Home Uncategorized Nursing

Uncategorized

Nursing

This essay is asking you to formalize your thoughts on the movie wit and the Death of Ivan Ilyich. Wit and the death of Ivan combine to be a capstone for the course content. Watching wit in light of Tolstoy novella is meant to drown together in this paper

The Three-course theme we have done, the nurse’s ethics, suffering, and empathy, demonstrate your engagement with the course by tracing the theme trough Wit and the death of Ivan and then by quoted direct reference of at least four other official sources what do our many scholars have to offer to the perhaps emotional interaction of spirituality and healthcare.

Finish your essay on how your healthcare setting would be improved.

· The essay must be 6-7 pages In a word document.

· Your grammar and spelling must be correct.

· Number of pages in the lower right corner, typed double spaced, 12-font times, New Roman

· Block quotes of more than 4 lines are single-spaced and indented

· Use parenteral in-text citation fomat (Ch4,p67) or (Peters, Ch3, p45) only include full bibliographic reference

Watch (or read, if you prefer) Wit

https://tinyurl.com/EdsonWit

The Death of Ivan Ilych
Tolstoy, Lev Nikolayevich

(Translator: Louise and Aylmer Maude)

Published:

Type(s): Short Fiction
Source: Wikisource

About Tolstoy:
Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, commonly referred to in English as

Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian novelist, writer, essayist, philosopher, Chris-
tian anarchist, pacifist, educational reformer, moral thinker, and an influ-
ential member of the Tolstoy family.

As a fiction writer Tolstoy is widely regarded as one of the greatest of
all novelists, particularly noted for his masterpieces War and Peace and
Anna Karenina; in their scope, breadth and realistic depiction of Russian
life, the two books stand at the peak of realistic fiction. As a moral philo-
sopher he was notable for his ideas on nonviolent resistance through his
work The Kingdom of God is Within You, which in turn influenced such
twentieth-century figures as Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther
King, Jr.

Source: Wikipedia

Also available on Feedbooks for Tolstoy:
• War and Peace (

)
• Anna Karenina (18

7)
• Where Love is, There God is Also (188

)
• Ivan the Fool (188

)
• Youth (18

)
• Boyhood (185

)
• Work, Death, and Sickness (

)
• Childhood (18

)
• Father Sergius (1873)
• Master and Man (1895)

Note: This book is brought to you by Feedbooks.
http://www.feedbooks.com
Strictly for personal use, do not use this file for commercial purposes.

http://feedbooks.com/book/83

http://feedbooks.com/book/

http://feedbooks.com/book/1

http://feedbooks.com/book/17

http://feedbooks.com/book/1508

http://feedbooks.com/book/15

http://feedbooks.com/book/

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Help:Public_domain#Copyright_terms_by_country

http://www.feedbooks.com

Chapter 1

During an interval in the Melvinski trial in the large building of the

Law Courts the members and public prosecutor met in Ivan Egorovich
Shebek’s private room, where the conversation turned on the celebrated
Krasovski case. Fedor Vasilievich warmly maintained that it was not
subject to their jurisdiction, Ivan Egorovich maintained the contrary,
while Peter Ivanovich, not having entered into the discussion at the start,
took no part in it but looked through the Gazette which had just been
handed in.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “Ivan Ilych has died!”
“You don’t say so!”
“Here, read it yourself,” replied Peter Ivanovich, handing Fedor Va-

silievich the paper still damp from the press. Surrounded by a black bor-
der were the words: “Praskovya Fedorovna Golovina, with profound
sorrow, informs relatives and friends of the demise of her beloved hus-
band Ivan Ilych Golovin, Member of the Court of Justice, which occurred
on February the 4th of this year 1882. the funeral will take place on Fri-
day at one o’clock in the afternoon.”

Ivan Ilych had been a colleague of the gentlemen present and was
liked by them all. He had been ill for some weeks with an illness said to
be incurable. His post had been kept open for him, but there had been
conjectures that in case of his death Alexeev might receive his appoint-
ment, and that either Vinnikov or Shtabel would succeed Alexeev. So on
receiving the news of Ivan Ilych’s death the first thought of each of the
gentlemen in that private room was of the changes and promotions it
might occasion among themselves or their acquaintances.

“I shall be sure to get Shtabel’s place or Vinnikov’s,” thought Fedor Va-
silievich. “I was promised that long ago, and the promotion means an ex-
tra eight hundred rubles a year for me besides the allowance.”

“Now I must apply for my brother-in-law’s transfer from Kaluga,”
thought Peter Ivanovich. “My wife will be very glad, and then she won’t
be able to say that I never do anything for her relations.” “I thought he

would never leave his bed again,” said Peter Ivanovich aloud. “It’s very
sad.” “But what really was the matter with him?”

“The doctors couldn’t say—at least they could, but each of them said
something different. When last I saw him I though he was getting
better.”

“And I haven’t been to see him since the holidays. I always meant to
go.” “Had he any property?”

“I think his wife had a little—but something quite trifling.”
“We shall have to go to see her, but they live so terribly far away.”
“Far away from you, you mean. Everything’s far away from your

place.”
“You see, he never can forgive my living on the other side of the river,”

said Peter Ivanovich, smiling at Shebek. Then, still talking of the dis-
tances between different parts of the city, they returned to the Court.

Besides considerations as to the possible transfers and promotions
likely to result from Ivan Ilych’s death, the mere fact of the death of a
near acquaintance aroused, as usual, in all who heard of it the compla-
cent feeling that, “it is he who is dead and not I.”

Each one thought or felt, “Well, he’s dead but I’m alive!” But the more
intimate of Ivan Ilych’s acquaintances, his so-called friends, could not
help thinking also that they would now have to fulfill the very tiresome
demands of propriety by attending the funeral service and paying a visit
of condolence to the widow.

Fedor Vasilievich and Peter Ivanovich had been his nearest acquaint-
ances. Peter Ivanovich had studied law with Ivan Ilych and had con-
sidered himself to be under obligations to him. Having told his wife at
dinner-time of Ivan Ilych’s death, and of his conjecture that it might be
possible to get her brother transferred to their circuit, Peter Ivanovich
sacrificed his usual nap, put on his evening clothes and drove to Ivan
Ilych’s house.

At the entrance stood a carriage and two cabs. Leaning against the
wall in the hall downstairs near the cloakstand was a coffin-lid covered
with cloth of gold, ornamented with gold cord and tassels, that had been
polished up with metal powder. Two ladies in black were taking off their
fur cloaks. Peter Ivanovich recognized one of them as Ivan Ilych’s sister,
but the other was a stranger to him. His colleague Schwartz was just
coming downstairs, but on seeing Peter Ivanovich enter he stopped and

winked at him, as if to say: “Ivan Ilych has made a mess of things—not
like you and me.”

Schwartz’s face with his Piccadilly whiskers, and his slim figure in
evening dress, had as usual an air of elegant solemnity which contrasted
with the playfulness of his character and had a special piquancy here, or
so it seemed to Peter Ivanovich.

Peter Ivanovich allowed the ladies to precede him and slowly fol-
lowed them upstairs. Schwartz did not come down but remained where
he was, and Peter Ivanovich understood that he wanted to arrange
where they should play bridge that evening. The ladies went upstairs to
the widow’s room, and Schwartz with seriously compressed lips but a
playful look in his eyes, indicated by a twist of his eyebrows the room to
the right where the body lay.

Peter Ivanovich, like everyone else on such occasions, entered feeling
uncertain what he would have to do. All he knew was that at such times
it is always safe to cross oneself. But he was not quite sure whether one
should make obseisances while doing so. He therefore adopted a middle
course. On entering the room he began crossing himself and made a
slight movement resembling a bow. At the same time, as far as the mo-
tion of his head and arm allowed, he surveyed the room. Two young
men—apparently nephews, one of whom was a high-school pupil—were
leaving the room, crossing themselves as they did so. An old woman was
standing motionless, and a lady with strangely arched eyebrows was
saying something to her in a whisper. A vigorous, resolute Church Read-
er, in a frock-coat, was reading something in a loud voice with an expres-
sion that precluded any contradiction. The butler’s assistant, Gerasim,
stepping lightly in front of Peter Ivanovich, was strewing something on
the floor. Noticing this, Peter Ivanovich was immediately aware of a
faint odour of a decomposing body.

The last time he had called on Ivan Ilych, Peter Ivanovich had seen
Gerasim in the study. Ivan Ilych had been particularly fond of him and
he was performing the duty of a sick nurse. Peter Ivanovich continued to
make the sign of the cross slightly inclining his head in an intermediate
direction between the coffin, the Reader, and the icons on the table in a
corner of the room. Afterwards, when it seemed to him that this move-
ment of his arm in crossing himself had gone on too long, he stopped
and began to look at the corpse.

The dead man lay, as dead men always lie, in a specially heavy way,
his rigid limbs sunk in the soft cushions of the coffin, with the head

forever bowed on the pillow. His yellow waxen brow with bald patches
over his sunken temples was thrust up in the way peculiar to the dead,
the protruding nose seeming to press on the upper lip. He was much
changed and grown even thinner since Peter Ivanovich had last seen
him, but, as is always the case with the dead, his face was handsomer
and above all more dignified than when he was alive. the expression on
the face said that what was necessary had been accomplished, and ac-
complished rightly. Besides this there was in that expression a reproach
and a warning to the living. This warning seemed to Peter Ivanovich out
of place, or at least not applicable to him. He felt a certain discomfort and
so he hurriedly crossed himself once more and turned and went out of
the door—too hurriedly and too regardless of propriety, as he himself
was aware.

Schwartz was waiting for him in the adjoining room with legs spread
wide apart and both hands toying with his top-hat behind his back. The
mere sight of that playful, well-groomed, and elegant figure refreshed
Peter Ivanovich. He felt that Schwartz was above all these happenings
and would not surrender to any depressing influences. His very look
said that this incident of a church service for Ivan Ilych could not be a
sufficient reason for infringing the order of the session—in other words,
that it would certainly not prevent his unwrapping a new pack of cards
and shuffling them that evening while a footman placed fresh candles on
the table: in fact, that there was no reason for supposing that this incid-
ent would hinder their spending the evening agreeably. Indeed he said
this in a whisper as Peter Ivanovich passed him, proposing that they
should meet for a game at Fedor Vasilievich’s. But apparently Peter Ivan-
ovich was not destined to play bridge that evening. Praskovya Fe-
dorovna (a short, fat woman who despite all efforts to the contrary had
continued to broaden steadily from her shoulders downwards and who
had the same extraordinarily arched eyebrows as the lady who had been
standing by the coffin), dressed all in black, her head covered with lace,
came out of her own room with some other ladies, conducted them to
the room where the dead body lay, and said: “The service will begin im-
mediately. Please go in.”

Schwartz, making an indefinite bow, stood still, evidently neither ac-
cepting nor declining this invitation. Praskovya Fedorovna recognizing
Peter Ivanovich, sighed, went close up to him, took his hand, and said: “I
know you were a true friend to Ivan Ilych…” and looked at him awaiting
some suitable response. And Peter Ivanovich knew that, just as it had
been the right thing to cross himself in that room, so what he had to do

here was to press her hand, sigh, and say, “Believe me…” So he did all
this and as he did it felt that the desired result had been achieved: that
both he and she were touched.

“Come with me. I want to speak to you before it begins,” said the wid-
ow. “Give me your arm.” Peter Ivanovich gave her his arm and they went
to the inner rooms, passing Schwartz who winked at Peter Ivanovich
compassionately.

“That does for our bridge! Don’t object if we find another player. Per-
haps you can cut in when you do escape,” said his playful look.

Peter Ivanovich sighed still more deeply and despondently, and
Praskovya Fedorovna pressed his arm gratefully. When they reached the
drawing-room, upholstered in pink cretonne and lighted by a dim lamp,
they sat down at the table—she on a sofa and Peter Ivanovich on a low
pouffe, the springs of which yielded spasmodically under his weight.
Praskovya Fedorovna had been on the point of warning him to take an-
other seat, but felt that such a warning was out of keeping with her
present condition and so changed her mind. As he sat down on the
pouffe Peter Ivanovich recalled how Ivan Ilych had arranged this room
and had consulted him regarding this pink cretonne with green leaves.
The whole room was full of furniture and knick-knacks, and on her way
to the sofa the lace of the widow’s black shawl caught on the edge of the
table. Peter Ivanovich rose to detach it, and the springs of the pouffe, re-
lieved of his weight, rose also and gave him a push. The widow began
detaching her shawl herself, and Peter Ivanovich again sat down, sup-
pressing the rebellious springs of the pouffe under him. But the widow
had not quite freed herself and Peter Ivanovich got up again, and again
the pouffe rebelled and even creaked. When this was all over she took
out a clean cambric handkerchief and began to weep. The episode with
the shawl and the struggle with the pouffe had cooled Peter Ivanovich’s
emotions and he sat there with a sullen look on his face. This awkward
situation was interrupted by Sokolov, Ivan Ilych’s butler, who came to
report that the plot in the cemetery that Praskovya Fedorovna had
chosen would cost two hundred rubles. She stopped weeping and, look-
ing at Peter Ivanovich with the air of a victim, remarked in French that it
was very hard for her. Peter Ivanovich made a silent gesture signifying
his full conviction that it must indeed be so. “Please smoke,” she said in a
magnanimous yet crushed voice, and turned to discuss with Sokolov the
price of the plot for the grave.

Peter Ivanovich while lighting his cigarette heard her inquiring very
circumstantially into the prices of different plots in the cemetery and fi-
nally decide which she would take. when that was done she gave in-
structions about engaging the choir. Sokolov then left the room. “I look
after everything myself,” she told Peter Ivanovich, shifting the albums
that lay on the table; and noticing that the table was endangered by his
cigarette-ash, she immediately passed him an ash-tray, saying as she did
so: “I consider it an affectation to say that my grief prevents my attend-
ing to practical affairs. On the contrary, if anything can—I won’t say con-
sole me, but—distract me, it is seeing to everything concerning him.” She
again took out her handkerchief as if preparing to cry, but suddenly, as if
mastering her feeling, she shook herself and began to speak calmly. “But
there is something I want to talk to you about.”

Peter Ivanovich bowed, keeping control of the springs of the pouffe,
which immediately began quivering under him.

“He suffered terribly the last few days.”
“Did he?” said Peter Ivanovich.
“Oh, terribly! He screamed unceasingly, not for minutes but for hours.

For the last three days he screamed incessantly. It was unendurable. I
cannot understand how I bore it; you could hear him three rooms off.
Oh, what I have suffered!”

“Is it possible that he was conscious all that time?” asked Peter
Ivanovich.

“Yes,” she whispered. “To the last moment. He took leave of us a
quarter of an hour before he died, and asked us to take Vasya away.”

The thought of the suffering of this man he had known so intimately,
first as a merry little boy, then as a schoolmate, and later as a grown-up
colleague, suddenly struck Peter Ivanovich with horror, despite an un-
pleasant consciousness of his own and this woman’s dissimulation. He
again saw that brow, and that nose pressing down on the lip, and felt
afraid for himself.

“Three days of frightful suffering and the death! Why, that might sud-
denly, at any time, happen to me,” he thought, and for a moment felt ter-
rified. But—he did not himself know how—the customary reflection at
once occurred to him that this had happened to Ivan Ilych and not to
him, and that it should not and could not happen to him, and that to
think that it could would be yielding to depression which he ought not
to do, as Schwartz’s expression plainly showed. After which reflection

Peter Ivanovich felt reassured, and began to ask with interest about the
details of Ivan Ilych’s death, as though death was an accident natural to
Ivan Ilych but certainly not to himself. After many details of the really
dreadful physical sufferings Ivan Ilych had endured (which details he
learnt only from the effect those sufferings had produced on Praskoyva
Fedorovna’s nerves) the widow apparently found it necessary to get to
business.

“Oh, Peter Ivanovich, how hard it is! How terribly, terribly hard!” and
she again began to weep. Peter Ivanovich sighed and waited for her to
finish blowing her nose. When she had done so he said, “Believe me…”
and she again began talking and brought out what was evidently her
chief concern with him—namely, to question him as to how she could
obtain a grant of money from the government on the occasion of her
husband’s death. She made it appear that she was asking Peter
Ivanovich’s advice about her pension, but he soon saw that she already
knew about that to the minutest detail, more even than he did himself.
She knew how much could be got out of the government in consequence
of her husband’s death, but wanted to find out whether she could not
possibly extract something more. Peter Ivanovich tried to think of some
means of doing so, but after reflecting for a while and, out of propriety,
condemning the government for its niggardliness, he said he thought
that nothing more could be got. Then she sighed and evidently began to
devise means of getting rid of her visitor. Noticing this, he put out his ci-
garette, rose, pressed her hand, and went out into the anteroom. In the
dining-room where the clock stood that Ivan Ilych had liked so much
and had bought at an antique shop, Peter Ivanovich met a priest and a
few acquaintances who had come to attend the service, and he recog-
nized Ivan Ilych’s daughter, a handsome young woman. She was in
black and her slim figure appeared slimmer than ever. She had a
gloomy, determined, almost angry expression, and bowed to Peter Ivan-
ovich as though he were in some way to blame. Behind her, with the
same offended look, stood a wealthy young man, an examining magis-
trate, whom Peter Ivanovich also knew and who was her fiance, as he
had heard. He bowed mournfully to them and was about to pass into the
death-chamber, when from under the stairs appeared the figure of Ivan
Ilych’s schoolboy son, who was extremely like his father. He seemed a
little Ivan Ilych, such as Peter Ivanovich remembered when they studied
law together. His tear-stained eyes had in them the look that is seen in
the eyes of boys of thirteen or fourteen who are not pure-minded. When
he saw Peter Ivanovich he scowled morosely and shamefacedly. Peter

Ivanovich nodded to him and entered the death-chamber. The service
began: candles, groans, incense, tears, and sobs. Peter Ivanovich stood
looking gloomily down at his feet. He did not look once at the dead man,
did not yield to any depressing influence, and was one of the first to
leave the room. There was no one in the anteroom, but Gerasim darted
out of the dead man’s room, rummaged with his strong hands among the
fur coats to find Peter Ivanovich’s and helped him on with it.

“Well, friend Gerasim,” said Peter Ivanovich, so as to say something.
“It’s a sad affair, isn’t it?” “It’s God will. We shall all come to it some day,”
said Gerasim, displaying his teeth—the even white teeth of a healthy
peasant—and, like a man in the thick of urgent work, he briskly opened
the front door, called the coachman, helped Peter Ivanovich into the
sledge, and sprang back to the porch as if in readiness for what he had to
do next. Peter Ivanovich found the fresh air particularly pleasant after
the smell of incense, the dead body, and carbolic acid.

“Where to sir?” asked the coachman.
“It’s not too late even now….I’ll call round on Fedor Vasilievich.”
He accordingly drove there and found them just finishing the first rub-

ber, so that it was quite convenient for him to cut in.

Chapter 2

Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore

most terrible. He had been a member of the Court of Justice, and died at
the age of forty-five. His father had been an official who after serving in
various ministries and departments in Petersburg had made the sort of
career which brings men to positions from which by reason of their long
service they cannot be dismissed, though they are obviously unfit to hold
any responsible position, and for whom therefore posts are specially cre-
ated, which though fictitious carry salaries of from six to ten thousand
rubles that are not fictitious, and in receipt of which they live on to a
great age. Such was the Privy Councillor and superfluous member of
various superfluous institutions, Ilya Epimovich Golovin.

He had three sons, of whom Ivan Ilych was the second. The eldest son
was following in his father’s footsteps only in another department, and
was already approaching that stage in the service at which a similar sine-
cure would be reached. The third son was a failure. He had ruined his
prospects in a number of positions and was now serving in the railway
department. His father and brothers, and still more their wives, not
merely disliked meeting him, but avoided remembering his existence un-
less compelled to do so. His sister had married Baron Greff, a Petersburg
official of her father’s type. Ivan Ilych was le phénix de la famille as
people said. He was neither as cold and formal as his elder brother nor
as wild as the younger, but was a happy mean between them—an intelli-
gent, polished, lively, and agreeable man. He had studied with his
younger brother at the School of Law, but the latter had failed to com-
plete the course and was expelled when he was in the fifth class. Ivan
Ilych finished the course well. Even when he was at the School of Law he
was just what he remained for the rest of his life: a capable, cheerful,
good-natured, and sociable man, though strict in the fulfillment of what
he considered to be his duty: and he considered his duty to be what was
so considered by those in authority. Neither as a boy nor as a man was
he a toady, but from early youth was by nature attracted to people of
high station as a fly is drawn to the light, assimilating their ways and

views of life and establishing friendly relations with them. All the enthu-
siasms of childhood and youth passed without leaving much trace on
him; he succumbed to sensuality, to vanity, and latterly among the
highest classes to liberalism, but always within limits which his instinct
unfailingly indicated to him as correct.

At school he had done things which had formerly seemed to him very
horrid and made him feel disgusted with himself when he did them; but
when later on he saw that such actions were done by people of good pos-
ition and that they did not regard them as wrong, he was able not exactly
to regard them as right, but to forget about them entirely or not be at all
troubled at remembering them. Having graduated from the School of
Law and qualified for the tenth rank of the civil service, and having re-
ceived money from his father for his equipment, Ivan Ilych ordered him-
self clothes at Scharmer’s, the fashionable tailor, hung a medallion in-
scribed respice finem on his watch-chain, took leave of his professor and
the prince who was patron of the school, had a farewell dinner with his
comrades at Donon’s first-class restaurant, and with his new and fash-
ionable portmanteau, linen, clothes, shaving and other toilet appliances,
and a travelling rug, all purchased at the best shops, he set off for one of
the provinces where through his father’s influence, he had been attached
to the governor as an official for special service.

In the province Ivan Ilych soon arranged as easy and agreeable a posi-
tion for himself as he had had at the School of Law. He performed his of-
ficial task, made his career, and at the same time amused himself pleas-
antly and decorously. Occasionally he paid official visits to country dis-
tricts where he behaved with dignity both to his superiors and inferiors,
and performed the duties entrusted to him, which related chiefly to the
sectarians, with an exactness and incorruptible honesty of which he
could not but feel proud.

In official matters, despite his youth and taste for frivolous gaiety, he
was exceedingly reserved, punctilious, and even severe; but in society he
was often amusing and witty, and always good-natured, correct in his
manner, and bon enfant, as the governor and his wife—with whom he
was like one of the family—used to say of him.

In the province he had an affair with a lady who made advances to the
elegant young lawyer, and there was also a milliner; and there were ca-
rousals with aides-de-camp who visited the district, and after-supper
visits to a certain outlying street of doubtful reputation; and there was
too some obsequiousness to his chief and even to his chief’s wife, but all

this was done with such a tone of good breeding that no hard names
could be applied to it. It all came under the heading of the French saying:
“Il faut que jeunesse se passe.” It was all done with clean hands, in clean
linen, with French phrases, and above all among people of the best soci-
ety and consequently with the approval of people of rank.

So Ivan Ilych served for five years and then came a change in his offi-
cial life. The new and reformed judicial institutions were introduced, and
new men were needed. Ivan Ilych became such a new man. He was
offered the post of examining magistrate, and he accepted it though the
post was in another province and obliged him to give up the connections
he had formed and to make new ones. His friends met to give him a
send-off; they had a group photograph taken and presented him with a
silver cigarette-case, and he set off to his new post.

As examining magistrate Ivan Ilych was just as comme il faut and dec-
orous a man, inspiring general respect and capable of separating his offi-
cial duties from his private life, as he had been when acting as an official
on special service. His duties now as examining magistrate were far
more interesting and attractive than before. In his former position it had
been pleasant to wear an undress uniform made by Scharmer, and to
pass through the crowd of petitioners and officials who were timorously
awaiting an audience with the governor, and who envied him as with
free and easy gait he went straight into his chief’s private room to have a
cup of tea and a cigarette with him. But not many people had then been
directly dependent on him—only police officials and the sectarians when
he went on special missions—and he liked to treat them politely, almost
as comrades, as if he were letting them feel that he who had the power to
crush them was treating them in this simple, friendly way. There were
then but few such people. But now, as an examining magistrate, Ivan
Ilych felt that everyone without exception, even the most important and
self-satisfied, was in his power, and that he need only write a few words
on a sheet of paper with a certain heading, and this or that important,
self- satisfied person would be brought before him in the role of an ac-
cused person or a witness, and if he did not choose to allow him to sit
down, would have to stand before him and answer his questions. Ivan
Ilych never abused his power; he tried on the contrary to soften its ex-
pression, but the consciousness of it and the possibility of softening its
effect, supplied the chief interest and attraction of his office. In his work
itself, especially in his examinations, he very soon acquired a method of
eliminating all considerations irrelevant to the legal aspect of the case,
and reducing even the most complicated case to a form in which it

would be presented on paper only in its externals, completely excluding
his personal opinion of the matter, while above all observing every pre-
scribed formality. The work was new and Ivan Ilych was one of the first
men to apply the new Code of 1864.

On taking up the post of examining magistrate in a new town, he
made new acquaintances and connections, placed himself on a new foot-
ing and assumed a somewhat different tone. He took up an attitude of
rather dignified aloofness towards the provincial authorities, but picked
out the best circle of legal gentlemen and wealthy gentry living in the
town and assumed a tone of slight dissatisfaction with the government,
of moderate liberalism, and of enlightened citizenship. At the same time,
without at all altering the elegance of his toilet, he ceased shaving his
chin and allowed his beard to grow as it pleased.

Ivan Ilych settled down very pleasantly in this new town. The society
there, which inclined towards opposition to the governor was friendly,
his salary was larger, and he began to play vint, which he found added
not a little to the pleasure of life, for he had a capacity for cards, played
good-humouredly, and calculated rapidly and astutely, so that he usu-
ally won.

After living there for two years he met his future wife, Praskovya Fe-
dorovna Mikhel, who was the most attractive, clever, and brilliant girl of
the set in which he moved, and among other amusements and relaxa-
tions from his labours as examining magistrate, Ivan Ilych established
light and playful relations with her.

While he had been an official on special service he had been accus-
tomed to dance, but now as an examining magistrate it was exceptional
for him to do so. If he danced now, he did it as if to show that though he
served under the reformed order of things, and had reached the fifth of-
ficial rank, yet when it came to dancing he could do it better than most
people. So at the end of an evening he sometimes danced with
Praskovya Fedorovna, and it was chiefly during these dances that he
captivated her. She fell in love with him. Ivan Ilych had at first no defin-
ite intention of marrying, but when the girl fell in love with him he said
to himself: “Really, why shouldn’t I marry?”

Praskovya Fedorovna came of a good family, was not bad looking,
and had some little property. Ivan Ilych might have aspired to a more
brilliant match, but even this was good. He had his salary, and she, he
hoped, would have an equal income. She was well connected, and was a
sweet, pretty, and thoroughly correct young woman. To say that Ivan

Ilych married because he fell in love with Praskovya Fedorovna and
found that she sympathized with his views of life would be as incorrect
as to say that he married because his social circle approved of the match.
He was swayed by both these considerations: the marriage gave him per-
sonal satisfaction, and at the same time it was considered the right thing
by the most highly placed of his associates. So Ivan Ilych got married.

The preparations for marriage and the beginning of married life, with
its conjugal caresses, the new furniture, new crockery, and new linen,
were very pleasant until his wife became pregnant—so that Ivan Ilych
had begun to think that marriage would not impair the easy, agreeable,
gay and always decorous character of his life, approved of by society and
regarded by himself as natural, but would even improve it. But from the
first months of his wife’s pregnancy, something new, unpleasant, de-
pressing, and unseemly, and from which there was no way of escape,
unexpectedly showed itself. His wife, without any reason—de gaiete de
coeur as Ivan Ilych expressed it to himself—began to disturb the pleas-
ure and propriety of their life. She began to be jealous without any cause,
expected him to devote his whole attention to her, found fault with
everything, and made coarse and ill-mannered scenes.

At first Ivan Ilych hoped to escape from the unpleasantness of this
state of affairs by the same easy and decorous relation to life that had
served him heretofore: he tried to ignore his wife’s disagreeable moods,
continued to live in his usual easy and pleasant way, invited friends to
his house for a game of cards, and also tried going out to his club or
spending his evenings with friends. But one day his wife began upbraid-
ing him so vigorously, using such coarse words, and continued to abuse
him every time he did not fulfill her demands, so resolutely and with
such evident determination not to give way till he submitted—that is, till
he stayed at home and was bored just as she was—that he became
alarmed. He now realized that matrimony—at any rate with Praskovya
Fedorovna—was not always conducive to the pleasures and amenities of
life, but on the contrary often infringed both comfort and propriety, and
that he must therefore entrench himself against such infringement. And
Ivan Ilych began to seek for means of doing so. His official duties were
the one thing that imposed upon Praskovya Fedorovna, and by means of
his official work and the duties attached to it he began struggling with
his wife to secure his own independence.

With the birth of their child, the attempts to feed it and the various
failures in doing so, and with the real and imaginary illnesses of mother
and child, in which Ivan Ilych’s sympathy was demanded but about

which he understood nothing, the need of securing for himself an exist-
ence outside his family life became still more imperative.

As his wife grew more irritable and exacting and Ivan Ilych trans-
ferred the center of gravity of his life more and more to his official work,
so did he grow to like his work better and became more ambitious than
before.

Very soon, within a year of his wedding, Ivan Ilych had realized that
marriage, though it may add some comforts to life, is in fact a very intric-
ate and difficult affair towards which in order to perform one’s duty, that
is, to lead a decorous life approved of by society, one must adopt a defin-
ite attitude just as towards one’s official duties.

And Ivan Ilych evolved such an attitude towards married life. He only
required of it those conveniences—dinner at home, housewife, and
bed—which it could give him, and above all that propriety of external
forms required by public opinion. For the rest he looked for lighthearted
pleasure and propriety, and was very thankful when he found them, but
if he met with antagonism and querulousness he at once retired into his
separate fenced-off world of official duties, where he found satisfaction.

Ivan Ilych was esteemed a good official, and after three years was
made Assistant Public Prosecutor. His new duties, their importance, the
possibility of indicting and imprisoning anyone he chose, the publicity
his speeches received, and the success he had in all these things, made
his work still more attractive.

More children came. His wife became more and more querulous and
ill-tempered, but the attitude Ivan Ilych had adopted towards his home
life rendered him almost impervious to her grumbling. After seven
years’ service in that town he was transferred to another province as
Public Prosecutor. They moved, but were short of money and his wife
did not like the place they moved to. Though the salary was higher the
cost of living was greater, besides which two of their children died and
family life became still more unpleasant for him.

Praskovya Fedorovna blamed her husband for every inconvenience
they encountered in their new home. Most of the conversations between
husband and wife, especially as to the children’s education, led to topics
which recalled former disputes, and these disputes were apt to flare up
again at any moment. There remained only those rare periods of amor-
ousness which still came to them at times but did not last long. These
were islets at which they anchored for a while and then again set out
upon that ocean of veiled hostility which showed itself in their aloofness

from one another. This aloofness might have grieved Ivan Ilych had he
considered that it ought not to exist, but he now regarded the position as
normal, and even made it the goal at which he aimed in family life. His
aim was to free himself more and more from those unpleasantnesses and
to give them a semblance of harmlessness and propriety. He attained this
by spending less and less time with his family, and when obliged to be at
home he tried to safeguard his position by the presence of outsiders. The
chief thing however was that he had his official duties. The whole in-
terest of his life now centered in the official world and that interest ab-
sorbed him. The consciousness of his power, being able to ruin anybody
he wished to ruin, the importance, even the external dignity of his entry
into court, or meetings with his subordinates, his success with superiors
and inferiors, and above all his masterly handling of cases, of which he
was conscious—all this gave him pleasure and filled his life, together
with chats with his colleagues, dinners, and bridge. So that on the whole
Ivan Ilych’s life continued to flow as he considered it should
do—pleasantly and properly.

So things continued for another seven years. His eldest daughter was
already sixteen, another child had died, and only one son was left, a
schoolboy and a subject of dissension. Ivan Ilych wanted to put him in
the School of Law, but to spite him Praskovya Fedorovna entered him at
the High School. The daughter had been educated at home and had
turned out well: the boy did not learn badly either.

Chapter 3

So Ivan Ilych lived for seventeen years after his marriage. He was

already a Public Prosecutor of long standing, and had declined several
proposed transfers while awaiting a more desirable post, when an
unanticipated and unpleasant occurrence quite upset the peaceful course
of his life. He was expecting to be offered the post of presiding judge in a
University town, but Happe somehow came to the front and obtained
the appointment instead. Ivan Ilych became irritable, reproached Happe,
and quarrelled both with him and with his immediate superiors—who
became colder to him and again passed him over when other appoint-
ments were made.

This was in 1880, the hardest year of Ivan Ilych’s life. It was then that it
became evident on the one hand that his salary was insufficient for them
to live on, and on the other that he had been forgotten, and not only this,
but that what was for him the greatest and most cruel injustice appeared
to others a quite ordinary occurrence. Even his father did not consider it
his duty to help him. Ivan Ilych felt himself abandoned by everyone, and
that they regarded his position with a salary of 3,500 rubles as quite nor-
mal and even fortunate. He alone knew that with the consciousness of
the injustices done him, with his wife’s incessant nagging, and with the
debts he had contracted by living beyond his means, his position was far
from normal.

In order to save money that summer he obtained leave of absence and
went with his wife to live in the country at her brother’s place. In the
country, without his work, he experienced ennui for the first time in his
life, and not only ennui but intolerable depression, and he decided that it
was impossible to go on living like that, and that it was necessary to take
energetic measures. Having passed a sleepless night pacing up and
down the veranda, he decided to go to Petersburg and bestir himself, in
order to punish those who had failed to appreciate him and to get trans-
ferred to another ministry.

Next day, despite many protests from his wife and her brother, he
started for Petersburg with the sole object of obtaining a post with a

salary of five thousand rubles a year. He was no longer bent on any par-
ticular department, or tendency, or kind of activity. All he now wanted
was an appointment to another post with a salary of five thousand
rubles, either in the administration, in the banks, with the railways, in
one of the Empress Marya’s Institutions, or even in the customs—but it
had to carry with it a salary of five thousand rubles and be in a ministry
other than that in which they had failed to appreciate him.

And this quest of Ivan Ilych’s was crowned with remarkable and unex-
pected success. At Kursk an acquaintance of his, F. I. Ilyin, got into the
first-class carriage, sat down beside Ivan Ilych, and told him of a tele-
gram just received by the governor of Kursk announcing that a change
was about to take place in the ministry: Peter Ivanovich was to be super-
seded by Ivan Semonovich.

The proposed change, apart from its significance for Russia, had a spe-
cial significance for Ivan Ilych, because by bringing forward a new man,
Peter Petrovich, and consequently his friend Zachar Ivanovich, it was
highly favourable for Ivan Ilych, since Sachar Ivanovich was a friend and
colleague of his.

In Moscow this news was confirmed, and on reaching Petersburg Ivan
Ilych found Zachar Ivanovich and received a definite promise of an ap-
pointment in his former Department of Justice. A week later he tele-
graphed to his wife: “Zachar in Miller’s place. I shall receive appointment
on presentation of report.”

Thanks to this change of personnel, Ivan Ilych had unexpectedly ob-
tained an appointment in his former ministry which placed him two
states above his former colleagues besides giving him five thousand
rubles salary and three thousand five hundred rubles for expenses con-
nected with his removal. All his ill humour towards his former enemies
and the whole department vanished, and Ivan Ilych was completely
happy.

He returned to the country more cheerful and contented than he had
been for a long time. Praskovya Fedorovna also cheered up and a truce
was arranged between them. Ivan Ilych told of how he had been feted by
everybody in Petersburg, how all those who had been his enemies were
put to shame and now fawned on him, how envious they were of his ap-
pointment, and how much everybody in Petersburg had liked him.

Praskovya Fedorovna listened to all this and appeared to believe it.
She did not contradict anything, but only made plans for their life in the
town to which they were going. Ivan Ilych saw with delight that these

plans were his plans, that he and his wife agreed, and that, after a
stumble, his life was regaining its due and natural character of pleasant
lightheartedness and decorum.

Ivan Ilych had come back for a short time only, for he had to take up
his new duties on the 10th of September. Moreover, he needed time to
settle into the new place, to move all his belongings from the province,
and to buy and order many additional things: in a word, to make such
arrangements as he had resolved on, which were almost exactly what
Praskovya Fedorovna too had decided on.

Now that everything had happened so fortunately, and that he and his
wife were at one in their aims and moreover saw so little of one another,
they got on together better than they had done since the first years of
marriage. Ivan Ilych had thought of taking his family away with him at
once, but the insistence of his wife’s brother and her sister-in-law, who
had suddenly become particularly amiable and friendly to him and his
family, induced him to depart alone.

So he departed, and the cheerful state of mind induced by his success
and by the harmony between his wife and himself, the one intensifying
the other, did not leave him. He found a delightful house, just the thing
both he and his wife had dreamt of. Spacious, lofty reception rooms in
the old style, a convenient and dignified study, rooms for his wife and
daughter, a study for his son—it might have been specially built for
them. Ivan Ilych himself superintended the arrangements, chose the
wallpapers, supplemented the furniture (preferably with antiques which
he considered particularly comme il faut), and supervised the upholster-
ing. Everything progressed and progressed and approached the ideal he
had set himself: even when things were only half completed they ex-
ceeded his expectations. He saw what a refined and elegant character,
free from vulgarity, it would all have when it was ready. On falling
asleep he pictured to himself how the reception room would look. Look-
ing at the yet unfinished drawing room he could see the fireplace, the
screen, the what-not, the little chairs dotted here and there, the dishes
and plates on the walls, and the bronzes, as they would be when
everything was in place. He was pleased by the thought of how his wife
and daughter, who shared his taste in this matter, would be impressed
by it. They were certainly not expecting as much. He had been particu-
larly successful in finding, and buying cheaply, antiques which gave a
particularly aristocratic character to the whole place. But in his letters he
intentionally understated everything in order to be able to surprise them.
All this so absorbed him that his new duties—though he liked his official

work—interested him less than he had expected. Sometimes he even had
moments of absent-mindedness during the court sessions and would
consider whether he should have straight or curved cornices for his cur-
tains. He was so interested in it all that he often did things himself, re-
arranging the furniture, or rehanging the curtains. Once when mounting
a step-ladder to show the upholsterer, who did not understand, how he
wanted the hangings draped, he mad a false step and slipped, but being
a strong and agile man he clung on and only knocked his side against the
knob of the window frame. The bruised place was painful but the pain
soon passed, and he felt particularly bright and well just then. He wrote:
“I feel fifteen years younger.” He thought he would have everything
ready by September, but it dragged on till mid-October. But the result
was charming not only in his eyes but to everyone who saw it.

In reality it was just what is usually seen in the houses of people of
moderate means who want to appear rich, and therefore succeed only in
resembling others like themselves: there are damasks, dark wood, plants,
rugs, and dull and polished bronzes—all the things people of a certain
class have in order to resemble other people of that class. His house was
so like the others that it would never have been noticed, but to him it all
seemed to be quite exceptional. He was very happy when he met his
family at the station and brought them to the newly furnished house all
lit up, where a footman in a white tie opened the door into the hall dec-
orated with plants, and when they went on into the drawing-room and
the study uttering exclamations of delight. He conducted them every-
where, drank in their praises eagerly, and beamed with pleasure. At tea
that evening, when Praskovya Fedorovna among other things asked him
about his fall, he laughed, and showed them how he had gone flying and
had frightened the upholsterer.

“It’s a good thing I’m a bit of an athlete. Another man might have been
killed, but I merely knocked myself, just here; it hurts when it’s touched,
but it’s passing off already—it’s only a bruise.” So they began living in
their new home—in which, as always happens, when they got thor-
oughly settled in they found they were just one room short—and with
the increased income, which as always was just a little (some five hun-
dred rubles) too little, but it was all very nice.

Things went particularly well at first, before everything was finally ar-
ranged and while something had still to be done: this thing bought, that
thing ordered, another thing moved, and something else adjusted.
Though there were some disputes between husband and wife, they were
both so well satisfied and had so much to do that it all passed off without

any serious quarrels. When nothing was left to arrange it became rather
dull and something seemed to be lacking, but they were then making ac-
quaintances, forming habits, and life was growing fuller.

Ivan Ilych spent his mornings at the law court and came home to
diner, and at first he was generally in a good humour, though he occa-
sionally became irritable just on account of his house. (Every spot on the
tablecloth or the upholstery, and every broken window-blind string, ir-
ritated him. He had devoted so much trouble to arranging it all that
every disturbance of it distressed him.) But on the whole his life ran its
course as he believed life should do: easily, pleasantly, and decorously.
He got up at nine, drank his coffee, read the paper, and then put on his
undress uniform and went to the law courts. There the harness in which
he worked had already been stretched to fit him and he donned it
without a hitch: petitioners, inquiries at the chancery, the chancery itself,
and the sittings public and administrative. In all this the thing was to ex-
clude everything fresh and vital, which always disturbs the regular
course of official business, and to admit only official relations with
people, and then only on official grounds. A man would come, for in-
stance, wanting some information. Ivan Ilych, as one in whose sphere the
matter did not lie, would have nothing to do with him: but if the man
had some business with him in his official capacity, something that could
be expressed on officially stamped paper, he would do everything, posit-
ively everything he could within the limits of such relations, and in do-
ing so would maintain the semblance of friendly human relations, that is,
would observe the courtesies of life. As soon as the official relations
ended, so did everything else. Ivan Ilych possessed this capacity to sep-
arate his real life from the official side of affairs and not mix the two, in
the highest degree, and by long practice and natural aptitude had
brought it to such a pitch that sometimes, in the manner of a virtuoso, he
would even allow himself to let the human and official relations mingle.
He let himself do this just because he felt that he could at any time he
chose resume the strictly official attitude again and drop the human rela-
tion. and he did it all easily, pleasantly, correctly, and even artistically. In
the intervals between the sessions he smoked, drank tea, chatted a little
about politics, a little about general topics, a little about cards, but most
of all about official appointments. Tired, but with the feelings of a virtu-
oso—one of the first violins who has played his part in an orchestra with
precision—he would return home to find that his wife and daughter had
been out paying calls, or had a visitor, and that his son had been to
school, had done his homework with his tutor, and was surely learning

what is taught at High Schools. Everything was as it should be. After
dinner, if they had no visitors, Ivan Ilych sometimes read a book that
was being much discussed at the time, and in the evening settled down
to work, that is, read official papers, compared the depositions of wit-
nesses, and noted paragraphs of the Code applying to them. This was
neither dull nor amusing. It was dull when he might have been playing
bridge, but if no bridge was available it was at any rate better than doing
nothing or sitting with his wife. Ivan Ilych’s chief pleasure was giving
little dinners to which he invited men and women of good social posi-
tion, and just as his drawing-room resembled all other drawing-rooms so
did his enjoyable little parties resemble all other such parties.

Once they even gave a dance. Ivan Ilych enjoyed it and everything
went off well, except that it led to a violent quarrel with his wife about
the cakes and sweets. Praskovya Fedorovna had made her own plans,
but Ivan Ilych insisted on getting everything from an expensive confec-
tioner and ordered too many cakes, and the quarrel occurred because
some of those cakes were left over and the confectioner’s bill came to
forty-five rubles. It was a great and disagreeable quarrel. Praskovya Fe-
dorovna called him “a fool and an imbecile,” and he clutched at his head
and made angry allusions to divorce.

But the dance itself had been enjoyable. The best people were there,
and Ivan Ilych had danced with Princess Trufonova, a sister of the distin-
guished founder of the Society “Bear My Burden”. The pleasures connec-
ted with his work were pleasures of ambition; his social pleasures were
those of vanity; but Ivan Ilych’s greatest pleasure was playing bridge. He
acknowledged that whatever disagreeable incident happened in his life,
the pleasure that beamed like a ray of light above everything else was to
sit down to bridge with good players, not noisy partners, and of course
to four-handed bridge (with five players it was annoying to have to
stand out, though one pretended not to mind), to play a clever and seri-
ous game (when the cards allowed it) and then to have supper and drink
a glass of wine. after a game of bridge, especially if he had won a little (to
win a large sum was unpleasant), Ivan Ilych went to bed in a specially
good humour.

So they lived. They formed a circle of acquaintances among the best
people and were visited by people of importance and by young folk. In
their views as to their acquaintances, husband, wife, and daughter were
entirely agreed, and tacitly and unanimously kept at arm’s length and
shook off the various shabby friends and relations who, with much show
of affection, gushed into the drawing-room with its Japanese plates on

the walls. Soon these shabby friends ceased to obtrude themselves and
only the best people remained in the Golovins’ set.

Young men made up to Lisa, and Petrishchev, an examining magis-
trate and Dmitri Ivanovich Petrishchev’s son and sole heir, began to be
so attentive to her that Ivan Ilych had already spoken to Praskovya Fe-
dorovna about it, and considered whether they should not arrange a
party for them, or get up some private theatricals.

So they lived, and all went well, without change, and life flowed
pleasantly.

Chapter 4

They were all in good health. It could not be called ill health if Ivan

Ilych sometimes said that he had a queer taste in his mouth and felt some
discomfort in his left side. But this discomfort increased and, though not
exactly painful, grew into a sense of pressure in his side accompanied by
ill humour. And his irritability became worse and worse and began to
mar the agreeable, easy, and correct life that had established itself in the
Golovin family. Quarrels between husband and wife became more and
more frequent, and soon the ease and amenity disappeared and even the
decorum was barely maintained. Scenes again became frequent, and
very few of those islets remained on which husband and wife could meet
without an explosion. Praskovya Fedorovna now had good reason to say
that her husband’s temper was trying. With characteristic exaggeration
she said he had always had a dreadful temper, and that it had needed all
her good nature to put up with it for twenty years. It was true that now
the quarrels were started by him. His bursts of temper always came just
before dinner, often just as he began to eat his soup. Sometimes he no-
ticed that a plate or dish was chipped, or the food was not right, or his
son put his elbow on the table, or his daughter’s hair was not done as he
liked it, and for all this he blamed Praskovya Fedorovna. At first she re-
torted and said disagreeable things to him, but once or twice he fell into
such a rage at the beginning of dinner that she realized it was due to
some physical derangement brought on by taking food, and so she re-
strained herself and did not answer, but only hurried to get the dinner
over. She regarded this self-restraint as highly praiseworthy. Having
come to the conclusion that her husband had a dreadful temper and
made her life miserable, she began to feel sorry for herself, and the more
she pitied herself the more she hated her husband. She began to wish he
would die; yet she did not want him to die because then his salary would
cease. And this irritated her against him still more. She considered her-
self dreadfully unhappy just because not even his death could save her,
and though she concealed her exasperation, that hidden exasperation of
hers increased his irritation also. After one scene in which Ivan Ilych had
been particularly unfair and after which he had said in explanation that

he certainly was irritable but that it was due to his not being well, she
said that he if was ill it should be attended to, and insisted on his going
to see a celebrated doctor. He went. Everything took place as he had ex-
pected and as it always does. There was the usual waiting and the im-
portant air assumed by the doctor, with which he was so familiar
(resembling that which he himself assumed in court), and the sounding
and listening, and the questions which called for answers that were fore-
gone conclusions and were evidently unnecessary, and the look of im-
portance which implied that “if only you put yourself in our hands we
will arrange everything—we know indubitably how it has to be done, al-
ways in the same way for everybody alike.” It was all just as it was in the
law courts. The doctor put on just the same air towards him as he him-
self put on towards an accused person.

The doctor said that so-and-so indicated that there was so-and-so in-
side the patient, but if the investigation of so-and-so did not confirm this,
then he must assume that and that. If he assumed that and that,
then…and so on. To Ivan Ilych only one question was important: was his
case serious or not? But the doctor ignored that inappropriate question.
From his point of view it was not the one under consideration, the real
question was to decide between a floating kidney, chronic catarrh, or ap-
pendicitis. It was not a question the doctor solved brilliantly, as it
seemed to Ivan Ilych, in favour of the appendix, with the reservation that
should an examination of the urine give fresh indications the matter
would be reconsidered. All this was just what Ivan Ilych had himself
brilliantly accomplished a thousand times in dealing with men on trial.
The doctor summed up just as brilliantly, looking over his spectacles tri-
umphantly and even gaily at the accused. From the doctor’s summing up
Ivan Ilych concluded that things were bad, but that for the doctor, and
perhaps for everybody else, it was a matter of indifference, though for
him it was bad. And this conclusion struck him painfully, arousing in
him a great feeling of pity for himself and of bitterness towards the
doctor’s indifference to a matter of such importance.

He said nothing of this, but rose, placed the doctor’s fee on the table,
and remarked with a sigh: “We sick people probably often put inappro-
priate questions. But tell me, in general, is this complaint dangerous, or
not?…”

The doctor looked at him sternly over his spectacles with one eye, as if
to say: “Prisoner, if you will not keep to the questions put to you, I shall
be obliged to have you removed from the court.” “I have already told you

what I consider necessary and proper. The analysis may show something
more.” And the doctor bowed.

Ivan Ilych went out slowly, seated himself disconsolately in his sledge,
and drove home. All the way home he was going over what the doctor
had said, trying to translate those complicated, obscure, scientific
phrases into plain language and find in them an answer to the question:
“Is my condition bad? Is it very bad? Or is there as yet nothing much
wrong?” And it seemed to him that the meaning of what the doctor had
said was that it was very bad. Everything in the streets seemed depress-
ing. The cabmen, the houses, the passers-by, and the shops, were dismal.
His ache, this dull gnawing ache that never ceased for a moment, seemed
to have acquired a new and more serious significance from the doctor’s
dubious remarks. Ivan Ilych now watched it with a new and oppressive
feeling.

He reached home and began to tell his wife about it. She listened, but
in the middle of his account his daughter came in with her hat on, ready
to go out with her mother. She sat down reluctantly to listen to this tedi-
ous story, but could not stand it long, and her mother too did not hear
him to the end.

“Well, I am very glad,” she said. “Mind now to take your medicine reg-
ularly. Give me the prescription and I’ll send Gerasim to the chemist’s.”
And she went to get ready to go out. While she was in the room Ivan
Ilych had hardly taken time to breathe, but he sighed deeply when she
left it.

“Well,” he thought, “perhaps it isn’t so bad after all.”
He began taking his medicine and following the doctor’s directions,

which had been altered after the examination of the urine. but then it
happened that there was a contradiction between the indications drawn
from the examination of the urine and the symptoms that showed them-
selves. It turned out that what was happening differed from what the
doctor had told him, and that he had either forgotten or blundered, or
hidden something from him. He could not, however, be blamed for that,
and Ivan Ilych still obeyed his orders implicitly and at first derived some
comfort from doing so.

From the time of his visit to the doctor, Ivan Ilych’s chief occupation
was the exact fulfillment of the doctor’s instructions regarding hygiene
and the taking of medicine, and the observation of his pain and his ex-
cretions. His chief interest came to be people’s ailments and people’s
health. When sickness, deaths, or recoveries were mentioned in his

presence, especially when the illness resembled his own, he listened with
agitation which he tried to hide, asked questions, and applied what he
heard to his own case.

The pain did not grow less, but Ivan Ilych made efforts to force him-
self to think that he was better. And he could do this so long as nothing
agitated him. But as soon as he had any unpleasantness with his wife,
any lack of success in his official work, or held bad cards at bridge, he
was at once acutely sensible of his disease. He had formerly borne such
mischances, hoping soon to adjust what was wrong, to master it and at-
tain success, or make a grand slam. But now every mischance upset him
and plunged him into despair. He would say to himself: “There now, just
as I was beginning to get better and the medicine had begun to take ef-
fect, comes this accursed misfortune, or unpleasantness…” And he was
furious with the mishap, or with the people who were causing the un-
pleasantness and killing him, for he felt that this fury was killing him but
he could not restrain it. One would have thought that it should have
been clear to him that this exasperation with circumstances and people
aggravated his illness, and that he ought therefore to ignore unpleasant
occurrences. But he drew the very opposite conclusion: he said that he
needed peace, and he watched for everything that might disturb it and
became irritable at the slightest infringement of it. His condition was
rendered worse by the fact that he read medical books and consulted
doctors. The progress of his disease was so gradual that he could deceive
himself when comparing one day with another—the difference was so
slight. But when he consulted the doctors it seemed to him that he was
getting worse, and even very rapidly. Yet despite this he was continually
consulting them.

That month he went to see another celebrity, who told him almost the
same as the first had done but put his questions rather differently, and
the interview with this celebrity only increased Ivan Ilych’s doubts and
fears. A friend of a friend of his, a very good doctor, diagnosed his ill-
ness again quite differently from the others, and though he predicted re-
covery, his questions and suppositions bewildered Ivan Ilych still more
and increased his doubts. A homeopathist diagnosed the disease in yet
another way, and prescribed medicine which Ivan Ilych took secretly for
a week. But after a week, not feeling any improvement and having lost
confidence both in the former doctor’s treatment and in this one’s, he be-
came still more despondent. One day a lady acquaintance mentioned a
cure effected by a wonder-working icon. Ivan Ilych caught himself listen-
ing attentively and beginning to believe that it had occurred. This

incident alarmed him. “Has my mind really weakened to such an ex-
tent?” he asked himself. “Nonsense! It’s all rubbish. I mustn’t give way to
nervous fears but having chosen a doctor must keep strictly to his treat-
ment. That is what I will do. Now it’s all settled. I won’t think about it,
but will follow the treatment seriously till summer, and then we shall
see. From now there must be no more of this wavering!” this was easy to
say but impossible to carry out. The pain in his side oppressed him and
seemed to grow worse and more incessant, while the taste in his mouth
grew stranger and stranger. It seemed to him that his breath had a dis-
gusting smell, and he was conscious of a loss of appetite and strength.
There was no deceiving himself: something terrible, new, and more im-
portant than anything before in his life, was taking place within him of
which he alone was aware. Those about him did not understand or
would not understand it, but thought everything in the world was going
on as usual. That tormented Ivan Ilych more than anything. He saw that
his household, especially his wife and daughter who were in a perfect
whirl of visiting, did not understand anything of it and were annoyed
that he was so depressed and so exacting, as if he were to blame for it.
Though they tried to disguise it he saw that he was an obstacle in their
path, and that his wife had adopted a definite line in regard to his illness
and kept to it regardless of anything he said or did. Her attitude was
this: “You know,” she would say to her friends, “Ivan Ilych can’t do as
other people do, and keep to the treatment prescribed for him. One day
he’ll take his drops and keep strictly to his diet and go to bed in good
time, but the next day unless I watch him he’ll suddenly forget his medi-
cine, eat sturgeon—which is forbidden—and sit up playing cards till one
o’clock in the morning.”

“Oh, come, when was that?” Ivan Ilych would ask in vexation. “Only
once at Peter Ivanovich’s.”

“And yesterday with Shebek.”
“Well, even if I hadn’t stayed up, this pain would have kept me

awake.”
“Be that as it may you’ll never get well like that, but will always make

us wretched.”
Praskovya Fedorovna’s attitude to Ivan Ilych’s illness, as she expressed

it both to others and to him, was that it was his own fault and was anoth-
er of the annoyances he caused her. Ivan ilych felt that this opinion es-
caped her involuntarily—but that did not make it easier for him.

At the law courts too, Ivan Ilych noticed, or thought he noticed, a
strange attitude towards himself. It sometimes seemed to him that
people were watching him inquisitively as a man whose place might
soon be vacant. Then again, his friends would suddenly begin to chaff
him in a friendly way about his low spirits, as if the awful, horrible, and
unheard-of thing that was going on within him, incessantly gnawing at
him and irresistibly drawing him away, was a very agreeable subject for
jests. Schwartz in particular irritated him by his jocularity, vivacity, and
savoir-faire, which reminded him of what he himself had been ten years
ago.

Friends came to make up a set and they sat down to cards. They dealt,
bending the new cards to soften them, and he sorted the diamonds in his
hand and found he had seven. His partner said “No trumps” and suppor-
ted him with two diamonds. What more could be wished for? It ought to
be jolly and lively. They would make a grand slam. But suddenly Ivan
Ilych was conscious of that gnawing pain, that taste in his mouth, and it
seemed ridiculous that in such circumstances he should be pleased to
make a grand slam.

He looked at his partner Mikhail Mikhaylovich, who rapped the table
with his strong hand and instead of snatching up the tricks pushed the
cards courteously and indulgently towards Ivan Ilych that he might have
the pleasure of gathering them up without the trouble of stretching out
his hand for them. “Does he think I am too weak to stretch out my arm?”
thought Ivan Ilych, and forgetting what he was doing he over-trumped
his partner, missing the grand slam by three tricks. And what was most
awful of all was that he saw how upset Mikhail Mikhaylovich was about
it but did not himself care. And it was dreadful to realize why he did not
care.

They all saw that he was suffering, and said: “We can stop if you are
tired. Take a rest.” Lie down? No, he was not at all tired, and he finished
the rubber. All were gloomy and silent. Ivan Ilych felt that he had dif-
fused this gloom over them and could not dispel it. They had supper and
went away, and Ivan Ilych was left alone with the consciousness that his
life was poisoned and was poisoning the lives of others, and that this
poison did not weaken but penetrated more and more deeply into his
whole being.

With this consciousness, and with physical pain besides the terror, he
must go to bed, often to lie awake the greater part of the night. Next
morning he had to get up again, dress, go to the law courts, speak, and

write; or if he did not go out, spend at home those twenty-four hours a
day each of which was a torture. And he had to live thus all alone on the
brink of an abyss, with no one who understood or pitied him.

Chapter 5

So one month passed and then another. Just before the New Year his

brother-in-law came to town and stayed at their house. Ivan Ilych was at
the law courts and Praskovya Fedorovna had gone shopping. When Ivan
Ilych came home and entered his study he found his brother-in-law
there—a healthy, florid man—unpacking his portmanteau himself. He
raised his head on hearing Ivan Ilych’s footsteps and looked up at him
for a moment without a word. That stare told Ivan Ilych everything. His
brother-in-law opened his mouth to utter an exclamation of surprise but
checked himself, and that action confirmed it all.

“I have changed, eh?”
“Yes, there is a change.”
And after that, try as he would to get his brother-in-law to return to

the subject of his looks, the latter would say nothing about it. Praskovya
Fedorovna came home and her brother went out to her. Ivan Ilych locked
to door and began to examine himself in the glass, first full face, then in
profile. He took up a portrait of himself taken with his wife, and com-
pared it with what he saw in the glass. The change in him was immense.
Then he bared his arms to the elbow, looked at them, drew the sleeves
down again, sat down on an ottoman, and grew blacker than night.

“No, no, this won’t do!” he said to himself, and jumped up, went to the
table, took up some law papers and began to read them, but could not
continue. He unlocked the door and went into the reception-room. The
door leading to the drawing-room was shut. He approached it on tiptoe
and listened.

“No, you are exaggerating!” Praskovya Fedorovna was saying.
“Exaggerating! Don’t you see it? Why, he’s a dead man! Look at his

eyes—there’s no life in them. But what is it that is wrong with him?”
“No one knows. Nikolaevich said something, but I don’t know what.

And Leshchetitsky said quite the contrary…”
Ivan Ilych walked away, went to his own room, lay down, and began

musing; “The kidney, a floating kidney.” He recalled all the doctors had

told him of how it detached itself and swayed about. And by an effort of
imagination he tried to catch that kidney and arrest it and support it. So
little was needed for this, it seemed to him. “No, I’ll go to see Peter Ivan-
ovich again.” He rang, ordered the carriage, and got ready to go.

“Where are you going, Jean?” asked his wife with a specially sad and
exceptionally kind look. This exceptionally kind look irritated him. He
looked morosely at her.

“I must go to see Peter Ivanovich.”
He went to see Peter Ivanovich, and together they went to see his

friend, the doctor. He was in, and Ivan Ilych had a long talk with him.
Reviewing the anatomical and physiological details of what in the

doctor’s opinion was going on inside him, he understood it all.
There was something, a small thing, in the vermiform appendix. It

might all come right. Only stimulate the energy of one organ and check
the activity of another, then absorption would take place and everything
would come right. He got home rather late for dinner, ate his dinner, and
conversed cheerfully, but could not for a long time bring himself to go
back to work in his room. At last, however, he went to his study and did
what was necessary, but the consciousness that he had put something
aside—an important, intimate matter which he would revert to when his
work was done—never left him. When he had finished his work he re-
membered that this intimate matter was the thought of his vermiform
appendix. But he did not give himself up to it, and went to the drawing-
room for tea. There were callers there, including the examining magis-
trate who was a desirable match for his daughter, and they were con-
versing, playing the piano, and singing. Ivan Ilych, as Praskovya Fe-
dorovna remarked, spent that evening more cheerfully than usual, but
he never for a moment forgot that he had postponed the important mat-
ter of the appendix. At eleven o’clock he said goodnight and went to his
bedroom. Since his illness he had slept alone in a small room next to his
study. He undressed and took up a novel by Zola, but instead of reading
it he fell into thought, and in his imagination that desired improvement
in the vermiform appendix occurred. There were the absorption and
evacuation and the re-establishment of normal activity. “Yes, that’s it!” he
said to himself. “One need only assist nature, that’s all.” He remembered
his medicine, rose, took it, and lay down on his back watching for the be-
neficent action of the medicine and for it to lessen the pain. “I need only
take it regularly and avoid all injurious influences. I am already feeling
better, much better.” He began touching his side: it was not painful to the

touch. “There, I really don’t feel it. It’s much better already.” He put out
the light and turned on his side … “The appendix is getting better, ab-
sorption is occurring.” Suddenly he felt the old, familiar, dull, gnawing
pain, stubborn and serious. There was the same familiar loathsome taste
in his mouth. His heart sank and he felt dazed. “My God! My God!” he
muttered. “Again, again! And it will never cease.” And suddenly the
matter presented itself in a quite different aspect. “Vermiform appendix!
Kidney!” he said to himself. “It’s not a question of appendix or kidney,
but of life and…death. Yes, life was there and now it is going, going and I
cannot stop it. Yes. Why deceive myself? Isn’t it obvious to everyone but
me that I’m dying, and that it’s only a question of weeks, days…it may
happen this moment. There was light and now there is darkness. I was
here and now I’m going there! Where?” A chill came over him, his
breathing ceased, and he felt only the throbbing of his heart. “When I am
not, what will there be? There will be nothing. Then where shall I be
when I am no more? Can this be dying? No, I don’t want to!” He jumped
up and tried to light the candle, felt for it with trembling hands, dropped
candle and candlestick on the floor, and fell back on his pillow.

“What’s the use? It makes no difference,” he said to himself, staring
with wide-open eyes into the darkness. “Death. Yes, death. And none of
them knows or wishes to know it, and they have no pity for me. Now
they are playing.” (He heard through the door the distant sound of a
song and its accompaniment.) “It’s all the same to them, but they will die
too! Fools! I first, and they later, but it will be the same for them. And
now they are merry…the beasts!”

Anger choked him and he was agonizingly, unbearably miserable. “It
is impossible that all men have been doomed to suffer this awful horror!”
He raised himself.

“Something must be wrong. I must calm myself—must think it all over
from the beginning.” And he again began thinking. “Yes, the beginning
of my illness: I knocked my side, but I was still quite well that day and
the next. It hurt a little, then rather more. I saw the doctors, then fol-
lowed despondency and anguish, more doctors, and I drew nearer to the
abyss. My strength grew less and I kept coming nearer and nearer, and
now I have wasted away and there is no light in my eyes. I think of the
appendix—but this is death! I think of mending the appendix, and all the
while here is death! Can it really be death?” Again terror seized him and
he gasped for breath. He leant down and began feeling for the matches,
pressing with his elbow on the stand beside the bed. It was in his way
and hurt him, he grew furious with it, pressed on it still harder, and

upset it. Breathless and in despair he fell on his back, expecting death to
come immediately.

Meanwhile the visitors were leaving. Praskovya Fedorovna was seeing
them off. She heard something fall and came in.

“What has happened?”
“Nothing. I knocked it over accidentally.”
She went out and returned with a candle. He lay there panting heav-

ily, like a man who has run a thousand yards, and stared upwards at her
with a fixed look.

“What is it, Jean?”
“No…no…thing. I upset it.” (“Why speak of it? She won’t understand,”

he thought.) And in truth she did not understand. She picked up the
stand, lit his candle, and hurried away to see another visitor off. When
she came back he still lay on his back, looking upwards.

“What is it? Do you feel worse?”
“Yes.”
She shook her head and sat down. “Do you know, Jean, I think we

must ask Leshchetitsky to come and see you here.” This meant calling in
the famous specialist, regardless of expense. He smiled malignantly and
said “No.” She remained a little longer and then went up to him and
kissed his forehead. While she was kissing him he hated her from the
bottom of his soul and with difficulty refrained from pushing her away.

“Good night. Please God you’ll sleep.”
“Yes.”

Chapter 6

Ivan Ilych saw that he was dying, and he was in continual despair. In

the depth of his heart he knew he was dying, but not only was he not ac-
customed to the thought, he simply did not and could not grasp it.

The syllogism he had learnt from Kiesewetter’s Logic: “Caius is a man,
men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal,” had always seemed to him
correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. That
Caius—man in the abstract—was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he
was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate
from all others. He had been little Vanya, with a mamma and a papa,
with Mitya and Volodya, with the toys, a coachman and a nurse, after-
wards with Katenka and will all the joys, griefs, and delights of child-
hood, boyhood, and youth. What did Caius know of the smell of that
striped leather ball Vanya had been so fond of? Had Caius kissed his
mother’s hand like that, and did the silk of her dress rustle so for Caius?
Had he rioted like that at school when the pastry was bad? Had Caius
been in love like that? Could Caius preside at a session as he did? “Caius
really was mortal, and it was right for him to die; but for me, little Van-
ya, Ivan Ilych, with all my thoughts and emotions, it’s altogether a differ-
ent matter. It cannot be that I ought to die. That would be too terrible.”

Such was his feeling.
“If I had to die like Caius I would have known it was so. An inner

voice would have told me so, but there was nothing of the sort in me and
I and all my friends felt that our case was quite different from that of
Caius. and now here it is!” he said to himself. “It can’t be. It’s impossible!
But here it is. How is this? How is one to understand it?”

He could not understand it, and tried to drive this false, incorrect,
morbid thought away and to replace it by other proper and healthy
thoughts. But that thought, and not the thought only but the reality itself,
seemed to come and confront him.

And to replace that thought he called up a succession of others, hoping
to find in them some support. He tried to get back into the former

current of thoughts that had once screened the thought of death from
him. But strange to say, all that had formerly shut off, hidden, and des-
troyed his consciousness of death, no longer had that effect. Ivan Ilych
now spent most of his time in attempting to re-establish that old current.
He would say to himself: “I will take up my duties again—after all I used
to live by them.” And banishing all doubts he would go to the law courts,
enter into conversation with his colleagues, and sit carelessly as was his
wont, scanning the crowd with a thoughtful look and leaning both his
emaciated arms on the arms of his oak chair; bending over as usual to a
colleague and drawing his papers nearer he would interchange whispers
with him, and then suddenly raising his eyes and sitting erect would
pronounce certain words and open the proceedings. But suddenly in the
midst of those proceedings the pain in his side, regardless of the stage
the proceedings had reached, would begin its own gnawing work. Ivan
Ilych would turn his attention to it and try to drive the thought of it
away, but without success. It would come and stand before him and look
at him, and he would be petrified and the light would die out of his eyes,
and he would again begin asking himself whether It alone was true. And
his colleagues and subordinates would see with surprise and distress
that he, the brilliant and subtle judge, was becoming confused and mak-
ing mistakes. He would shake himself, try to pull himself together, man-
age somehow to bring the sitting to a close, and return home with the
sorrowful consciousness that his judicial labours could not as formerly
hide from him what he wanted them to hide, and could not deliver him
from It. And what was worst of all was that It drew his attention to itself
not in order to make him take some action but only that he should look
at It, look it straight in the face: look at it and without doing anything,
suffer inexpressibly.

And to save himself from this condition Ivan Ilych looked for consola-
tions—new screens—and new screens were found and for a while
seemed to save him, but then they immediately fell to pieces or rather
became transparent, as if It penetrated them and nothing could veil It.

In these latter days he would go into the drawing-room he had ar-
ranged—that drawing-room where he had fallen and for the sake of
which (how bitterly ridiculous it seemed) he had sacrificed his life—for
he knew that his illness originated with that knock. He would enter and
see that something had scratched the polished table. He would look for
the cause of this and find that it was the bronze ornamentation of an al-
bum, that had got bent. He would take up the expensive album which he
had lovingly arranged, and feel vexed with his daughter and her friends

for their untidiness—for the album was torn here and there and some of
the photographs turned upside down. He would put it carefully in order
and bend the ornamentation back into position. Then it would occur to
him to place all those things in another corner of the room, near the
plants. He would call the footman, but his daughter or wife would come
to help him. They would not agree, and his wife would contradict him,
and he would dispute and grow angry. But that was all right, for then he
did not think about It. It was invisible.

But then, when he was moving something himself, his wife would say:
“Let the servants do it. You will hurt yourself again.” And suddenly It
would flash through the screen and he would see it. It was just a flash,
and he hoped it would disappear, but he would involuntarily pay atten-
tion to his side. “It sits there as before, gnawing just the same!” And he
could no longer forget It, but could distinctly see it looking at him from
behind the flowers. “What is it all for?” “It really is so! I lost my life over
that curtain as I might have done when storming a fort. Is that possible?
How terrible and how stupid. It can’t be true! It can’t, but it is.” He would
go to his study, lie down, and again be alone with It: face to face with It.
And nothing could be done with It except to look at it and shudder.

Chapter 7

How it happened it is impossible to say because it came about step by

step, unnoticed, but in the third month of Ivan Ilych’s illness, his wife,
his daughter, his son, his acquaintances, the doctors, the servants, and
above all he himself, were aware that the whole interest he had for other
people was whether he would soon vacate his place, and at last release
the living from the discomfort caused by his presence and be himself re-
leased from his sufferings. He slept less and less. He was given opium
and hypodermic injections of morphine, but this did not relieve him. The
dull depression he experienced in a somnolent condition at first gave
him a little relief, but only as something new, afterwards it became as
distressing as the pain itself or even more so.

Special foods were prepared for him by the doctors’ orders, but all
those foods became increasingly distasteful and disgusting to him. For
his excretions also special arrangements had to be made, and this was a
torment to him every time—a torment from the uncleanliness, the un-
seemliness, and the smell, and from knowing that another person had to
take part in it.

But just through his most unpleasant matter, Ivan Ilych obtained com-
fort. Gerasim, the butler’s young assistant, always came in to carry the
things out. Gerasim was a clean, fresh peasant lad, grown stout on town
food and always cheerful and bright. At first the sight of him, in his clean
Russian peasant costume, engaged on that disgusting task embarrassed
Ivan Ilych.

Once when he got up from the commode too weak to draw up his
trousers, he dropped into a soft armchair and looked with horror at his
bare, enfeebled thighs with the muscles so sharply marked on them. Ger-
asim with a firm light tread, his heavy boots emitting a pleasant smell of
tar and fresh winter air, came in wearing a clean Hessian apron, the
sleeves of his print shirt tucked up over his strong bare young arms; and
refraining from looking at his sick master out of consideration for his
feelings, and restraining the joy of life that beamed from his face, he
went up to the commode.

“Gerasim!” said Ivan Ilych in a weak voice.
“Gerasim started, evidently afraid he might have committed some

blunder, and with a rapid movement turned his fresh, kind, simple
young face which just showed the first downy signs of a beard.

“Yes, sir?”
“That must be very unpleasant for you. You must forgive me. I am

helpless.”
“Oh, why, sir,” and Gerasim’s eyes beamed and he showed his glisten-

ing white teeth, “what’s a little trouble? It’s a case of illness with you, sir.”
And his deft strong hands did their accustomed task, and he went out

of the room stepping lightly. Five minutes later he as lightly returned.
Ivan Ilych was still sitting in the same position in the armchair.
“Gerasim,” he said when the latter had replaced the freshly-washed
utensil. “Please come here and help me.” Gerasim went up to him. “Lift
me up. It is hard for me to get up, and I have sent Dmitri away.”

Gerasim went up to him, grasped his master with his strong arms
deftly but gently, in the same way that he stepped—lifted him, suppor-
ted him with one hand, and with the other drew up his trousers and
would have set him down again, but Ivan Ilych asked to be led to the
sofa. Gerasim, without an effort and without apparent pressure, led him,
almost lifting him, to the sofa and placed him on it. “Thank you. How
easily and well you do it all!”

Gerasim smiled again and turned to leave the room. But Ivan Ilych felt
his presence such a comfort that he did not want to let him go.

“One thing more, please move up that chair. No, the other one—under
my feet. It is easier for me when my feet are raised.”

Gerasim brought the chair, set it down gently in place, and raised Ivan
Ilych’s legs on it. It seemed to Ivan Ilych that he felt better while Gerasim
was holding up his legs.

“It’s better when my legs are higher,” he said. “Place that cushion un-
der them.”

Gerasim did so. He again lifted the legs and placed them, and again
Ivan Ilych felt better while Gerasim held his legs. When he set them
down Ivan Ilych fancied he felt worse.

“Gerasim,” he said. “Are you busy now?”
“Not at all, sir,” said Gerasim, who had learnt from the townsfolk how

to speak to gentlefolk.

“What have you still to do?”
“What have I to do? I’ve done everything except chopping the logs for

tomorrow.”
“Then hold my legs up a bit higher, can you?”
“Of course I can. Why not?” and Gerasim raised his master’s legs high-

er and Ivan Ilych thought that in that position he did not feel any pain at
all.

“And how about the logs?”
“Don’t trouble about that, sir. There’s plenty of time.”
Ivan Ilych told Gerasim to sit down and hold his legs, and began to

talk to him. And strange to say it seemed to him that he felt better while
Gerasim held his legs up.

After that Ivan Ilych would sometimes call Gerasim and get him to
hold his legs on his shoulders, and he liked talking to him. Gerasim did
it all easily, willingly, simply, and with a good nature that touched Ivan
Ilych. Health, strength, and vitality in other people were offensive to
him, but Gerasim’s strength and vitality did not mortify but soothed
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,
and that he only need keep quiet and undergo a treatment and then
something very good would result. He however knew that do what they
would nothing would come of it, only still more agonizing suffering and
death. This deception tortured him—their not wishing to admit what
they all knew and what he knew, but wanting to lie to him concerning
his terrible condition, and wishing and forcing him to participate in that
lie. Those lies—lies enacted over him on the eve of his death and
destined to degrade this awful, solemn act to the level of their visitings,
their curtains, their sturgeon for dinner—were a terrible agony for Ivan
Ilych. And strangely enough, many times when they were going through
their antics over him he had been within a hairbreadth of calling out to
them: “Stop lying! You know and I know that I am dying. Then at least
stop lying about it!” But he had never had the spirit to do it. The awful,
terrible act of his dying was, he could see, reduced by those about him to
the level of a casual, unpleasant, and almost indecorous incident (as if
someone entered a drawing room defusing an unpleasant odour) and
this was done by that very decorum which he had served all his life long.
He saw that no one felt for him, because no one even wished to grasp his

position. Only Gerasim recognized it and pitied him. And so Ivan Ilych
felt at ease only with him. He felt comforted when Gerasim supported
his legs (sometimes all night long) and refused to go to bed, saying:
“Don’t you worry, Ivan Ilych. I’ll get sleep enough later on,” or when he
suddenly became familiar and exclaimed: “If you weren’t sick it would
be another matter, but as it is, why should I grudge a little trouble?” Ger-
asim alone did not lie; everything showed that he alone understood the
facts of the case and did not consider it necessary to disguise them, but
simply felt sorry for his emaciated and enfeebled master. Once when
Ivan Ilych was sending him away he even said straight out: “We shall all
of us die, so why should I grudge a little trouble?”—expressing the fact
that he did not think his work burdensome, because he was doing it for a
dying man and hoped someone would do the same for him when his
time came.

Apart from this lying, or because of it, what most tormented Ivan Ilych
was that no one pitied him as he wished to be pitied. At certain moments
after prolonged suffering he wished most of all (though he would have
been ashamed to confess it) for someone to pity him as a sick child is pit-
ied. He longed to be petted and comforted. He knew he was an import-
ant functionary, that he had a beard turning grey, and that therefore
what he longed for was impossible, but still he longed for it. And in
Gerasim’s attitude towards him there was something akin to what he
wished for, and so that attitude comforted him. Ivan Ilych wanted to
weep, wanted to be petted and cried over, and then his colleague Shebek
would come, and instead of weeping and being petted, Ivan Ilych would
assume a serious, severe, and profound air, and by force of habit would
express his opinion on a decision of the Court of Cassation and would
stubbornly insist on that view. This falsity around him and within him
did more than anything else to poison his last days.

Chapter 8

It was morning. He knew it was morning because Gerasim had gone,

and Peter the footman had come and put out the candles, drawn back
one of the curtains, and begun quietly to tidy up. Whether it was morn-
ing or evening, Friday or Sunday, made no difference, it was all just the
same: the gnawing, unmitigated, agonizing pain, never ceasing for an in-
stant, the consciousness of life inexorably waning but not yet extin-
guished, the approach of that ever dreaded and hateful Death which was
the only reality, and always the same falsity. What were days, weeks,
hours, in such a case?

“Will you have some tea, sir?”
“He wants things to be regular, and wishes the gentlefolk to drink tea

in the morning,” thought Ivan Ilych, and only said “No.”
“Wouldn’t you like to move onto the sofa, sir?”
“He wants to tidy up the room, and I’m in the way. I am uncleanliness

and disorder,” he thought, and said only:
“No, leave me alone.”
The man went on bustling about. Ivan Ilych stretched out his hand.

Peter came up, ready to help.
“What is it, sir?”
“My watch.”
Peter took the watch which was close at hand and gave it to his

master.
“Half-past eight. Are they up?”
“No sir, except Vladimir Ivanovich, who has gone to school. Praskovya

Fedorovna ordered me to wake her if you asked for her. Shall I do so?”
“No, there’s no need to.” “Perhaps I’d better have some tea,” he

thought, and added aloud: “Yes, bring me some tea.”
Peter went to the door, but Ivan Ilych dreaded being left alone. “How

can I keep him here? Oh yes, my medicine.” “Peter, give me my

medicine.” “Why not? Perhaps it may still do some good.” He took a
spoonful and swallowed it. “No, it won’t help. It’s all tomfoolery, all de-
ception,” he decided as soon as he became aware of the familiar, sickly,
hopeless taste. “No, I can’t believe in it any longer. But the pain, why this
pain? If it would only cease just for a moment!” And he moaned. Peter
turned towards him. “It’s all right. Go and fetch me some tea.”

Peter went out. Left alone Ivan Ilych groaned not so much with pain,
terrible though that was, as from mental anguish. Always and for ever
the same, always these endless days and nights. If only it would come
quicker! If only what would come quicker? Death, darkness?…No, no!
anything rather than death!

When Peter returned with the tea on a tray, Ivan Ilych stared at him
for a time in perplexity, not realizing who and what he was. Peter was
disconcerted by that look and his embarrassment brought Ivan Ilych to
himself.

“Oh, tea! All right, put it down. Only help me to wash and put on a
clean shirt.”

And Ivan Ilych began to wash. With pauses for rest, he washed his
hands and then his face, cleaned his teeth, brushed his hair, looked in the
glass. He was terrified by what he saw, especially by the limp way in
which his hair clung to his pallid forehead.

While his shirt was being changed he knew that he would be still more
frightened at the sight of his body, so he avoided looking at it. Finally he
was ready. He drew on a dressing-gown, wrapped himself in a plaid,
and sat down in the armchair to take his tea. For a moment he felt re-
freshed, but as soon as he began to drink the tea he was again aware of
the same taste, and the pain also returned. He finished it with an effort,
and then lay down stretching out his legs, and dismissed Peter. Always
the same. Now a spark of hope flashes up, then a sea of despair rages,
and always pain; always pain, always despair, and always the same.
When alone he had a dreadful and distressing desire to call someone, but
he knew beforehand that with others present it would be still worse.
“Another dose of morphine—to lose consciousness. I will tell him, the
doctor, that he must think of something else. It’s impossible, impossible,
to go on like this.”

An hour and another pass like that. But now there is a ring at the door
bell. Perhaps it’s the doctor? It is. He comes in fresh, hearty, plump, and
cheerful, with that look on his face that seems to say: “There now, you’re
in a panic about something, but we’ll arrange it all for you directly!” The

doctor knows this expression is out of place here, but he has put it on
once for all and can’t take it off—like a man who has put on a frock-coat
in the morning to pay a round of calls. The doctor rubs his hands vigor-
ously and reassuringly.

“Brr! How cold it is! There’s such a sharp frost; just let me warm my-
self!” he says, as if it were only a matter of waiting till he was warm, and
then he would put everything right.

“Well now, how are you?”
Ivan Ilych feels that the doctor would like to say: “Well, how are our

affairs?” but that even he feels that this would not do, and says instead:
“What sort of a night have you had?” Ivan Ilych looks at him as much as
to say: “Are you really never ashamed of lying?” But the doctor does not
wish to understand this question, and Ivan Ilych says: “Just as terrible as
ever. The pain never leaves me and never subsides. If only something … ”

“Yes, you sick people are always like that…. There, now I think I am
warm enough. Even Praskovya Fedorovna, who is so particular, could
find no fault with my temperature. Well, now I can say good-morning,”
and the doctor presses his patient’s hand.

Then dropping his former playfulness, he begins with a most serious
face to examine the patient, feeling his pulse and taking his temperature,
and then begins the sounding and auscultation. Ivan Ilych knows quite
well and definitely that all this is nonsense and pure deception, but
when the doctor, getting down on his knee, leans over him, putting his
ear first higher then lower, and performs various gymnastic movements
over him with a significant expression on his face, Ivan Ilych submits to
it all as he used to submit to the speeches of the lawyers, though he knew
very well that they were all lying and why they were lying.

The doctor, kneeling on the sofa, is still sounding him when Praskovya
Fedorovna’s silk dress rustles at the door and she is heard scolding Peter
for not having let her know of the doctor’s arrival.

She comes in, kisses her husband, and at once proceeds to prove that
she has been up a long time already, and only owing to a misunder-
standing failed to be there when the doctor arrived. Ivan Ilych looks at
her, scans her all over, sets against her the whiteness and plumpness and
cleanness of her hands and neck, the gloss of her hair, and the sparkle of
her vivacious eyes. He hates her with his whole soul. And the thrill of
hatred he feels for her makes him suffer from her touch.

Her attitude towards him and his diseases is still the same. Just as the
doctor had adopted a certain relation to his patient which he could not
abandon, so had she formed one towards him—that he was not doing
something he ought to do and was himself to blame, and that she re-
proached him lovingly for this—and she could not now change that
attitude.

“You see he doesn’t listen to me and doesn’t take his medicine at the
proper time. And above all he lies in a position that is no doubt bad for
him—with his legs up.”

She described how he made Gerasim hold his legs up.
The doctor smiled with a contemptuous affability that said: “What’s to

be done? These sick people do have foolish fancies of that kind, but we
must forgive them.”

When the examination was over the doctor looked at his watch, and
then Praskovya Fedorovna announced to Ivan Ilych that it was of course
as he pleased, but she had sent today for a celebrated specialist who
would examine him and have a consultation with Michael Danilovich.

“Please don’t raise any objections. I am doing this for my own sake,”
she said ironically, letting it be felt that she was doing it all for his sake
and only said this to leave him no right to refuse. He remained silent,
knitting his brows. He felt that he was surrounded and involved in a
mesh of falsity that it was hard to unravel anything.

Everything she did for him was entirely for her own sake, and she told
him she was doing for herself what she actually was doing for herself, as
if that was so incredible that he must understand the opposite.

At half-past eleven the celebrated specialist arrived. Again the sound-
ing began and the significant conversations in his presence and in anoth-
er room, about the kidneys and the appendix, and the questions and an-
swers, with such an air of importance that again, instead of the real ques-
tion of life and death which now alone confronted him, the question
arose of the kidney and appendix which were not behaving as they
ought to and would now be attached by Michael Danilovich and the spe-
cialist and forced to amend their ways.

The celebrated specialist took leave of him with a serious though not
hopeless look, and in reply to the timid question Ivan Ilych, with eyes
glistening with fear and hope, put to him as to whether there was a
chance of recovery, said that he could not vouch for it but there was a
possibility. The look of hope with which Ivan Ilych watched the doctor

out was so pathetic that Praskovya Fedorovna, seeing it, even wept as
she left the room to hand the doctor his fee.

The gleam of hope kindled by the doctor’s encouragement did not last
long. The same room, the same pictures, curtains, wall- paper, medicine
bottles, were all there, and the same aching suffering body, and Ivan
Ilych began to moan. They gave him a subcutaneous injection and he
sank into oblivion.

It was twilight when he came to. They brought him his dinner and he
swallowed some beef tea with difficulty, and then everything was the
same again and night was coming on.

After dinner, at seven o’clock, Praskovya Fedorovna came into the
room in evening dress, her full bosom pushed up by her corset, and with
traces of powder on her face. She had reminded him in the morning that
they were going to the theatre. Sarah Bernhardt was visiting the town
and they had a box, which he had insisted on their taking. Now he had
forgotten about it and her toilet offended him, but he concealed his vexa-
tion when he remembered that he had himself insisted on their securing
a box and going because it would be an instructive and aesthetic pleas-
ure for the children.

Praskovya Fedorovna came in, self-satisfied but yet with a rather
guilty air. She sat down and asked how he was, but, as he saw, only for
the sake of asking and not in order to learn about it, knowing that there
was nothing to learn—and then went on to what she really wanted to
say: that she would not on any account have gone but that the box had
been taken and Helen and their daughter were going, as well as Pet-
rishchev (the examining magistrate, their daughter’s fiancé) and that it
was out of the question to let them go alone; but that she would have
much preferred to sit with him for a while; and he must be sure to follow
the doctor’s orders while she was away.

“Oh, and Fedor Petrovich” (the fiancé) “would like to come in. May he?
And Lisa?”

“All right.”
Their daughter came in in full evening dress, her fresh young flesh ex-

posed (making a show of that very flesh which in his own case caused so
much suffering), strong, healthy, evidently in love, and impatient with
illness, suffering, and death, because they interfered with her happiness.

Fedor petrovich came in too, in evening dress, his hair curled à la Ca-
poul, a tight stiff collar round his long sinewy neck, an enormous white

shirt-front and narrow black trousers tightly stretched over his strong
thighs. He had one white glove tightly drawn on, and was holding his
opera hat in his hand.

Following him the schoolboy crept in unnoticed, in a new uniform,
poor little fellow, and wearing gloves. Terribly dark shadows showed
under his eyes, the meaning of which Ivan Ilych knew well. His son had
always seemed pathetic to him, and now it was dreadful to see the boy’s
frightened look of pity. It seemed to Ivan Ilych that Vasya was the only
one besides Gerasim who understood and pitied him.

They all sat down and again asked how he was. A silence followed.
Lisa asked her mother about the opera glasses, and there was an alterca-
tion between mother and daughter as to who had taken them and where
they had been put. This occasioned some unpleasantness.

Fedor Petrovich inquired of Ivan Ilych whether he had ever seen Sarah
Bernhardt. Ivan Ilych did not at first catch the question, but then replied:
“No, have you seen her before?” “Yes, in Adrienne Lecouvreur.”

Praskovya Fedorovna mentioned some roles in which Sarah Bernhardt
was particularly good. Her daughter disagreed. Conversation sprang up
as to the elegance and realism of her acting—the sort of conversation that
is always repeated and is always the same.

In the midst of the conversation Fedor Petrovich glanced at Ivan Ilych
and became silent. The others also looked at him and grew silent. Ivan
Ilych was staring with glittering eyes straight before him, evidently in-
dignant with them. This had to be rectified, but it was impossible to do
so. The silence had to be broken, but for a time no one dared to break it
and they all became afraid that the conventional deception would sud-
denly become obvious and the truth become plain to all. Lisa was the
first to pluck up courage and break that silence, but by trying to hide
what everybody was feeling, she betrayed it.

“Well, if we are going it’s time to start,” she said, looking at her watch,
a present from her father, and with a faint and significant smile at Fedor
Petrovich relating to something known only to them. She got up with a
rustle of her dress. They all rose, said good-night, and went away.

When they had gone it seemed to Ivan Ilych that he felt better; the fals-
ity had gone with them. But the pain remained—that same pain and that
same fear that made everything monotonously alike, nothing harder and
nothing easier. Everything was worse.

Again minute followed minute and hour followed hour. Everything
remained the same and there was no cessation. And the inevitable end of
it all became more and more terrible. “Yes, send Gerasim here,” he
replied to a question Peter asked.

Chapter 9

His wife returned late at night. She came in on tiptoe, but he heard her,

opened his eyes, and made haste to close them again. She wished to send
Gerasim away and to sit with him herself, but he opened his eyes and
said: “No, go away.”

“Are you in great pain?”
“Always the same.”
“Take some opium.”
He agreed and took some. She went away.
Till about three in the morning he was in a state of stupefied misery. It

seemed to him that he and his pain were being thrust into a narrow,
deep black sack, but though they were pushed further and further in
they could not be pushed to the bottom. And this, terrible enough in it-
self, was accompanied by suffering. He was frightened yet wanted to fall
through the sack, he struggled but yet co-operated. And suddenly he
broke through, fell, and regained consciousness. Gerasim was sitting at
the foot of the bed dozing quietly and patiently, while he himself lay
with his emaciated stockinged legs resting on Gerasim’s shoulders; the
same shaded candle was there and the same unceasing pain.

“Go away, Gerasim,” he whispered.
“It’s all right, sir. I’ll stay a while.”
“No. Go away.”
He removed his legs from Gerasim’s shoulders, turned sideways onto

his arm, and felt sorry for himself. He only waited till Gerasim had gone
into the next room and then restrained himself no longer but wept like a
child. He wept on account of his helplessness, his terrible loneliness, the
cruelty of man, the cruelty of God, and the absence of God. “Why hast
Thou done all this? Why hast Thou brought me here? Why, why dost
Thou torment me so terribly?”

He did not expect an answer and yet wept because there was no an-
swer and could be none. The pain again grew more acute, but he did not

stir and did not call. He said to himself: “Go on! Strike me! But what is it
for? What have I done to Thee? What is it for?”

Then he grew quiet and not only ceased weeping but even held his
breath and became all attention. It was as though he were listening not to
an audible voice but to the voice of his soul, to the current of thoughts
arising within him.

“What is it you want?” was the first clear conception capable of expres-
sion in words, that he heard. “What do you want? What do you want?”
he repeated to himself.

“What do I want? To live and not to suffer,” he answered.
And again he listened with such concentrated attention that even his

pain did not distract him. “To live? How?” asked his inner voice.
“Why, to live as I used to—well and pleasantly.”
“As you lived before, well and pleasantly?” the voice repeated.
And in imagination he began to recall the best moments of his pleasant

life. But strange to say none of those best moments of his pleasant life
now seemed at all what they had then seemed—none of them except the
first recollections of childhood. There, in childhood, there had been
something really pleasant with which it would be possible to live if it
could return. But the child who had experienced that happiness existed
no longer, it was like a reminiscence of somebody else.

As soon as the period began which had produced the present Ivan
Ilych, all that had then seemed joys now melted before his sight and
turned into something trivial and often nasty.

And the further he departed from childhood and the nearer he came to
the present the more worthless and doubtful were the joys. This began
with the School of Law. A little that was really good was still found
there—there was light-heartedness, friendship, and hope. But in the up-
per classes there had already been fewer of such good moments. Then
during the first years of his official career, when he was in the service of
the governor, some pleasant moments again occurred: they were the
memories of love for a woman. Then all became confused and there was
still less of what was good; later on again there was still less that was
good, and the further he went the less there was. His marriage, a mere
accident, then the disenchantment that followed it, his wife’s bad breath
and the sensuality and hypocrisy: then that deadly official life and those
preoccupations about money, a year of it, and two, and ten, and twenty,
and always the same thing. And the longer it lasted the more deadly it

became. “It is as if I had been going downhill while I imagined I was go-
ing up. And that is really what it was. I was going up in public opinion,
but to the same extent life was ebbing away from me. And now it is all
done and there is only death.

“Then what does it mean? Why? It can’t be that life is so senseless and
horrible. But if it really has been so horrible and senseless, why must I
die and die in agony? There is something wrong! “Maybe I did not live as
I ought to have done,” it suddenly occurred to him. “But how could that
be, when I did everything properly?” he replied, and immediately dis-
missed from his mind this, the sole solution of all the riddles of life and
death, as something quite impossible.

“Then what do you want now? To live? Live how? Live as you lived in
the law courts when the usher proclaimed ‘The judge is coming!’ The
judge is coming, the judge!” he repeated to himself. “Here he is, the
judge. But I am not guilty!” he exclaimed angrily. “What is it for?” And
he ceased crying, but turning his face to the wall continued to ponder on
the same question: Why, and for what purpose, is there all this horror?
But however much he pondered he found no answer. And whenever the
thought occurred to him, as it often did, that it all resulted from his not
having lived as he ought to have done, he at once recalled the correctness
of his whole life and dismissed so strange an idea.

Chapter 10

Another fortnight passed. Ivan Ilych now no longer left his sofa. He

would not lie in bed but lay on the sofa, facing the wall nearly all the
time. He suffered ever the same unceasing agonies and in his loneliness
pondered always on the same insoluble question: “What is this? Can it be
that it is Death?” And the inner voice answered: “Yes, it is Death.”

“Why these sufferings?” And the voice answered, “For no reason—they
just are so.” Beyond and besides this there was nothing.

From the very beginning of his illness, ever since he had first been to
see the doctor, Ivan Ilych’s life had been divided between two contrary
and alternating moods: now it was despair and the expectation of this
uncomprehended and terrible death, and now hope and an intently in-
terested observation of the functioning of his organs. Now before his
eyes there was only a kidney or an intestine that temporarily evaded its
duty, and now only that incomprehensible and dreadful death from
which it was impossible to escape.

These two states of mind had alternated from the very beginning of his
illness, but the further it progressed the more doubtful and fantastic be-
came the conception of the kidney, and the more real the sense of im-
pending death.

He had but to call to mind what he had been three months before and
what he was now, to call to mind with what regularity he had been go-
ing downhill, for every possibility of hope to be shattered. Latterly dur-
ing the loneliness in which he found himself as he lay facing the back of
the sofa, a loneliness in the midst of a populous town and surrounded by
numerous acquaintances and relations but that yet could not have been
more complete anywhere—either at the bottom of the sea or under the
earth—during that terrible loneliness Ivan Ilych had lived only in
memories of the past. Pictures of his past rose before him one after an-
other. they always began with what was nearest in time and then went
back to what was most remote—to his childhood—and rested there. If he
thought of the stewed prunes that had been offered him that day, his
mind went back to the raw shrivelled French plums of his childhood,

their peculiar flavour and the flow of saliva when he sucked their stones,
and along with the memory of that taste came a whole series of memor-
ies of those days: his nurse, his brother, and their toys. “No, I mustn’t
think of that….It is too painful,” Ivan Ilych said to himself, and brought
himself back to the present—to the button on the back of the sofa and the
creases in its morocco. “Morocco is expensive, but it does not wear well:
there had been a quarrel about it. It was a different kind of quarrel and a
different kind of morocco that time when we tore father’s portfolio and
were punished, and mamma brought us some tarts….” And again his
thoughts dwelt on his childhood, and again it was painful and he tried to
banish them and fix his mind on something else.

Then again together with that chain of memories another series passed
through his mind—of how his illness had progressed and grown worse.
There also 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. The two
merged together. “Just as the pain went on getting worse and worse, so
my life grew worse and worse,” he thought. “There is one bright spot
there at the back, at the beginning of life, and afterwards all becomes
blacker and blacker and proceeds more and more rapidly—in inverse ra-
tio to the square of the distance from death,” thought Ivan Ilych. And the
example of a stone falling downwards with increasing velocity entered
his mind. Life, a series of increasing sufferings, flies further and further
towards its end—the most terrible suffering. “I am flying….” He
shuddered, shifted himself, and tried to resist, but was already aware
that resistance was impossible, and again with eyes weary of gazing but
unable to cease seeing what was before them, he stared at the back of the
sofa and waited—awaiting that dreadful fall and shock and destruction.

“Resistance is impossible!” he said to himself. “If I could only under-
stand what it is all for! But that too is impossible. An explanation would
be possible if it could be said that I have not lived as I ought to. But it is
impossible to say that,” and he remembered all the legality, correctitude,
and propriety of his life. “That at any rate can certainly not be admitted,”
he thought, and his lips smiled ironically as if someone could see that
smile and be taken in by it. “There is no explanation! Agony,
death….What for?”

Chapter 11

Another two weeks went by in this way and during that fortnight an

event occurred that Ivan Ilych and his wife had desired. Petrishchev
formally proposed. It happened in the evening. The next day Praskovya
Fedorovna came into her husband’s room considering how best to in-
form him of it, but that very night there had been a fresh change for the
worse in his condition. She found him still lying on the sofa but in a dif-
ferent position. He lay on his back, groaning and staring fixedly straight
in front of him.

She began to remind him of his medicines, but he turned his eyes to-
wards her with such a look that she did not finish what she was saying;
so great an animosity, to her in particular, did that look express.

“For Christ’s sake let me die in peace!” he said.
She would have gone away, but just then their daughter came in and

went up to say good morning. He looked at her as he had done at his
wife, and in reply to her inquiry about his health said dryly that he
would soon free them all of himself. They were both silent and after sit-
ting with him for a while went away.

“Is it our fault?” Lisa said to her mother. “It’s as if we were to blame! I
am sorry for papa, but why should we be tortured?”

The doctor came at his usual time. Ivan Ilych answered “Yes” and
“No,” never taking his angry eyes from him, and at last said: “You know
you can do nothing for me, so leave me alone.”

“We can ease your sufferings.”
“You can’t even do that. Let me be.”
The doctor went into the drawing room and told Praskovya Fe-

dorovna that the case was very serious and that the only resource left
was opium to allay her husband’s sufferings, which must be terrible. It
was true, as the doctor said, that Ivan Ilych’s physical sufferings were
terrible, but worse than the physical sufferings were his mental suffer-
ings which were his chief torture.

His mental sufferings were due to the fact that that night, as he looked
at Gerasim’s sleepy, good-natured face with its prominent cheek-bones,
the question suddenly occurred to him: “What if my whole life has been
wrong?”

It occurred to him that what had appeared perfectly impossible before,
namely that he had not spent his life as he should have done, might after
all be true. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to
struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed
people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately
suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his
professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his fam-
ily, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false. He
tried to defend all those things to himself and suddenly felt the weakness
of what he was defending. There was nothing to defend.

“But if that is so,” he said to himself, “and I am leaving this life with the
consciousness that I have lost all that was given me and it is impossible
to rectify it—what then?” He lay on his back and began to pass his life in
review in quite a new way. In the morning when he saw first his foot-
man, then his wife, then his daughter, and then the doctor, their every
word and movement confirmed to him the awful truth that had been re-
vealed to him during the night. In them he saw himself—all that for
which he had lived—and saw clearly that it was not real at all, but a ter-
rible and huge deception which had hidden both life and death. This
consciousness intensified his physical suffering tenfold. He groaned and
tossed about, and pulled at his clothing which choked and stifled him.
And he hated them on that account.

He was given a large dose of opium and became unconscious, but at
noon his sufferings began again. He drove everybody away and tossed
from side to side. His wife came to him and said:

“Jean, my dear, do this for me. It can’t do any harm and often helps.
Healthy people often do it.” He opened his eyes wide.

“What? Take communion? Why? It’s unnecessary! However…” She
began to cry.

“Yes, do, my dear. I’ll send for our priest. He is such a nice man.”
“All right. Very well,” he muttered.
When the priest came and heard his confession, Ivan Ilych was

softened and seemed to feel a relief from his doubts and consequently
from his sufferings, and for a moment there came a ray of hope. He again

began to think of the vermiform appendix and the possibility of correct-
ing it. He received the sacrament with tears in his eyes.

When they laid him down again afterwards he felt a moment’s ease,
and the hope that he might live awoke in him again. He began to think of
the operation that had been suggested to him. “To live! I want to live!” he
said to himself.

His wife came in to congratulate him after his communion, and when
uttering the usual conventional words she added:

“You feel better, don’t you?”
Without looking at her he said “Yes.”
Her dress, her figure, the expression of her face, the tone of her voice,

all revealed the same thing. “This is wrong, it is not as it should be. All
you have lived for and still live for is falsehood and deception, hiding
life and death from you.” And as soon as he admitted that thought, his
hatred and his agonizing physical suffering again sprang up, and with
that suffering a consciousness of the unavoidable, approaching end. And
to this was added a new sensation of grinding shooting pain and a feel-
ing of suffocation.

The expression of his face when he uttered that “Yes” was dreadful.
Having uttered it, he looked her straight in the eyes, turned on his face
with a rapidity extraordinary in his weak state and shouted:

“Go away! Go away and leave me alone!”

Chapter 12

From that moment the screaming began that continued for three days,

and was so terrible that one could not hear it through two closed doors
without horror. At the moment he answered his wife he realized that he
was lost, that there was no return, that the end had come, the very end,
and his doubts were still unsolved and remained doubts.

“Oh! Oh! Oh!” he cried in various intonations. He had begun by
screaming “I won’t!” and continued screaming on the letter “O”.

For three whole days, during which time did not exist for him, he
struggled in that black sack into which he was being thrust by an invis-
ible, resistless force. He struggled as a man condemned to death
struggles in the hands of the executioner, knowing that he cannot save
himself. And every moment he felt that despite all his efforts he was
drawing nearer and nearer to what terrified him. He felt that his agony
was due to his being thrust into that black hole and still more to his not
being able to get right into it. He was hindered from getting into it by his
conviction that his life had been a good one. That very justification of his
life held him fast and prevented his moving forward, and it caused him
most torment of all.

Suddenly some force struck him in the chest and side, making it still
harder to breathe, and he fell through the hole and there at the bottom
was a light. What had happened to him was like the sensation one some-
times experiences in a railway carriage when one thinks one is going
backwards while one is really going forwards and suddenly becomes
aware of the real direction.

“Yes, it was not the right thing,” he said to himself, “but that’s no mat-
ter. It can be done. But what is the right thing? he asked himself, and
suddenly grew quiet.

This occurred at the end of the third day, two hours before his death.
Just then his schoolboy son had crept softly in and gone up to the bed-
side. The dying man was still screaming desperately and waving his

arms. His hand fell on the boy’s head, and the boy caught it, pressed it to
his lips, and began to cry.

At that very moment Ivan Ilych fell through and caught sight of the
light, and it was revealed to him that though his life had not been what it
should have been, this could still be rectified. He asked himself, “What is
the right thing?” and grew still, listening. Then he felt that someone was
kissing his hand. He opened his eyes, looked at his son, and felt sorry for
him. His wife came up to him and he glanced at her. She was gazing at
him open-mouthed, with undried tears on her nose and cheek and a des-
pairing look on her face. He felt sorry for her too.

“Yes, I am making them wretched,” he thought. “They are sorry, but it
will be better for them when I die.” He wished to say this but had not the
strength to utter it. “Besides, why speak? I must act,” he thought. with a
look at his wife he indicated his son and said: “Take him away…sorry for
him…sorry for you too….” He tried to add, “Forgive me,” but said
“Forego” and waved his hand, knowing that He whose understanding
mattered would understand.

And suddenly it grew clear to him that what had been oppressing him
and would not leave him was all dropping away at once from two sides,
from ten sides, and from all sides. He was sorry for them, he must act so
as not to hurt them: release them and free himself from these sufferings.
“How good and how simple!” he thought. “And the pain?” he asked him-
self. “What has become of it? Where are you, pain?”

He turned his attention to it.
“Yes, here it is. Well, what of it? Let the pain be.”
“And death…where is it?”
He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it.

“Where is it? What death?” There was no fear because there was no
death.

In place of death there was light.
“So that’s what it is!” he suddenly exclaimed aloud. “What joy!”
To him all this happened in a single instant, and the meaning of that

instant did not change. For those present his agony continued for anoth-
er two hours. Something rattled in his throat, his emaciated body
twitched, then the gasping and rattle became less and less frequent.

“It is finished!” said someone near him. He heard these words and re-
peated them in his soul.

“Death is finished,” he said to himself. “It is no more!”
He drew in a breath, stopped in the midst of a sigh, stretched out, and

died.

Loved this book ?
Similar users also downloaded:

• “Anna Karenina”, Tolstoy
• “Master and Man”, Tolstoy
• “The Cossacks”, Tolstoy
• “War and Peace”, Tolstoy
• “Where Love is, There God is Also”, Tolstoy
• “Ivan the Fool”, Tolstoy
• “Father Sergius”, Tolstoy
• “Youth”, Tolstoy
• “Evil allures, but good endures”, Tolstoy
• “Boyhood”, Tolstoy

http://feedbooks.com/book/1487

http://feedbooks.com/book/138

http://feedbooks.com/book/1528

http://feedbooks.com/book/83

http://feedbooks.com/book/1736

http://feedbooks.com/book/1669

http://feedbooks.com/book/1527

http://feedbooks.com/book/1510

http://feedbooks.com/book/136

http://feedbooks.com/book/1509

www.feedbooks.com
Food for the mind

Turn in your highest-quality paper
Get a qualified writer to help you with

“ Nursing ”

Get high-quality paper

NEW! AI matching with writer

Hire a Writer

Client Reviews

4.9

Sitejabber

4.6

Trustpilot

4.8

Our Guarantees

100% Confidentiality

Information about customers is confidential and never disclosed to third parties.

Original Writing

We complete all papers from scratch. You can get a plagiarism report.

Timely Delivery

No missed deadlines – 97% of assignments are completed in time.

Money Back

If you're confident that a writer didn't follow your order details, ask for a refund.

New to Your Trusted Assignment Help Service? Sign up & Save

Calculate the price of your order

Type of paper needed:

Pages:

You will get a personal manager and a discount.

Academic level:

We'll send you the first draft for approval by at

Total price:

$0.00

Power up Your Academic Success with the
Team of Professionals. We’ve Got Your Back.

Power up Your Study Success with Experts We’ve Got Your Back.

Order Now Order Now