Even as she receives the last sacrament her attention is distracted by the priest’s recommendation of a local quack. Later, the deacon reads the Psalms over the dead body—monotonously, through his nose, without understanding the words. But beyond the door of the death chamber, there is renewal—children’s voices and the patter of feet. And what do the words of the Psalms actually say? They, too, speak of renewal. “Thou hidest thy face, they are troubled: thou takest away their breath, they die, and return to their dust. Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created: and thou renewest the face of the earth.”

In the coaching inn, the cook rebukes Sergei, the coachman’s boy, for failing to keep his promise. If he can’t afford a stone, he should at least mark the grave with a wooden cross.

As the dawn mists disperse, Sergei’s axe strokes can be heard, and a tree falls.

Tolstoy’s letter about this parable is explicit. The lady has lied all her life and lies in the face of death. Her understanding of Christianity cannot resolve the questions of life and death. The peasant dies in peaceful accord with the natural laws that governed his years of sowing and harvesting, delivering calves and slaughtering cattle. The tree dies “calmly, honestly, and gracefully.” The adverbs are pointedly anthropomorphic.

The loaded contrast between the gentry’s reluctance to confront death and the equanimity of the peasants, who have known a lifetime’s hardship, recurs in “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” and “Master and Man.” The irrelevance of formal religion is also repeated, and its rituals are satirized. And, like the lady of this story, as Ivan Ilyich receives the last sacrament, he is momentarily tempted by the promise of a curative operation.

A decade after writing “Three Deaths,” in August 1869, soon after finishing
War and Peace,
Tolstoy heard of land for sale in the distant Penza province. As he wrote later, “I wanted to buy an estate so that the income from it, or the timber on it, should cover the whole purchase price and I should get it for nothing. I looked out for some fool who did not understand business, and thought that I had found such a man.” In high good humor, he set out with one servant and decided to cover the long last lap of the journey without stopping. Dozing through the night, he woke with a sudden sense of horror and futility:

“Why am I going? Where am I going to?” I suddenly asked myself. It was not that I did not like the idea of buying an estate cheaply, but it suddenly occurred to me that there was no need for me to travel all that distance, that I should die here in this strange place, and I was filled with dread.

So they stopped at a small post station, woke up the attendant, and were shown into the only bedroom. The place was called Arzamas.

In his biography of Tolstoy, Henri Troyat makes the experience a melodrama in the style of Poe. The room was white and square, “like a big coffin.” The furniture was soiled. “The doors and woodwork [were] painted dark red, a color of dried blood.” Shaken by his sudden horror of death, “questions fell upon him like a flock of ravens. . . . He was the only person awake on a sinking ship.”

Tolstoy’s own account is drier. It is normality that frightens him. “A sleepy man with a spot on his cheek (which seemed to me terrifying) showed us into a small square room with whitewashed walls. I remember it tormented me that it should be square. It had one window with a red curtain.” He fell asleep, only to awake in renewed terror. Death was in the room with him.
It
followed him into the corridor in search of his sleeping servant. Everything seemed to be saying the same thing: “There is nothing in life. Death is the only real thing, and death ought not to exist.” In what we would now identify as a panic attack, it seems Tolstoy felt he was dying.

Life and death somehow merged into one another. Something was tearing my soul apart and could not complete the severance. . . . Again I went to look at the sleepers, and again I tried to go to sleep. Always the same horror: red, white and square. Something tearing within that yet could not be torn apart. A painful, painfully dry and spiteful feeling, no atom of kindliness. . . .

Like the Ancient Mariner, Tolstoy tried to pray, surreptitiously glancing over his shoulder in case anyone was watching him. In vain. No prayers would come. He woke his servant and they left in the dark. When they reached their destination, Tolstoy did not buy the land. He was forty-one years old.

Another decade passed. As letters to his wife, Sofya, and the reminiscences of his son Sergei testify, Tolstoy continued to experience terrifying intimations of death. When
Anna Karenina
was finished in 1877, he began
A Confession,
a self-critical, clear-sighted, autobiographical account of his deepening spiritual crisis. In form, its first half is comparable to the narrative of “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” Decades are sweepingly surveyed, significant moments seized on and coldly scrutinized. The content, too, is similar. Tolstoy categorically condemns his decade of early maturity from about 1845 to 1855, when he indulged his machismo—womanizing, quarreling, even killing in his army years. At that time, he had believed in a popular concept of “progress” as the justifying principle of life. This is comparable to Ivan Ilyich’s determination to fulfill conventional expectations, to live as others do, to achieve the status and acquire the furnishings other people respect. In his
Confession,
Tolstoy identifies the Paris execution as crucial. It shattered his faith in convention:

When I saw how the head separated from the body, and each separately rattled into its crate, I understood—not in my mind, but my whole being—that no theory of the good sense of Progress, and What Is, can justify this crime, and that if all the people in the world, on whatever theory, from the beginning of the world, should find it necessary—I still knew that it was not necessary but bad. 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.

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“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.