Ivan Ilych's death before his death

Well, it didn't end quite as I had expected but "The Death of Ivan Ilych" certainly deserves its title.

After getting through the details of his life and the cause of his eventually fatal illness, the last third of the story is spent in Ivan's head. Things become quite introspective and as bleak as Russian literature is said to be.

In his throes of agony, Ivan looks back on his life and wonders if he has lived properly. Up until the story's end this question plagues him and he denies it consideration although doubts constantly bring it to the fore of his mind.

Was Ivan Ilych living his life properly, always keeping to whatever middle path appeared before him?

It's a question that anyone can ask of themselves, but I think that the only answer can be found in a They Might Be Giants lyric: "Who can say what's wrong or right?/Nobody can" ("Spiralling Shape").

Though Tolstoy doesn't give any definite answers himself, he does end his story on an up note. All of Ivan's wondering about whether or not he lived his life properly really reminded me of P.D. Ouspenky's The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin. Ouspensky's novel is about a man who's given a chance to relive his life with the aim of improving it thanks to his awareness of where he went wrong.

The influence of G.I. Gurdjief's teachings about the Fourth Way and self-remembering were also brought to mind as I finished "The Death of Ivan Ilych." In my mind, Ivan's reflections suggest that his death isn't just the event that closes the story, but something that happened to him once he entered the world of officialdom at his law school. From that point, his life became more regular and predictable, or, as Gurdjief would have it, mechanical.

That is, all of the organic happenings of Ivan Ilych's life were slowly leached out of him until he reached the point where he moved into the same sort of house that others of his social standing owned and he decorated it in the same way as those others. To my mind, Ivan's injuring himself during this decorating is his time of death. From then until near the end of his broken body's existence he is dead and only in his final hours does he regain lively clarity through the nagging question: "What if my whole life has really been wrong?" (148).

So, "The Death of Ivan Ilych" is definitely quite a bit richer than "Family Happiness." As "The Kreutzer Sonata" is started, we'll see just how much Tolstoy's changed over a much shorter span of time: a mere three years.