The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy - Book Report/Review Example

? Book Review on The Death of Ivan Ilyich Book Review on The Death of Ivan Ilyich Tolstoy, Leo. The Death of Ivan Ilyich. 1886. Translated by Lynn Solotaroff. New York: Bantam Dell, 1981. ISBN: 0-553-21035-1 The novel by Leo Tolstoy was originally published in the Russian language as Smert Ivana Ilycha in 1886, several years following a phase of unhappiness and inner intellectual confusion that ended with his conversion to Christianity. The novel reveals the life and death of Ivan Ilyich, a high official of the 19th century Russia’s Court of Justice and at the same time, a miserable husband, a proud father of two, and a social climber in Russia’s high-society ladder. The story likewise portrays Ivan Ilyich's colleagues and family after his death, as each one reflects on the importance of his death for their personal gains — career, wealth and destiny. Tolstoy also exposes Ilyich’s life whose demise seems very insignificant. The ideal bureaucrat, Ivan Ilyich enjoys his routinely organized domestic and administrative duties. His terminal illness compels him to deal with the implications of both life and death. He discovers comfort in his young, poor servant Gerasim, the only person in Ilyich’s life who is fearless about death and shows genuine kindness for him, aside from his own son. Ilyich starts to question himself whether he has actually lived a good life. On his last day, he finally recognizes that he has lived a hypocritical and meaningless life. He asks forgiveness and wishes happiness for others. He retreats physically in agony but spiritually at peace (The Merriam-Webster Encylopedia of Literature).  The lead character in the novel is a rather naive, morally empty hero embodying a small but significant position of urban bureaucrats, prominent in the daily affairs of Russians in Tolstoy's era, whose lives became ever more disconnected from the natural world, the land, and spirituality. Through the revelation of the terrible emptiness of Ilyich's life, Tolstoy probes the self-deception, wickedness, and hostility of those people surrounding Ilyich. He may not be as clever as his maker, but he likewise learns to accept death and achieve a meaningful yet painful acceptance of what his life has signified. The story completely exemplifies what Tolstoy believed literature must contain: value and purpose (Zott). There are several stages whereupon this story can be read; nonetheless they are intertwined so inextricably into this masterwork that the density is overwhelming. Its simplicity — a dying man’s realization of the wasted life he lived — has been commonly depicted in Hollywood movies yet hardly ever portrayed and paralleled the superb skillfulness of Tolstoy in writing The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Teitelbaum). Departure from life, rousing of one’s spirituality, and salvation are the most important foundations in the novel. Indeed, the novel’s title may deceive the reader, like Ilyich himself, into believing that it is mainly on death, however ironically at the finale the reader, once more like Ilyich himself, comes into the realization that death is immaterial. While demonstrated in the story, death is the final certainty inevitably faced and acknowledged by all mortals. For Ilyich, the inescapability of his own death encourages a spiritual disaster and life abandonment. In keeping Tolstoy's viewpoint, Ilyich refuses the superficiality of his previous life and holds on to his newly-found spiritual ideals of love and acceptance. Reviewers have accentuated the emptiness of Ilyich's quest for greed and power, a life that is exposed as deceitful and lacking in spiritual profundity. Moreover, the novel has been argued from a psychological angle, as observers see Ilyich's estrangement from his associates and relations throughout his sickness and his propensity to pull out from human contact at his most trying moments. It is only through Gerasim, his poor servant, which he tried to make critical human contact shortly prior to his death. The persistent representation of the dark sack signifies Ilyich's descent from physical existence and spiritual enlightenment of his innermost soul (Zott). Just like Ivan Ilyich as he lies on his deathbed, we may likewise ask if his heteronomous life has not been a mistake. It becomes clear to Ilyich that what has seemed before as absolutely unfeasible: that he has not lived his life as he should have done, could have been true. He also realizes that his hardly discernible efforts to fight against what is deemed good by the most well positioned people, those hardly perceptible urges which he has instantly held back, could indeed have been the “real thing,” and everything that remains could have been false. And that his specialized responsibilities and the entire arrangement of his life and of his kin and his every societal and bureaucrat interest could have been false too. Ilyich attempts to defend all these things to himself and unexpectedly suffers the flaw of what he was fighting for when in fact there seems nothing worth fighting for (Donnelly). The depiction of the character of Ivan Ilyich, combined with Tolstoy's delicate but unstoppable criticism is overwhelming. Each element of the story is crucial and additionally provides the demonstration of life’s fundamentality devoid of morals and reason. However, Tolstoy lets his readers see the obvious and simple truth to speak up for themselves. The expertise in Tolstoy crafts an emotional intensity which is beyond compare (Teitelbaum). At the time Tolstoy’s novel came out, critics centered on the literary worth of the short story and viewed it as a stinging ironic description of aristocratic Russian society. In relation to this insight, the illness of Ilyich is symbolic of the disease of the high-class 19th century humanity. Later on, analysis centered on the dealings of death in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, construing the story as a manifestation of the universal mortality of every individual. The plot is also recognized as an incarnation of Tolstoy's quest for meaning and his views on humanity. Whereas some scholars regard the story as an illustration of Tolstoy's smart employment of verisimilitude, as it embodies a stage every human will ultimately meet; some recognizes the story as a leading model of Tolstoy's didacticism and strict morality. Furthermore, autobiographical analyses have examined parallels between Tolstoy's philosophical and religious works and The Death of Ivan Ilyich. The chapter organization of the book has also been criticized as to the proper position of the first chapter. Many reviewers have linked Ilyich’s demise to the stages of death explained in Elizabeth Kubler-Ross' On Death of Dying (Zott). Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, one of the most famous writers employing the Tolstoyian themes, published On Death and Dying in 1969. Kubler-Ross’s book is well known for pioneering the theory of what every dying entity passes — the Five Stages of Grief — (1) denial and isolation; (2) anger; (3) bargaining; (4) depression; and (5) acceptance. The book remarkably validates the principles of Ivan Ilyich. Tolstoy had effectively presented a fictional version of the Kubler-Ross model, which was based on over 200 terminally-ill patients resembling Ilyich’s condition. Ilyich was able to evolve through the phases of denial, anger, bargaining and depression prior to disembarking ultimately at a terribly brief state of acceptance during the final moment of his life. His fear of death had at last been quenched. After inspecting Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich alongside Kubler-Ross’s On Death and Dying, James Napier, a Humanities professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, writes that “science with its striking examples supports fiction” (Smith). While several readers may think that Ilyich is a wicked character, and that the story is a forewarning against fraud, I think that Ivan Ilyich is neither worse nor better than the common people. He could possibly be of a somewhat lesser amount of morality than the majority; however that does not make an absolutely wicked person in Ilyich. To consider him to be evil is to overlook the entire picture, for this narrative was intended to be universal and illustrative of realism’s subsistence for every individual. This is apparent even in the very beginning of the story, with Ilyich's so-called friends’ and family’s reactions to his passing away. Like Ilyich, they perceive death as something that can in no way occur to them, and as well like him, they lived lives that are superficial in an effort to escape life’s horrible realities. As his existence ceases, he has elevated above those people by finally accepting the realization of the triviality of his life. Ilyich rises above any commoner, who shuns away from the actuality of death and the endeavor to make life meaningful. In Tolstoy's personal remarks, "Ivan Ilyich's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible." Works Cited Donnelly, John. Language, Metaphysics, and Death. Second Edition. Fordham University Press, 1994. ISBN: 9780823215812 Smith, Jordan. A Night in Arzamas: How Tolstoy’s obsession with mortality became a teachable moment. The American Interest. March/April 2012 Issue. 4 April 2012. Teitelbaum, Ilana. Reviews Written by Ilana Teitelbaum. Amazon. 15 February 2001. 4 April 2012. The Merriam-Webster Encylopedia of Literature.  Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 1995. ISBN-10: 0877790426 Tolstoy, Leo. The Death of Ivan Ilyich. 1886. Trans. Lynn Solotaroff. New York: Bantam Dell, 1981. ISBN-10: 0553210351 Zott, Lynn M. 2002. Short Story Criticism: Criticism of the Works of Short Fiction Writers. Detroit, Michigan: Gale Group, 2002. ISBN 10: 0787659541 Read More