The death of Ivan Ilyich

The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the title of a short novela by Tolstoy. It likely is his most famous shorter work, along with the Kreutzer Sonata. While in its first parts it depics the usual 19th century Russian tendency to not very subtly provide a lot of information which only forms a background of societal or sentimental value, later on the eponymous character is presented far more as the focus of a bleak idea.

Ivan Ilyich was a member of the high-ranking judges. He hurt himself, and despite original assumptions this harm was not ever to be overcome. But the story is not about death, or a situation of power, or even the relationship of Ilyich with his wife (a motif more pronounced in the Kreutzer Sonata), since it is about giving up on life.

Ivan Ilyich does not want to try to live again, so he imagines that he now has to decide if he will actively attempt to push himself deeper inside a dark sack he seems to be already kicked into by life. The main metaphor of that closed space where the person will merely stop existing, as if he was a captured and wounded animal and it did not matter if it fought anymore to liberate itself, is possibly the most memorable in Tolstoy's stories.

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I often think of whether this anguish from life ('taedium vitae', which was the title of another nice short story, this time by Hermann Hesse), is the worst which can happen to a human being. We don't have to wait at all to learn that Ilyich dies in the end, cause this is mentioned in the first paragraph of the story. It is a work that depicts the momentum gained in a free-fall to death, only that here the special physics of this lethal fall appear to make the victim lose his gravity the more he is sunk to the abyss, and the retreat to the sack he wishes to be confined into.

-You can discuss if you have read the story of Ivan Ilyich, or whether you found it interesting as an idea.

I read it on the recommendation of my gf (who is all into russian lit.). I was unimpressed with it. It was good yes, but I never fully got why she thought it was such an amazing book. One day in the life of ivan denisovich was alot better in my opinion, but I also absolutely love the Gulag Archipelago (the non-abridge version) lol.