Leo Tolstoy's The Death Of Ivan Ilyich

One of many themes, in Leo Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych”, is the Latin parable Respice finem—look before you leap—that is inscribed on a medallion attached to Ivan Ilych’s watch-chain. At first glance, this parable seems to appear quite incidentally; its significance, nonetheless, is paramount. Respice finem is not only reflected in the narrative’s physical structure, it augments Tolstoy’s didactic message of one’s mortality and the importance of abiding by the ‘golden rule’. Ivan Ilych’s life presents the reader with an example of the consequences one may face in the absence of foresight and without heed to the emotions of others. His life was imbued with the need to conform to those around him and deficient in both foresight and empathy,

While on his deathbed he relives moments of his life, suddenly coming to the conclusion that he lived a fictitious life where he focused only on conforming to society, that he overlooked his relationships with people close to him. While dying Ivan gained self knowledge of his meaningless life and realized he could not change anything creating a crises. “Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done”(845). This was what Tolstoy meant when he said Ivan lived a terrible life. Instead of caring about his reputation and possessions, he “ought to” have tried to live a meaningful

He recognizes that in this time period, people treated death with shame. It is therefore associated with guilt on the part of the dying person and is considered unmentionable by those around this person (50). Though death is part of the human experience, Ivan Ilyich experiences this same sense of self-reproach. As he progresses closer to death, those around him, both family and friends, deny his looming fate and forced him into loneliness. They treat his death as though it were pornographic, in Gorer’s terms, and instead attempt to ignore Ivan’s state. Rather than treating death as an almost ceremonial process as in previous time periods, others see Ivan’s descent into death as a burden. He sees death negatively as both poisoning his own life and the lives of those around him (Tolstoy 24). Gorer’s theory would regard Ivan’s death not as a hilarious obscenity, but a taboo “pornographic” subject that is almost entirely disregarded by those close to him. Ivan’s wife, doctor, children, and friends all consider his death to be but a common illness rather than accept the truth of the matter of

Tolstoy refers to it as the intangibles in life: love, compassion, and spiritual life. These traits impacted Ivan significantly as he lays awaiting his maker. Ivan’s interactions with Gerasim and Pasha; whom process these traits causes him to realize his own yarning for this authentic life. “He wanted to be caressed, kissed, cried over...” (104). Ivan would pray and repent for the dishonest way he had lived. Because of his past no one gave him the compassion, the attention he craved and it tormented him terribly. His life did not provide him with happiness nor did it felt meaningful. “[My life] is not the real thing, everything [I] lived by and still lives by is a lie...”

The Death of Ivan Ilyich is quite short, but it is one of the greatest pieces of fiction in any language. In it, Leo Tolstoy examines the hollowness of bourgeois existence. Ivan Ilyich is a successful member of the state bureaucracy. Throughout his life he has carefully adjusted his conduct so as to please his superiors and to arrange a life that runs smoothly and without complication. He is the perfect example of the conforming, “other-directed” man. Only shortly before his death does he discover the horror that lies behind his seemingly successful life.

Tolstoy, in other hand, immerses a reader into a short life story of the protagonist, starting from his family origins, to his youth and his adult life. The misleading nature of Ivan Ilyich’s existence is demonstrated from the very beginning of novella which accurately describes the illusory reality the main character is living in. The reader might be curious why the normal and ordinary life could be horrible. It is not much possible that Tolstoy was against ordinariness itself, but rather to show the reader that the main character Ivan Ilyich never reaches anything meaningful and exciting in his life. Ivan becomes kind of a prisoner of social milieu, he does everything that is expected of him: he goes to law school just like his father did, he finds a job, gets promoted, earns enough money to enjoy his life, fulfills his duty. He becomes kind of a spiritual zombie. Tolstoy describes main character’s absence of “real” life in a subtle but authentic way, showing that Ivan is not much different from the people in his circle. As an inventor of his own illusion, or the “lie”, in which main character lives, Ivan is not showing much curiosity, moreover he is not in search of any kind of truth. He simply exists in his undisturbed, tranquil environment, until something unpredictable happens to him. During one of his ordinary actions, while hanging the new curtains in his new house, he slips, falls down, banging his side against the window frame. This

Ivan felt isolated as he neared death. Most people who knew Ivan acknowledged his illness but not the fact that he was dying which aggravated him, “What tormented Ivan Ilych most was the deception, the lie, which for some reason they all accepted, that he was not dying but was simply ill” (40). Ivan felt deceived by everyone else because no one accepted that his days were limited. Ivan felt secluded since many people ignored the gravity of his condition and did not pay much attention to him.

Secondly, with Pyotr narrating the first chapter of the book in response to his so-called “friend,” Ivan Ilyich, the reader understood that individuals of this materialistic society sought to obtain pleasantness and propriety for their lives. Both Ivan and Pyotr had a desire for pleasantness, and in a quest of attaining this pleasantness; they distanced themselves from an actual, involved living. In turn, their priorities are distorted for they have not real motives in accepting the hardships that life presents. For instance, at the service for Ivan, Pyotr was highly uncomfortable.“… [He] Entered the room where the body lay. The service began: candles,

The Death of Ivan Ilyich, central purpose was to let one know that even if we don 't get into a freak accident and end up with an illness from it, we are still faced with death and the “fear” of death every day no matter how one looks at it. For the simple fact that, death is easily forgettable when everything seems to be going the right way (pleasant). That is why Ivan doesn 't think about it or at least tries to pretend that he is not slowly deteriorating. When Ivan becomes ill, he realizes he isn 't able to enjoy many of the everyday things he was once able to. Ivan also realizes the friends he thought loved and cared about him; really don’t and aren’t his real friends at all, and that his family doesn 't really show him any compassion, therefore he is dying in “fear” and “alone”.

Tolstoy described a most terrifying agony in "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" Ivan Ilyich also lived a false life, filled with lies and artificially multiplied needs. All his colleagues liked him, and yet, on receiving the news of his death, their first thoughts were of the changes and promotions it might occasion among themselves or their acquaintances. They gave no thought to the deceased himself, who had but recently lived among them. Even in the beginning of the work we may conjecture from Ivan Ilyich's feeling of loneliness that the sense of isolation while dying horrified Tolstoy as much as the thought of death itself. This isolation, the novelist warns, influences man's relationship with nature, which includes not only his life

After becoming ill, caused by a fall hitting his side on the window frame, he is now depressed, irritable, fearful and quarrelsome. His physical strength declines rapidly. One night while lying in the dark, he was visited by his first condition of being subject to die, in which he continuously tried to block out of his mind but it haunted him profusely. As the people around him pretends that he is only sick, Ivan now feels that he is surrounded by hypocrites,

The thought of death has probably crossed everyone’s mind at some point in life, how we perceive our lives before death is more relevant. We also learn that death is not something that we can control, it will happen one day or another. When reading the story, The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy, it brings to light the reality of life and death. In fact, I find this Novel intriguing in the aspect of how similar it is in the 21st century. Ivan Ilyich was an ordinary man that had mostly all the same desires we have today. He was a married man, had children, a home, and he had a job. We call that the American dream in today’s time. This is what makes us similar as well as, his approach to life and what he experienced in his last days of life.

The novella oddly starts out shortly after Ivan’s death but it later takes us back years before then, to when he was in the prime of his life and talks of his origins as a middle child whom lived life in mediocrity. Overtime he decides to study law and eventually becomes a judge, all the while focusing on his work and expelling deep personal connections with anyone. He even decides to marry a woman, not necessarily because he may care for her but because

The Death of Ivan is an interesting read about how perspective can change, specifically death. Tolstoy. the author, uses this short story to display how death can portray a piece of freedom. This is one of Tolstoy's first stories, this is a succesful story in the fact that he experienced some personal spiritual awareness before writing it. He really uses this story to bring his personal truths come to life. Ivan is a character that has lived a life of general purpose. He is unhappily married and just goes through the mundane of day to day life. Tolstoy takes an interesting approach of showing the behavior's of Ivan's family and him while dying first then switches back to his life and finishes with the life ending moment.

Perseverance- In the introduction section of this book, Ronald Blythe talks about the struggles that the author of this book went through as he wrote this book. Leo Tolstoy has always been fascinated with death and had spent much of his time as a writer researching about death. An interesting thing about Tolstoy was that while he was specifically writing this book he experienced death in very hard and close ways. He worked through many deaths in his family including the death of one of his young sons. This shows the perseverance that Tolstoy had when he was working on his work. It it really respectable that he was able to work through these hard times and take those feelings and channel them into his work. Although these times were hard,