The year 1861 saw the emancipation of the serfs in Russia. However, this freedom was primarily restricted to an official existence on paper, while in reality the gap between the classes grew wider. The oral folk, or peasants, lived close to Russia in their practicing of folk medicine, religion, customs, and superstitions, while the educated adopted a Westernized culture. Yet, while this cultural gap remained, each class exerted an influence on the other. Even though free, the peasants mainly continued their work for the landed gentry, providing nannies, maids, field workers, and often illegitimate children. Yet, while the affluent controlled the oral folk economically, the Russian peasant often influenced the noble intellectually and spiritually.
A cultural debate arose among the intelligentsia at the end of the nineteenth century; many felt that Russia should remain Russian by emulating the peasant, while some were convinced that Russia must borrow from Western influences in developing a national identity. The peasants represented a close, sharing community, while the gentry were growing further apart and more alienated from their Russian traditions. The latter demanded their own sense of community; yet, their milieu was one of “unequivocal insistence on complete loyalty and agreement”—no divergence in public or private life was tolerated (Gibian xiv). One must remain comme il faut in polite Russian society, discussing only what is appropriate, decorous, and comfortable. This lifestyle led to the adoption of what Gorky called “a warm coat against the fear of death” (Gibian xiv). This “warm coat” kept out the cold realities of life: death, disease, discomfort—and appeared in many incarnations: intimate friends, kitsch, work, card games, vodka. The search for “warm coats” and the repudiation of the peasant lifestyle for Western values made some intellectuals and artists take an interest in Russia’s peasantry. Many felt that the answers to Russia’s cultural identity, as well as their own, individual identities, could be found in Russia’s peasant class. One of these artists, who has been accused of deifying the people, is Lev Tolstoy.
Tolstoy, himself an educated landowner, found many of Russia’s elite class wasting their lives in search of the wrong things: “We’re all looking for freedom from our obligations to our fellow man, but that is precisely what us human beings, that sense of our obligations, and if it weren’t for that, we would live like animals” (Gorky 33). Tolstoy admired the communal sense that he perceived in the simple people. He saw this altruistic sharing and devotion among them as almost mystical, and something that the comme il faut in high society has lost. By concentrating solely on the self without regard to the others, one injures himself and lives disingenuously. Only through caritas and the relinquishment of self for the community can one be totally free. Yet, Tolstoy observes, instead of embracing others, man builds up his own little world of trivialities that shield him from others as it shields him from this truth. Tolstoy’s reaction against this “warm coat” propensity is his novel of social criticism The Death of Ivan Ilyitch.
The Death of Ivan Ilyitch, written in 1886, represents Tolstoy’s reactions to his social milieu and provides a severe moral lesson for his readers. Tolstoy attempts to find an answer to a question that had been plaguing him since his writing of Anna Karenina thirteen years earlier: “What meaning can a person’s life have which would not be annihilated by the awful inevitability of death?” (Terras 476). He provides an answer by illustrating Russia’s two common social classes: the affluent and educated class of Ivan Ilyitch and the oral, peasant class of Gerasim.
Chapter one introduces Ivan’s colleagues, of which, Ivan represents a typical member. These well-to-do civil servicemen concern themselves with what is comme il faut, or proper appearance for their social standings. This expression is repeated a dozen times throughout the course of the novel and represents the educated class’ social philosophy; this philosophy, states Death’s narrator, is what makes Ivan’s life “the most simple, the most ordinary, and the most awful” (1180). The novel begins after Ivan’s death and introduces Ivan’s wife, Praskovya Fyodorovna, and his oldest friend, Pyotr Ivanovich, at Ivan’s wake. Both characters concern themselves with ostensibly trivial and heartless thoughts: Pyotr hopes that he can join Shvarts for a game of “screw” if he can “get away,” and Praskovya wants Pyotr to help her procure an increased pension to support herself and her son (her daughter is newly engaged). Amid the bric-à-brac clocks, the pink cretonne of the couch, and the drawing room “crowded with furniture and things” that Ivan had collected throughout his life, Praskovya tells Pyotr how much she suffered because of Ivan’s death (1178). When it becomes apparent that Pyotr cannot help her with her request, she looks for an “excuse to get rid of her visitor” (1179) and sends Pyotr on his way to join the rest of Ivan’s friends who “on hearing of Ivan Ilyitch’s death, the first thought of each of the gentlemen in the room was of the effect this death might have on the transfer or promotion of themselves or their friends” (1174).
In contrast to this array of shallow, self-centered thought are the first actions of Gerasim. Chapter one finds him taking care of the wake’s guests with alacrity and thoughtfulness. In response to Pyotr’s attempt at small-talk (“A sad business, isn’t it?”), Gerasim utters what could be taken as the appropriate, comme il faut response, but what turns out to be a sagacious expression of truth: “We shall come to the same” (1179). Indeed, the first words spoken by Gerasim are leveling; he dismisses social ranks and morés just as death will eventually do. Gerasim’s words foreshadow the novel’s existential lesson: the way humans die is directly related to how they live. Therefore, life, as well as death, has nothing to do with assumed social classes and its concomitant perception of reality, but only with genuine humanity that knows no rank.
Yet, Ivan Ilyitch creates his life around social rank and equips it like he would his flat: he “chose the wallpapers, bought furniture, by preference antique furniture, which had a peculiar comme-il-faut style to his mind, and it all grew up and grew up, and really attained the ideal he had set before himself” (1187). Ivan arranges his life according to what he observes of his superiors’ lives. He married when it seemed appropriate and achieved promotions when it was time, so that the “life of Ivan Ilyitch ran its course as, according to his convention, life ought to do—easily, agreeably, and decorously” (1188). Since Ivan is the exemplar of his societal position, this comme-il-faut convention is shared by society’s highest, evidenced by their actions in the first chapter and the fact that Ivan emulates and apes his superiors in living his life. Ivan is not alone in his decorous existence, it is shared by his society, his friends, and his family. He and his family are wrapped up in the concerns of the trivial, the frequent mention of “the hearth, the screen, the étagère, and the little chairs dotted here and there, the plates and dishes on the wall, … the window blinds, straight or fluted,” and the sundry other decorous, yet mundane, items that the elite use to give meaning to their quotidian existences. Ironically, Ivan’s death results from an injury—that he treats as trivial—incurred while hanging some curtains. Trivial collections of kitsch also represent trivial amusements, or Gorky’s “warm coats.”
Even in the most decorous and pleasant lives, contention and ennui will still make appearances. When the stuff has all been bought, the job secured, the wife married, the children reared, and the friends made, what else does one have to do? Ivan’s two outlets are his job and, more importantly, “screw”: “Ivan Ilyitch’s most real pleasure was the pleasure of playing ‘screw,’ the Russian equivalent for ‘poker.’ He admitted to himself that, after all, after whatever unpleasant incidents there had been in his life, the pleasure which burned like a candle before all others was sitting with good players, and not noisy partners, at ‘screw’ ” (1189).
The word “screw” epitomizes what Ivan thinks of his subordinates and how he separates his “official” life from his “human” life: “In all this the great thing necessary was to exclude everything with the sap of life in it, which always disturbs the regular course of official business, not to admit any sort of relations with people except the official relations. … But where the official relation ended, there everything else stopped too” (1188). Yet, when Ivan gets sick, the doctor treats him “exactly as in [Ivan’s] court of justice. Exactly the same air as he put on in dealing with a man brought up for judgment, the doctor put on for him” (1191). Ivan, essentially, has screwed himself; he is being treated as a less-than-human piece of trivial matter, as significant as a piece of chipped pottery or a bad hair style (1190). Ivan has become to others what he most dreaded: indecorous, unplesant, and un-comme-il-faut. Not even his favorite activity can hide the inevitable fact of death. As he is confronted by “It,” an existential knowledge of death, Ivan begins to hate those that represent his unauthentic existence, namely Praskovya and his daughter, and become closer to the one honest person in his life, Gerasim:
[quote]Lying, lying, this lying carried on over him on the eve of his death, and destined to bring that terrible, solemn act of his death down to the level of all their visits, curtains, sturgeons for dinner … was a horrible agony for Ivan Ilyitch. And, strange to say, many times when they had been going through the regular performance over him, he had been within a hair’s-breath of screaming at them: “Cease your lying! You know, and I know, that I’m dying; so do, at least, give over lying!” But he had never had the spirit to do this. The terrible, awful act of his dying was, he saw, by all those about him, brought down to the level of a casual, unpleasant, and to some extent indecorous, incident (somewhat as they would behave with a person who should enter a drawing-room smelling unpleasant). It was brought down to the very decorum to which he had been enslaved all his life. He saw that no one felt for him, because no one would even grasp his position. Gerasim was the only person who recognised the position, and felt sorry for him. … Gerasim alone did not lie. (1201-2)[/quote]
Even though Ivan knew that his family and friends were lying to him, he was unaware that he had been lying to himself. Gerasim’s simplicity and willingness to help his dying master inspires Ivan to entertain “a strange idea”: “Can it be that I have not lived as one ought?” (1208). Ivan quickly repudiates this idea as too horrible: “But I’m not to blame!” (1208). Ironically, it takes the inevitability of death to make Ivan even ask that question; the deceit has been self-perpetuated. Not only has Ivan been hiding the inevitability of death, but also any joi de vivre: “Not the right thing. All that in which you lived and are living is lying, deceit, hiding life and death away from you” (1212). Ivan sees in Gerasim, the peasant, the correct way to live—indeed, “we all shall die. So what’s a little trouble” if one can make his life better by helping someone else (1202)?
There is hope for Tolstoy’s class. A subtle character throughout Death is Ivan’s son, Volodya. Perhaps Ivan’s intense suffering and death changes Volodya for the better. Indeed, it is Volodya’s touch that precipitates Ivan’s compassion for him and eases his death. Ivan feels sorry for his family, no longer for himself. This act of caritas, that Ivan first witnesses in Gerasim, finally manifests itself in Ivan, turning the terror of death to light (1213). This light, the first chapter illustrates, is lost on Praskovya, yet Volodya shows true remorse during the gathering of the comme-il-faut vultures at Ivan’s wake. This “little Ivan Ilyitch,” as Pyotr ironically describes him, perhaps holds the key to breaking both the social inequality and the power of comme il faut with the simple act of selfless love.
Tolstoy’s interpretation of nineteenth-century Russia’s class division is as appropriate to America’s twentieth-century, just-do-it culture of greed and self-centeredness. The Death of Ivan Ilyitch could just as easily be called The Death of Joe Smith because this lament for human indignity and suffering plays next door daily.
Works Cited
- Gibian, George. Introduction. The Portable Nineteenth-Century Russian Reader. New York: Penguin, 1993. ix-xv.
- Gorky, Maxim. “Recollections of Leo Tolstoy.” The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader. Ed. and Tr. Clarence Brown. New York: Penguin, 1976. 29-57.
- Terras, Victor. “Tolstoí, Lev Nikoláevich.” Handbook of Russian Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
- Tolstoy, Leo. The Death of Ivan Ilyitch. Stories: An Anthology and an Introduction. Ed. Eric S. Rabkin. New York: Harper Collins, 1995. 1174-1214.
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