The stages of death and dying in “The Death of Ivan Ilych”

Introduction

Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich preceded in date of publication Chekhov's less well-known "A Dreary Story" by three years: 1886 and 1889. Chekhov's tale has been called a response to the challenge laid down by Tolstoy's. Certainly both stories are sufficiently similar and dissimilar to be discussed together (as they have been), for each author explored a common problem from a somewhat different aperture. It is worth knowing that, like Chekhov's story, Tolstoy's was originally planned as a first-person-narrative memoir, that is, Ivan telling his own story by means of a diary which Ivan's widow hands over to the narrator. This narrator states: "It is impossible, absolutely impossible, to live as I have lived, as I live, and as we all live. I realized that as a result of the death of an acquaintance of mine, Ivan Ilyich, and of the diary he had left behind." The ur-version of the story dealt only with Ivan's life and the onset of his illness; later the diary was added. Clearly Tolstoy's final version was possible only by eliminating the diary, just as Chekhov's story gains its strength precisely by having it (John, pp. 131). The stories are by no means the same, but in each a character is viewed from the inside and found wanting. Tolstoy's story allows him to reveal Ivan Ilyich's dissatisfaction with his life, and with himself, and the illness serves as the metaphor for the revelation. Chekhov, always intent on objectivity, irony, and inconclusiveness, permits the reader to judge his protagonist precisely by not giving him insight into his own failings, but instead having him measure his failings almost exclusively against a failing world that surrounds him the theater with sublime imperturbability."

“Ivan Ilych's face seems to be handsomer in death than in life, and marked by some kind of expression of satisfaction. The face also seems to bear some kind of warning to the living.”

Discussion

Of course the dying Professor Nicholas Stepanovich is sixty-two years old; Ivan Ilyich is forty-five when he dies, and certainly never thinks of himself as "old." Furthermore, though both men are in a sense egotists, Ivan has some glimmer of recognition; the professor's almost clinical preoccupation with his death gets in the way of genuine self-analysis. The professor is full of "decisiveness towards himself"; so, too, is Ivan Ilyich. The essential similarity between the two is clear: both are dying; both regret their lives; both are suffused with introspection, almost to the point where an excess of amour-propre overwhelms their lives. Yet they are also very different: in age, in what insight is permitted each, in the nature of their disaffection. Most of all whereas Tolstoy's hero looks back with regret and wished he had the chance to live his life over, Chekhov's clinically-minded professor of medicine merely accepts, sometimes passively, the fate of aging, death, dissociation, observing his symptoms, occasionally almost as if he were outside himself looking at a ...