Spirituality In Leo Tolstoy's The Death Of Ivan Ilyich

In the beginning of Chapter XII of Tolstoy’s story, Ivan starts to painfully scream loudly for three consecutive days, during which time Ivan realizes that his doubts are still unsolved. During this moment, Ivan realizes that moving up in social esteem has not led to joy, fulfillment, and life, but to misery, emptiness, and death instead. Blinded by the values of high society, he

Tolstoy talks about a sort of scholarly emergency that he endured late in his life, and his recuperation from it. In spite of the fact that Tolstoy appreciated what might conventionally be viewed as a successful and agreeable life, he started feeling tormented by worries of unimportance. Specifically, he reports starting to question why he should think about things that he once thought about, or why he should do the things that he would choose to do. At last, he discovered it inconceivably hard to give answers to these inquiries. The outcome, he reports, is feeling as though his life were a doltish, pointless trap played someone has bestowed upon him. He felt as though every individual task he attempted, and also his life in its totality, were without importance.

In The Death of Ivan Ilych Leo Tolstoy conveys the psychological importance of the last, pivotal scene through the use of diction, symbolism, irony. As Ivan Ilych suffers through his last moments on earth, Tolstoy narrates this man's struggle to evolve and to ultimately realize his life was not perfect. Using symbols Tolstoy creates a vivid image pertaining to a topic few people can even start to comprehend- the reexamination of one's life while on the brink of death. In using symbols and irony Tolstoy vividly conveys the manner in which Ilych views death as darkness unto his last moments of life when he finally admits imperfection.

In his novella, The Death of Ivan Ilych, Leo Tolstoy offers his audience a glance into the life and death of an ambitious man, Ivan Ilych. Tolstoy uses the death of Ivan Ilyich to show his audience the negative consequences of living the way Ilych did. Ivan Ilych followed society and made decisions based on what others around him conformed to and not so much about what he genuinely wanted until he was on his deathbed. As death approaches Ilych he realizes that he wrecked everything that should be meaningful in his life in order to work and make money and in the end his friends did not really care much about him. Ilych’s desire to conform made him live a miserable life and led him to darkness. Ivan Ilych attained everything that society

Furthermore, in Leo Tolstoy‘s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and analysis will demonstrate that the character Ivan Ilyich struggles throughout his life to achieve the ideals of liberty, life and the pursuit of happiness. It is through Ivan’s death and his friend’s narration of Ivan’s life that the reader comes to the realization the the middle-class Ivan has few strength’s besides his hard work to drive him towards his ideals for wealth and property. Ivan lived his whole life with the purpose of enjoying himself. He did this through winning power at work, spending money, buying things to impress his friends, throwing parties, and playing bridge. His pursuit of happiness in material things and pleasures is so great that his deliberately avoids anything unpleasant. This means that when he settled down with a family, which was expected of him, he never grows close to them.

Thought-provoking and brutally honest, Ivan Ilych’s life and death divulged the idea that life is not meant to live like others, but to live authentically. When Leo Tolstoy published The Death of Ivan Ilych (1886), he sought to challenge society’s pride of striving to live a shallow and materialistic life. Significant insight was brought about into how Ivan Ilych’s life was considered artificial and terrible by perceiving how he spent his life in the story. Moreover, Ivan Ilych’s life reflected upon the grievance of yearning to live pleasantly and properly. It ultimately exposed how his suffering and illness freed him from his decorous, but dull life.

When one is encountered with death, life’s meaning is revealed. We infrequently agonize over whether we live a healthy lifestyle until it is too late, as demonstrated in "The Death of Ivan Ilych” and “A Good Man is Hard to Find”. Both stories allow the readers to learn the consequences of living a completely selfish, non-Christian life. Through death, characters Ivan and the grandmother are encountered with conversion experiences, in which they reevaluate their own lives. O’Conner and Tolstoy exhibited the character’s reevaluation experience through similar themes in each story.

Tolstoy’s shows in this novel what can happen when you live life by your own rules and what can happen when you live by societies rules such as Ivan Ilyich. He shows that both choices come with major consequences. In this story Ivan Ilyich had two brothers one older and one younger. The older

All throughout the text, (mostly the second and third chapters) parts of Ivan's life are explained in a neutral, informative tone. It is only when he starts dying, that he starts to see his life through a lens of negativity, and wrong. He describes his life as being "ordinary, and, therefore most awful," after reviewing it in whole. He realizes that with his death, he will have accomplished nothing more than leading a painfully normal life, with a meaningless career.

The physical death he must face at the end scares him because it forces him to realize the life he has lived has been completely false. When confronted with death Ivan starts retracing his past, wondering what he has done to deserve such pain and suffering. He realizes when he is bed ridden that he was much more alive as a child then as an adult. In chapter five of The Death of Ivan Ilych, Ivan admits that “…the further back he looked the more life there had been. There had been more of what was good in life and more of life itself,” (Tolstoy 238). If one were to observe small children play, they would notice it does not take much to hold a child’s interest, and often they are much more fascinated by things that don’t work correctly then things that do. With the pressure to conform to society’s views of perfection as an adult, Ivan loses the liveliness he possessed as a child. Having to face death terrifies him because it forces him to admit he actually did not do the correct thing like he thought he did.

The seen environment present when reading The Death of Ivan Ilych story is the way Ivan’s family lived and the way Ivan treated everyone with coldness. The unseen was depicted by the atmosphere present in Ivan’s’ room, making friends and family members uncomfortable to be there. The storied environment is when Ivan realizes that his life has been a mistake and he converts religiously, he finds God and Ivan repents from all his sins, it is not until then that he found peace in his mind.

The book The Death of Ivan Ilych is a literary work by Count Leo Tolstoy published in 1886 and has been hailed as a masterpiece both by critics and readers. The author has been reputed as one of the people who changed how the subject of death is treated in society. In the novel, Leo Tolstoy presents the story of Ivan Ilych who lived a wasted life but who is not ready to imagine his own death. Through Gerasim, the peasant servant associated with Ivan, we are able to see the simple and gentle approach manner to which he serves his master. The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the first major work of fiction completed by Leo Tolstoy after his existential crisis. “The death of Ivan Ilych can be seen as true reflection of and an elaboration of Tolstoy’s

They have just learned about Ilyich’s death, and they outwardly react in the way expected of them. However, these reactions are only for show; internally, each man approaches Ilyich’s death with a slight air of annoyance at the inconvenience the death causes, speculations about what Ilyich’s death means for his own career and his friends’ careers, and relief in the fact that, once again, another man has died instead of himself. Along with this feeling of relief also comes a sort of denial; the men all recognize that Ivan Ilyich is mortal, but deny their own mortality, believing death to be some isolated incident that only happens to other men. They go through the motions of one who has lost an acquaintance, only doing what is socially acceptable and moving on from the death at the first possible

We will begin with an analysation of his family situation. Praskovya, his wife, had been a love constructed from the start of an economic and sociological expectation rather than that of a true courtship. The happiness therefore of the union was derived solely of a necessity to fulfill a desire on the part of others for a “success” of sorts, surely her desire as well. “Ivan Ilyich could have counted on a more illustrious match, but even this one was quite good. He had his salary, and her income, he hoped, would bring in an equal amount. (Tolstoy, 56)” Tolstoy goes on to make several remarks on the benevolent nature of the relationship between he and his wife. The arrival of his children creates no great marker in his life, and proves to be little more than a factor in his ever-lengthening retreat into his life of solitude and work.