Conversion, Reversion and Subversion in Tolstoi's "The Death of Ivan Il'ich"

Conversion, Reversion and Subversion in Tolstoi's "The Death of Ivan Il'ich"Author(s): David ShepherdSource: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 71, No. 3 (Jul., 1993), pp. 401-416Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4211299 .

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THE SLAVONIC

AND EAST EUROPEAN

REVIEEW

Volume 7 I, Number 3-July 1993

Conversion, Reversion and

Subversion in Tolstoi's The Death

of Ivan Il'ich

DAVID SHEPHERD

As the first work of fiction written after his crisis in the early i88os, Tolstoi's The Death of Ivan Il'ich (Smert'Ivana Il'icha, i886) has been repeatedly interrogated for evidence of the true extent of its author's avowed renunciation of his former moral and artistic values and predilections. So wide-ranging and thorough has this interrogation been that few questions, it would seem, remain to be asked or answered. It is possible to discern a predictable, and banal, consensus that this story of a public prosecutor and prominent member of the legal establishment, forced by impending death to re-evaluate his life and the values by which he has lived it, unambiguously conveys Tolstoi's post-crisis thinking while at the same time demonstrating that, notwithstanding his ostensible renunciation of art, his power as a writer of fiction was undiminished. Such disagreements as remain seem com- paratively minor and centre on two issues. The first is the identity of the hero. For most Soviet critics Ivan Il'ich was, in the words of Mark Shcheglov, from beginning to end 'completely the product of his time and class'.1 However, Shcheglov's account of the story, written in I952-53, also contains evidence of the heterodoxy which caused diffi- culties for him and Nozyi mir at about that time: several pages before this uncompromising statement we find him arguing that 'In the chapters devoted to Ivan Il'ich's illness and death the universally human [obshchechelovecheskoe] and natural aspects of the hero come to the fore to

David Shepherd is a Lecturer in Russian Studies at the University of Manchester.

1 Mark Shcheglov, 'Povest' Tolstogo Smert' Ivana Il'icha' (hereafter 'Povest' Tolstogo'), in his Literaturnaia kritika, Moscow, 1971, pp. 9-56 (38).



402 DAVID SHEPHERD

supplant the imprint of time and [social] conditions kept in place by the veneer of "pleasantness and decorum" .2 This suggests that Shcheglov was in reality eager to embrace what is, of course, the majority view of non-Soviet commentators, a view encapsulated in Robert Russell's conclusion that 'Having, through the power of his writing, engaged the reader's attention in the fate of this man, [Tolstoi] does everything he can to ensure that the reader perceives this man as Everyman'.3 Ivan Il'ich thus, like virtually every other man in Russian literature, represents us all, men and women alike, whenever and wherever we are, and faces the existential and ontological dilemmas that we must all confront.

The second and related question on which there remains some disagreement is that of the plausibility or otherwise of Ivan Il'ich's 'conversion' shortly before his death, when he suddenly ceases to struggle against death, sees clearly the solution to his hitherto irresolv- able dilemmas and dies at peace with himself and the world. No critic argues that Ivan Il'ich is not forced into a realization that he has lived his life badly; but many 'question [Tolstoi's] success in portraying the protagonist's last-minute "conversion" and regard it as inconsistent with the other elements of the story'.4 An exemplary illustration of this approach is Edward Wasiolek's contention that 'It is hard to make artistic sense of Ivan Ilych's conversion, [. . .] and the truth that he sees in the last moments of his life'.5 The cases made for the ending's implausibility are usually more vigorously argued, and on the face of it more plausible, than those for its plausibility.6 The issue is obviously an important one, but the perceived message, whether conveyed plausibly or not, is the same for most commentators, and is easily understood by both Ivan Il'ich and the readers whom he represents: as Tolstoi was to

2 Ibid., p. 34. Elsewhere in the article Shcheglov signals that the issue is not a clear-cut one for him, writing that 'Ivan Il'ich could be interpreted as a representative of humanity in general', but adding the qualification that Tolstoi's attempts to endow his characters with such universal significance usually led him 'in the direction of the most robust and incomparably realistic denunciation of the characteristics of bourgeois psychology, life and morality' (p. 20). Although written in I952-53, Shcheglov's article was not published until 1958. For details of Shcheglov's role as a controversial Novyi mir contributor, see 'Ob oshibkakh zhurnala Novyi mir. Rezoliutsiia pravleniia Soiuza sovetskikh pisatelei', Novyi mir, I954, 9, pp. 3-7

3 Robert Russell, 'From Individual to Universal: Tolstoy's Smert' Ivana Il'icha' (hereafter 'From Individual to Universal'), Modern Language Review, 76, I 98 I, 3, pp. 629-42 (642).

4Gary Jahn, 'The Role of the Ending in Lev Tolstoi's The Death of Ivan Il'ich' (hereafter 'The Role of the Ending'), Canadian Slavonic Papers, 24, 1982, 3, pp. 229-38 (229).

5 Edward Wasiolek, Tolstoy's Major Fiction, Chicago and London, I978, p. 175. See also Schcheglov, 'Povest' Tolstogo', pp. 35-36, and E. F. Volodin, 'Povest' o smysle vremeni (Smert' Ivana Il'icha L. N. Tolstogo)' (hereafter 'Povest' o smysle vremeni'), in Kontekst 1984. Literaturno-teoreticheskie issledovaniia, ed. N. K. Gei, Moscow, I 986, pp. 144-63 (i 60-6 I).

6 Noteworthy among the arguments for plausibility are Jahn, 'The Role of the Ending', and Robert L. Duncan's attempt to show how 'imagery and Biblical allusions' reinforce the sincerity of Ivan Il'ich's conversion ('Ivan Ilych's Death: Secular or Religious?', University of Dayton Review, I 5, I 98 I, I, pp. 99- I o6 [99] ).



TOLSTOI S THE DEATH OF IVAN IL 'ICH 403

put it some twenty-two years later in his Circle of Reading (Krug chteniia, I908): 'the more a man lives by spiritual life alone, the less terrible death is to him'; 'the better a life the less terrible is death and the easier it is to die'.7 He, and we, have been warned.

There is thus precious little room for manceuvre. In fact, it seems that the only line of argument left for any interpretation of the story which sets out to be different enough to warrant being submitted to public scrutiny is a contradictory one: that Ivan Il'ich is brought to a re-evaluation of his past life; that the ending is not just a contrived means of closure, but that, as Gary Jahn puts it, 'The apparently miraculous conversion of the dying Ivan and his discovery of a new understanding of life at the end of the story are adequately prepared and artistically consistent with the preceding text';8 but that as a result of this wholly plausible conversion Ivan Il'ich has not changed one bit. This line of argument sounds unsustainable; but the aim of this article is to attempt to sustain it. It will be argued that, as well as conversion, processes of reversion and subversion play an important part in the history of Ivan Il'ich. Moreover, in the course of the argument it will emerge that these processes extend beyond Tolstoi's text and impinge upon the interpretation of it. In defiance of recent irresistible shifts in the political and intellectual climate, there will be a reversion to an aspect of the legacy of Lenin and to a French Marxist appropriation of that legacy. Such recourse to carefully selected aspects of Leninism and Marxism may allow for some modest subversion of the assumptions upon which many previous readings of The Death of Ivan Il'ich in particular, and Tolstoi's work in general, have been predicated.

If such claims seem exaggerated, that is perhaps to be expected in discussion of a text in which the overstatement and hyperbole charac- teristic of Tolstoi are so prominent. These are the dominant qualities of the narrative's establishment of Ivan Il'ich's ordinariness, his status as an average, typical representative of his family, his class and his profession alike. We are informed that he was an average or mean from the start, the middle of three brothers, 'not as cold and punctilious as his elder brother, nor as hot-headed as his younger brother'.9 With unremitting irony we are shown how his career follows a similarly middle course, shaped by due, but not excessive, deference to authority and service to the 'pleasantness' (priiatnost') and 'decorum' (prilichie) whose guiding role in the life of Ivan Il'ich and his whole milieu is conveyed by the use of these nouns and their associated adjectives and

7 L. N. Tolstoi, Krug chteniia, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (hereafter PSS), go vols, Moscow, 1928-72, XLI, 1957, pp. 140, 141. Here as elsewhere the translation from Russian is my own.

8 Jahn, 'The Role of the Ending', p. 237. 9Tolstoi, Smert' Ivana Il'icha, in PSS, xxvi, I936, pp. 6i-i13 (69); subsequent page

references are given in parentheses in the text.



404 DAVID SHEPHERD

adverbs as a browbeating refrain.10 The end result is a dissolution of Ivan Il'ich's singularity in the plurality of social conformity and aspiration: his attempts to decorate his new apartment in a distinctive manner produce 'the same as is done by all people who are not quite wealthy, but wish to be like the wealthy and are therefore only like one another [... .] everything that a certain kind of people do in order to be like all people of a certain kind' (p. 79).

There is no more subtlety about Ivan Il'ich's questioning of his place in the society by which he has been so thoroughly shaped and in which he has been so comfortable. On his very first visit to his doctor he displays a capacity, at this stage unmotivated, for defamiliarizing critique, perceiving an analogy, unfavourable to both parties, between the physician's supercilious treatment of his patient and his own dealings with those brought before him in court (pp. 83-85).11 His interrogation of his own values could hardly be more intense than it is in this section of the story, but it becomes ever more insistent with the progress of his illness - brought on, as it is obligatory to point out, by a fall from a step-ladder crudely symbolic of the social ladder which he had devoted so much energy to climbing.12 Forced to withdraw physically from his familiar professional and social environment, and eventually to retreat into the confined space of his study, Ivan Il'ich undergoes a parallel psychological withdrawal from the values he had previously served. These values and the way of life they engender appear more and more as 'wrong' (ne to). He realizes (as Tolstoyan heroes usually do) that the worst thing that he ever did was to grow up: 'in his childhood there had been something truly pleasant [priiatnoe], something with which he could live were it to return. [. . .] The further he moved from his childhood, and the nearer to the present, the more insignificant and dubious were hisjoys' (p. io6). Hence the special part played by his son Vasia, who is only just leaving behind the pre- pubescent, and thus prelapsarian, stage. Vasia is able to understand and pity his father; just as importantly, Ivan Il'ich 'always felt sorry for his son' ('Syn vsegda zhalok byl emu', p. 104). It therefore seemns reasonable, or plausible, that this capacity both to sense and to feel pit:y should win out at the end of the story, when Ivan Il'ich finally succumbs to the pull of the black bag which he has hitherto resisted:

At this moment Ivan Il'ich fell through and saw light, and it was revealed to him that his life had not been what it should have been, but that this could still be put to rights. He asked himself what was right, and fell quiet,

10 Cf. C. J. G. Turner, 'The Language of Fiction: Word-Clusters in Tolstoy's The Death qf Ivan Ilyich', Modern Language Review, 65, 1970, I, pp. I I 6-2 I . 11 On the lack of motivation of Ivan Il'ich's insights into the iniquities of medical and legal

practices, see Russell, 'From Individual to Universal', p. 642. 12 See in particular Michael V. Williams, 'Tolstoy's The Death of Iocin Iljch: After the Fall',

Studies in Short Fiction, 2 1, I 984, 3, pp. 229-34.



TOLSTOI S THE DEATH OF IVAN IL ICH 405

listening. At this moment he felt that someone was kissing his hand. He opened his eyes and looked at his son. He felt pity for him [Emu stalo zhalko ego]. His wife approached. He looked at her ... .1 He felt pity for her [Emu zhalko stalo ee]. (pp. I I 2-13)

The word which recurs in these final stages is zhalko, but earlier the related verb zhalet' is used repeatedly. In the Tolstoyan scheme of things pity, of course, is a highly charged concept. In a I 906 diary entry Tolstoi made clear its resonance for him and his thinking: 'In the language of the people "to take pity on" [zhalet'] means "to love" [liubit']. And this is a correct definition of that kind of love which more than anything else binds people together and evokes their loving activity.'13 By feeling pity for his family, Ivan is able 'to free them, and to be set free himself, from his suffering'; death vanishes, to be replaced by light (p. I 3). In embracing an ethics of pity, Ivan Il'ich, in Robert Bernasconi's words, 'had at the last chosen to live for Others and this meant, in the situation in which he found himself, the acceptance of his own death'.14

The terminal point of Ivan Il'ich's crisis is thus the same as that of Tolstoi's: a recognition that, paradoxically, the self is at its most perfect when it is sublimated in union with all other selves. And indeed there are striking parallels between the whole course of the fictional charac- ter's crisis and that of his author, as attested in non-fictional texts such as Confession (Ispoved', i882).15 Ivan Il'ich has come rather a long way. So in what sense can it possibly be true that he undergoes a plausible conversion, yet is unchanged? In order to begin to answer this question we need to look at the narrative methods employed in the story.

Again, this matter has been commented on extensively. Up to the onset of his illness, Ivan's career is described in what is formally, if not axiologically, 'objective' third-person narrative (with some important exceptions, one of which is discussed below). However, the progression of the illness is charted almost exclusively from Ivan's point of view, conveyed by interior monologue and quasi-direct discourse (nesobstvenno-priamaia rech'). There is nothing especially remarkable about this, or about comments such as M. Rukavitsyn's that 'With the help of concealed inner speech [ ...] Tolstoi finds the only real way of fathoming his hero's most personal and secret thoughts and conveying

13 Tolstoi [Diary entry for 27 November I906], in PSS, LV, 1955, p. 278. For a thorough discussion of the strong link between pity and love in Tolstoi, see Richard F. Gustafson, Leo Tolstoy. Resident and Stranger (hereafter Leo Tolstoy), Princeton, I 986, pp. 187-92. 14 Robert Bernasconi, 'Literary Attestation in Philosophy: Heidegger's Footnote on

Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich' (hereafter 'Literary Attestation'), in Philosophers'Poets, ed. David Wood, London and New York, 1990, pp. 7-36 (29). 15 See in particular David Matual, 'The Confession as Subtext in The Death of Ivan Il'ich'

(hereafter 'The Confession'), The International Fiction Review, 8, I98I, 2, pp. 124-28.



406 DAVID SHEPHERD

them to the reader'.16 What is remarkable is that the presence arid effects of such elementary narrative procedures are as often as not forgotten, or bracketed out, in discussion of a central element of the story.

Ivan Jl'ich's servant, the young peasant Gerasim, is generally acknowledged to hold the key to his master's conversion. He alone does not lie to Ivan about the seriousness of his condition. Apart from Vasia, he is the only person to feel pity for Ivan. Richard Gustafson speaks for virtually all commentators on the story when he writes:

What Gerasim knows is that the task of life is not to seek place after place [as Ivan Il'ich had done in pursuing his career], but to see his task in his place. He lives not by the 'inertia of salary' [zhalovania], but by his ability to 'take pity' [zhalet'] on others. [. . .] From Gerasim Ivan Ilych learns that to live does not mean to be loved but to love. [...] What must be done is 'to take pity' on others. [...] The pain and the death disappear in the act of pity which is Ivan Ilych's illumination and rebirth to life. 17

In other words, Gerasim is one of those legion Tolstoyan peasants, all physical and moral wholesomeness, who, in their blessed state of permanent childhood, have the panacea for the intellectual's ills not because they know the answers to the terrible existential questions which torment the intellectual, but because they do not even know that the questions are there to be asked. Surprisingly, almost all commentators have failed to display the slightest scepticism about Gerasim, and have offered variations on Gustafson's panegyric to his instinctive access to the secrets of life and death. This is surprising not because it should be the business of critics to berate Tolstoi for his representation of the peasantry, but because, with one exception, Gerasim is seen entirely from Ivan Il'ich's viewpoint. The exception is in the opening chapter, where, as a prelude to the story of his dying, we are told of Ivan- Il'ich's death and the reactions to it. His colleague and 'closest friend' Petr Ivanovich comes to pay his respects and sees Gerasim pass in front of him 'with a light step' as he sprinkles 'something' on the floor to counter the smell of decay (p. 63). Then, as Petr Ivanovich leaves:

Gerasim [... .I leapt out of the room where the deceased lay, tossed all the fur coats aside with his strong arms in order to find Petr Ivanovich's, and helped him into it.

'Well, now, Gerasim,' said Petr Ivanovich, simply in order to say something. 'It's a pity, isn't it [Zhalko]?'

16 M. M. Rukavitsyn, 'Iskusstvo portreta v povesti L. N. Tolstogo Smert' Ivana Il'icha', Izvestiia AN SSSR. Seriia literatury i iazyka, 23, I964, I, pp. 44-48 (47). For a thorough description of the different discursive levels of the text, see Gunther Schaarschmidt, 'Time and Discourse Structure in The Death of Ivan Il'ich' (hereafter 'Time and Discourse Structure'), Canadian Slavonic Papers, 2I, 1979, 3, pp. 356-66. 17 Gustafson, Leo Tolstoy, p. I59.




'It's God's will. It will come to us all,' said Gerasim, baring his even white peasant teeth and, like a man wholly occupied in strenuous labour, briskly opened the door, called for Petr Ivanovich's coachman, helped Petr Ivano- vich into his carriage and leapt back towards the porch, as though he were trying to think of what else he might do. (p. 68)

Presumably because of its emphasis on his physical vigour and no- nonsense attitude towards death, this is usually seen as an adumbration of Gerasim's later, positive role in relation to Ivan Il'ich. Robert Bernasconi seems to be alone in pointing out that there is nothing to indicate that Gerasim is any different from the other characters in the first chapter, whose hypocritical displays of grief do not mask their true indifference: 'Even Gerassim, who it will subsequently emerge is not to be condemned, appears in the first chapter to be part of the conspiracy'; in the light of his (cliched) remark to Petr Ivanovich, 'he could readily have been taken to exhibit a further form of the inauthentic attitude to death, one which refers it to an external power. Only retrospectively do we recognize that Gerassim understood more of death than the others.'18

But is such a retrospective recognition correct? When Gerasim next appears it is as a 'comfort' to Ivan Il'ich, who is discomfited by the 'dirtiness, lack of decorum and smell' which come from having to use a commode, and embarrassed that another person should have to empty the commode for him (p. 95). Ivan first becomes aware of Gerasim's positive qualities when his own physical weakness leaves him floun- dering in an easy chair, unable to pull up his trousers and forced to contemplate his wasted legs:

Gerasim came in with a light, robust step, spreading a pleasant smell of boot polish and the freshness of the winter air, wearing a clean apron of homespun hemp and a clean printed-cotton shirt, with the sleeves rolled up on his bare, strong, young arms, and, without looking at Ivan Il'ich, evidently holding back, so as not to offend the sick man, the joy at being alive which shone in his face, went to take out the bowl. (p. 96)

Gerasim's cleanness and strength are not presented 'objectively': they are perceived, highlighted and magnified by Ivan Il'ich from the standpoint of his own unclean, debilitated state (just as the hyperactive Gerasim of chapter I was presented from the viewpoint of a Petr Ivanovich made uneasy by the rituals of death and mourning and eager to be reassured by signs of health and life). Lest we miss the point, the verb 'to seem' (kazat'sia/pokazat'sia) subsequently occurs several times in its familiar role as a blatant marker of circumscribed viewpoint: 'it seemed to Ivan Il'ich that his pain was eased when Gerasim was holding his legs up high' (p. 97); 'And, oddly, it seemed to him that he

18 Bernasconi, 'Literary Attestation', pp. 24-25.



408 DAVID SHEPHERD

felt better while Gerasim was holding his legs' (ibid.). And Gerasim's abstract qualities are similarly presented explicitly and exclusively from Ivan's point of view:

he saw that nobody would take pity on him, because nobody even wanted to understand his position. Only Gerasim understood this position and pitied him. ... .] Only Gerasim did not lie, it was obviousfrom everything that he alone understood what was happening and did not consider it necessary to hide this, and that he simply felt pity for his wasted, weak master. Once he even said straight out, as Ivan Il'ich was sending him away:

'We'll all die. What's a little trouble?' he said, making clear by this that he did not find his labour a burden because he was carrying it out for a dying man, and hoped that when his time came someone would carry out the same labour for him. (p. 98, emphases added)

The crucial word in this passage, apart from the italicized markers of point of view,. is 'master' (barin). The significance which Gerasim acquires for Ivan Il'ich cannot be separated from his social subordi- nation to him. As a result of his illness Ivan has lost his capacity to move freely among his social equals and superiors, to exercise his former skill in shaping their attitudes towards him. They no longer provide him with what he needs and cannot be persuaded or compelled to do so. On the contrary, when they visit him Ivan Il'ich feels constrained to conceal his wish to be pitied and cried over, and to try to display, and express in appropriate manner, an interest in the professional matters that they raise. As his subordinate, however, Gerasim has no choice but to 'carry out' the labour required of him by Ivan; his apparent eagerness to please must be at least in part a reflection ofhis own awareness that it is his place and duty to please. He is similarly available for Ivan to project onto him the qualities he wishes to find in others as he tries to come to terms with impending death. Unlike Ivan Il'ich's colleagues, Gerasim is in no position to escape his master's search for consolation. If Gerasim is some kind of ideal, this is because he is produced as such by Ivan Il'ich -just as Tolstoi, in his fictional and non-fictional or 'theoretical' works alike, makes peasants his ideal by projecting certain qualities upon them in a gesture which, paradoxically, is made possible by, and helps perpetuate, the very social inequality and oppression which it is supposed to undermine. If Gerasim has the answers to Ivan Il'ich's questions, this is because Ivan Il'ich supplies him with those answers. The degree to which Gerasim's status as positive hero is compromised is underlined by the fact that even his physical strength is not independent of social factors. Gerasim, we learn (Ivan Il'ich's viewpoint is at work here again), 'was a clean, fresh young peasant grown heavier on city food [razdobrevshii na gorodskikh kharchakh]' (p. 96): this embodiment of a natural countryside vigour owes much of his physical well-being to the very city life whose ethos he is intended to counter.



TOLSTOI S THE DEATH OF IVAN IL 'ICH 409

We ignore at our peril, then, the factors which shape Ivan Il'ich's perception of Gerasim, and indeed of his whole milieu. And, in keeping with the general tenor of the text, there seems to be a certain overdeter- mination of this perception. Ivan's view of his position in relation to others may be influenced by the increasingly heavy doses of morphine administered to him, which at times send him into 'oblivion'; perhaps the key moments of his conversion are, at least in part, hallucination? This possibility cannot be ruled out altogether, but there are other avenues which more richly reward exploration. In particular, the point about the parallel between Ivan Il'ich's and Tolstoi's production of a particular image or concept of the peasant may be worth taking further. In an article in which he tries to show that 'The Death of Ivan Il'ich is thematically and even stylistically a fictional recasting of The Confes- sion', David Matual argues that 'the problem of death elicits various responses in the two works' because Tolstoi is 'more analytical than his fictional creation', who is 'far too accepting and uncritical' to be considered 'the same man as Tolstoy'.19 Certainly Ivan Il'ich is not Tolstoi, and is initially too accepting and uncritical of the world to which he is born; but as his illness progresses he reveals himself to be every bit as analytical as his author. Ostensibly his (quintessentially Tolstoyan) realization of the inadequacy of reason and logical analysis is confirmed when he recalls Kiesewetter's syllogism 'Caius is a man; men are mortal; therefore Caius is mortal' (p. 92), but refuses to accept that this logic, however irrefutable, might apply to him, with his wealth of experience unfathomable by the intellect, 'with all the joys, sorrows and delights of childhood, adolescence and youth' (p. 93). The anti- rational basis of his approach to the syllogism is intimated when his expression of the conviction that "'I, Vania, Ivan Il'ich, with all my feelings and thoughts"' cannot be mortal in the same way as Caius is followed by an indication that 'This is how he felt' (p. 93, emphasis added), rather than thought. But he constantly reverts to the intellectual, rational habits of his past: the razor-sharp legal mind, which contributed so much to his worldly success, continues to function as his thoughts return time and again to the question of whether or not he has lived his life correctly. He conducts dialogues with his pain, with the 'voice of his soul', with God. As Rima Salys observes, this 'internal dialectic' is in effect an expression of Ivan's identity as a lawyer, 'really court briefs for and against the correctness of Ivan's life'.20 One of the

19 Matual, 'The Confession', pp. 124, 126, I 28. 20 Rima Salys, 'Signs on the Road of Life: The Death of Ivan I1'iW', Slavic and East European

Journal, 30, I986, 1, pp. 18-28 (23). John Wiltshire also remarks on 'the psychologically plausible quality of Ivan Ilyich's thinking; ajudge would naturally think in this way' ('The Argument of Ivan Ilyich's Death', The Critical Review [Chicago], 24, I982, pp. 46-54 [53] ).



4IO DAVID SHEPHERD

most vivid illustrations of the continuing power of, and reliance on, his intellect is provided, ironically, by one of the occasions when Ivan recalls fondly his earlier life and his childhood, that stage and state of life whose positive valency derives from its pre-cerebral, irrational naturalness:

'Just as my torment is becoming worse and worse, so my whole life became worse and worse,' he thought. There was one bright spot back there at the beginning of his life, but then things became blacker and blacker, moved more and more quickly. 'Inversely proportionally to the squares of the distances from death,' thought Ivan Il'ich. (pp. io8-o9)

This image, whose basis is nothing if not rational, speaks volumes about Ivan Il'ich's reluctance or inability to renounce the foundation of his former worldview. Indeed, it is not only his way of viewing and categorizing the world that remains largely unchanged; his fundamen- tal aspiration, too, remains constant. His past life and career were driven by the desire, or need, to find an accommodation with the world, to fit in socially and professionally, to retain total control over his relations with others. When this control was threatened, he took corrective and evasive action, retreating, for example, into his work as an escape from what he saw as his wife's shrewishness and her attempts to make him dependent on domestic routine. The story of his coming to terms with death is similarly one of correction and evasion. He may come to renounce much of what he formerly believed in and lived for, but this is because it is no longer available to him, available to reinforce his sense of his self and its worth. The moment when he sees the light is not a moment of epiphanic access to some truth previously hidden from him, but a moment of discovery of a new way to conceptualize his own relationship to his (temporally and spatially reduced) circumstances. His apparent embracing of the ethics of empathetic pity is not the sublimation of his ego in a Karataevan sense of himself as a part of the whole, but the apotheosis of an ego whose driving imperative is to order the world around it in such a way as to ensure its continuing security. Ivan Il'ich does not, at the moment of conversion, cease to be himself; he reverts to, or remains, his old self, the self produced, as the whole chronicle of his life has shown with a near-parodic thoroughness, by the society he inhabits. This story is not, as Shcheglov would have it, 'a cruel demonstration of the collapse of bourgeois egoism';21 it is a dazzling demonstration of that egoism's sheer tenacity. The attitude with which Ivan Il'ich expires does not elevate him above his society, but confirms his place within it.

So the fact that Ivan Il'ich does not change provides the best explanation for the 'plausibility' of his conversion. It is also the reason

21 Shcheglov, 'Povest' Tolstogo', p. 15.




why he is not an 'Everyman', except in the limited sense that he represents other men of the same time, place and class, or in the sense of Kiesewetter's syllogism. That syllogism embodies the sum total of what the text has to say about 'man in general' ('voobshche chelovek'), to use Ivan Il'ich's expression (p. 93); it is irrefutable, but of course it is also impossibly trite.

Close reading and re-reading of the story reveals that all this has been obvious from the beginning, from the opening chapter which portrays, with a hyperbole that sets the tone for the rest of the text, the indifference, hypocrisy and self-interest governing the reaction of Ivan Il'ich's colleagues and family to his death. Apart from Gerasim, whose otherness in relation to the general reaction is, as we have seen, open to question, only the corpse of Ivan Il'ich himself seems to embody any different attitude or value. This is signalled by one sentence in the description of the corpse which, in the view of Gunther Schaarschmidt, sums up the meaning of the whole story':22 'On his face was an

expression which said that what needed to be done had been done; and done correctly' (p. 64). Schaarschmidt is right, but not in the sense that he intends. Clearly he reads this sentence as evidence that, before he died, Ivan Il'ich truly realized that his past life had been wrong and that he succeeded at the last in doing what was right. The counter- argument to this is not, as might be expected, that what happens to Ivan Il'ich subsequently (in the siuzhet, but earlier in the fabula) gives the lie to the implications of his corpse's facial expression; rather it is that the description of this facial expression conveys succinctly Ivan Il'ich's failure to change.

The key word here is 'correctly' (pravil'no). The adjective 'correct', the adverb 'correctly' and especially the noun 'correctness' (pravil'nost') are used repeatedly throughout the story, with a meaning very different from the one the adverb appears to have at this stage. 'Correctness', along with 'pleasantness' and 'decorum', is one of the qualities that right up to the end justify for Ivan Il'ich his past life:

And when, as it often did, the thought came to him that all this was happening to him because he had lived wrongly, he would instantly recall the total correctness of his life and banish this strange thought. (p. I07)

'It is impossible to resist,' he said to himself, 'but if I could at least understand why this is happening. That's impossible too. You might be able to explain it if you were to say that I have not lived as I should have. But it is quite impossible to admit to that,' he said to himself, recalling the lawfulness, correctness and decorum of his life. (p. IO9)

22 Schaarschmidt, 'Time and Discourse Structure', p. 365.



412 DAVID SHEPHERD

A certain type of 'correctness' is thus a quality prized in Ivan Il'ich's milieu. The corpse's facial expression is not, as Schaarschmidt states (surprisingly, since his account of the story's 'discourse structure' is otherwise so nuanced and perceptive), simply 'described by the narra- tor'.23 The description is quasi-direct discourse reflecting the viewpoint of Petr Ivanovich, a bearer of the values of that milieu (even, as Shcheglov argues, Ivan Il'ich's double), who is scrutinizing the face of his departed colleague.24 Petr Ivanovich has already noticed that, in death as in life, Ivan Il'ich is like everybody else: 'The corpse lay, as corpses always lie'; 'as with all corpses, his face was more handsome, and most importantly more full of significance, than in the living man' (p. 64). Perhaps, then, the sense conveyed by 'correctly' in chapter I is in some degree the same as that conveyed by 'correctness' later on? This seems to be confirmed when the description continues: 'In addition, there was in this expression a reproach or reminder to the living. This reminder struck Petr Ivanovich as inappropriate, or at least not applicable to him' (p. 64). Petr Ivanovich's capacity to be no more than momentarily affected by this perceived reproach or reminder could be seen as evidence of his, and his milieu's, capacity to eclipse the unfamiliar meaning of 'correctly' with its familiar meaning. But there is more to it than this. The 'new' sense of 'correctly' is not obscured by the reasserted old meaning: because it is the result of Ivan Il'ich's conversion, that is to say his failure to change, this new meaning is an extension of the old meaning. The moral correctness ostensibly achieved by Ivan Il'ich in his dying moments is a reflex of the social correctness to which he has been a slave all his life. The 'message of contentment'25 that Petr Ivanovich reads on his friend's face is in fact a message of continuing complacency.

GaryJahn has suggested that Petr Ivanovich's 'ultimate disregard of his internal dilemma is not a satisfactory solution of it', and that Petr Ivanovich and the reader alike experience 'an unresolved affective tension in the face of death'.26 But in fact there is a dissolution of tension: that one word 'correctly', in which two apparently opposed meanings collapse into a single meaning, is the focal point of the text's thoroughgoing subversion of its own message, which is no more a 'satisfactory solution' than Petr Ivanovich's. This subversion is enac- ted by the whole of the first chapter, which demonstrates how Ivan Il'ich's death has made not onejot of difference to the attitudes of those close to him. For one Soviet critic this made the chapter 'an angry

23 Ibid., p. 364. 24 Shcheglov, 'Povest' Tolstogo', p. 53. On the importance of Petr Ivanovich's viewpoint,

seeJahn, 'The Death of Ivan I1'i- Chapter One' (hereafter 'The Death'), in Studies in Honor of Xenia GaEsiorowska, ed. Lauren G. Leighton, Columbus, Ohio, I983, pp. 37-43 (40).

25 Gustafson, Leo Tolstoy, p. I55. 26Jahn, 'The Death', p. 4 I -



TOLSTOI S THE DEATH OF IVAN IL ICH 4I3

denunciation of the soullessness of the bureaucrats' world, which has failed to understand or learn anything from the story, the tragedy of Ivan Il'ich'.27 But, since Ivan Il'ich has not changed, there is no reason for anyone else to do so. Another Soviet, although his approach to the story in most respects rehearsed the standard line, provided an astute gloss on Petr Ivanovich's reaction to the corpse's 'message':

Petr Ivanovich considered the reminder to be inappropriate most probably because it came from Ivan Il'ich, and Ivan Il'ich was a member of the Palace of Justice and a card-player just like the rest of his colleagues and partners, and there could be nothing of his own or particular in his professional and life experience that would entitle him to offer a reproach or a reminder, that is to say a homily [pouchenie].28

Chapter i is not, as Jahn implies, a preparation for the alternative, authentic homily offered by the rest of the story; it is an ironic adumbration of the failure of the story's patent aspiration to offer a convincing homily to its readers. Robert Russell argues that Tolstoi 'uses the story of Ivan Il'ich as a parable', praising the story's 'simultaneous realistic and parabolic qualities' which make possible an equilibrium between individual and universal;29 but the realism of the piece, its unrelenting (if unwitting) emphasis on the social context of and reasons for Ivan Il'ich's 'conversion', undermines rather than buttresses its undoubted homiletic or parabolic ambitions.

Now such self-subversion is patently not what Tolstoi intended in writing The Death of Ivan Il'ich: as Jahn notes, 'there are, in fact, few stories whose intended meaning is so abundantly clear'.30 What, then, is the significance and purpose of such a reading 'against the grain' of Tolstoi's intention? It is here that it will be helpful to return - or revert - to the Leninist legacy, and specifically to Lenin's notorious articles on Tolstoi. In 'Lev Tolstoi as a Mirror of the Russian Revolution' ('Lev Tolstoi, kak zerkalo russkoi revoliutsii', i908), Lenin wrote:

The contradictions in the works, the views, the teachings, the school of Tolstoi are truly glaring. [...] On the one hand, there is a remarkably powerful, direct and sincere protest against the lies and falsehood in society; on the other hand, there is the 'Tolstoyan', i.e. a shabby, hysterical sniveller known as a member of the Russian intelligentsia, who, publicly beating his breast, declares, 'I am foul, I am rotten, but I am engaged in moral self-perfection; I no longer eat meat and now feed on rice cutlets.' On the one hand, a merciless critique of capitalist exploitation, a denunciation of government violence, the comedy of the law courts and the running of the

27 Volodin, 'Povest' o smysle vremeni', p. I63. 28 M. Eremin, 'Podrobnosti i smysl tselogo. Iz nabliudenii nad tekstom povesti Smert' Ivana

Il'icha', in Vmire Tolstogo. Sbornikstatei, ed. S. I. Mashinskii, Moscow, I978, pp. 22I-47 (237). 29 Russell, 'From Individual to Universal', pp. 642, 629. 30Jahn, 'The Role of the Ending', p. 237.



4I4 DAVID SHEPHERD

state, revelation of the full depth of the contradictions between the growth of wealth and the achievements of civilization and the growth of the poverty, the degradation and the torments of the working masses; on the other hand, the Holy-fool message of 'non-resistance to evil' by violence.31

Tolstoi is a 'mirror' of the I905 Revolution in that his works articulate 'the ideas and the moods developed by millions of Russian peasants', the majority of whom, instead of taking an active part in revolutionary struggle:

wept and prayed, reasoned and dreamed, wrote petitions and sent 'suppli- cants' - entirely in the spirit of Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi! [ ...] Tolstoi's ideas are a mirror of the weakness and shortcomings of our peasant uprising, a reflection of the flabbiness of the patriarchal countryside and the hardened cowardice of the 'enterprising muzhik'.32

This lengthy quotation from Lenin is not intended as a prelude to showing that The Death of Ivan Il'ich, published almost twenty years before the first Revolution and offering a very narrow, particular view of the peasantry, somehow exemplifies every aspect of his analysis. That would signal a reversion to a kind of vulgarizing criticism whose day has, thankfully, long since gone. But Lenin's words are more relevant than they might seem at first sight, in that they encapsulate the methodological or heuristic value of an approach which is all too often denigrated and dismissed. This value was brilliantly expounded almost thirty years ago by the French Marxist theorist Pierre Macherey. Macherey examined closely Lenin's notion of 'mirror', rejecting any idea that this signified a straightforward total and faithful reflection of reality. Rather, he argued, according to Lenin's conception 'The work is perhaps a mirror precisely because it registers the partiality of its own reflections'; moreover, 'there is a conflict within the text between the text and its ideological content', so that Tolstoi's work 'reveals both the contradictions of his age and the deficiences involved in his partial view of those contradictions'.33 In other words, the feature of Tolstoi's works pinpointed by Lenin is that they offer an incisive diagnosis of the ills which beset his society, but propose a cure which is revealed by the works themselves to be not only inadequate, but actually a further symptom of the ills diagnosed. To use an old but still vigorous cliche, the solution is part of the problem. Such a 'Leninist' analysis seems unusually appropriate for The Death of Ivan Il'ich: the text denounces its hero's social milieu (including, of course, 'the comedy of the lav

31 V. I. Lenin, 'Lev Tolstoi, kak zerkalo russkoi revoliutsii' (hereafter 'Lev Tolstoi'), in V. I. Lenin o Tolstom, ed. K. N. Lomunov, Moscow, 1978, pp. 48-54 (49-50).

32 Ibid., pp. 51-52. 33 Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production [I966] (hereafter A Theory), tr. Geoffrey

Wall, London, Henley and Boston, 1978, pp. 121-22, 124, I I5.




courts'); it reveals how that social milieu reproduces and preserves itself; but it offers a solution - an ethics of empathetic pity which will overcome the core value of class-based egoism - which, as Ivan Il'ich's illusory conversion demonstrates, is a product and an expression of the very faults it is meant to overcome.

This is in no sense meant as a prescriptive reproach to Tolstoi, a suggestion that he could have or should have proposed a different solution, one that Lenin might have found more palatable, or written the story in a different way. Mark Shcheglov was surely right to say that the 'light' attained by Ivan Il'ich 'comes straight from the rationalism and mysticism of Tolstoi's religious conception of spiritual good'; but he was just as surely wrong to argue that these 'mystical pyrotechnics' are 'an enormous error on the part of Tolstoi the artist and Tolstoi the preacher', a sign of lack of co-ordination between the writer's right and left hands.34 Of course it is a commonplace of Tolstoi criticism that both before and after his crisis he was a mass of startling contradictions and paradoxes which are there for all to see. But it would be a disservice to Tolstoi to read the self-subversion of The Death of Ivan Il'ich as a mere reflection of its author's personal inability to reach a satisfactory resolution of the questions he could not stop himself asking. What an approach via Lenin and Macherey allows us to see is that the contradictions in Tolstoi's work are not, as is so often assumed, a simple reflection of the contradictions in its author's thinking. Nor, indeed, are they a straightforward reflection of contradictions within a specific society. As Macherey puts it:

It would [... .] be incorrect to say that the contradictions of the work are the reflection of historical contradictions: rather they are the consequences of the absence of this reflection. [. . .] there can be no mechanical correspondence between the object and its 'image'. Expression does not mean a direct reproduction (or even knowledge), but an indirect figuration which arises from the deficiencies of the reproduction. Thus the work has a self-sufficient meaning which does not require to be completed; this meaning results from the disposition of partial reflections within the work and from a certain impossibility of reflecting. The function of criticism is to bring this to light.35

The contradictions inscribed in The Death of Ivan Il' ich which this article has attempted to bring to light are not unmediated, real historical contradictions, any more than the hyperbolically corrupt and cor- rupting society represented in the story is a straightforward reflection of historical actuality - notwithstanding the references to actual social trends and legal reforms, or the fact that Ivan Il'ich had a living

3" Shcheglov, 'Povest' Tolstogo', p. 35. 35 Macherey, A Theory, p. 128.



4I6 DAVID SHEPHERD

prototype.36 But this does not mean that the story is not realistic: its realism derives from its demonstration that effects (social, psychological, spiritual) have identifiable and describable causes. A lot more work would need to be done to elucidate the refractive, rather than reflective, relationship between the fictional contradictions inscribed in the story and the actual contradictions of the society and historical moment (obliquely) represented in it. But that would be a task worth undertaking, not least because it would open the way for a nuanced account of the contentious issue of 'realism' in the context not only of Tolstoi's work, but also of nineteenth-century Russian literature as a whole, where petty arguments about the simple 'plausibility' or 'truth to life' of this or that work all too often impede serious debate about the nature and the effects of specific representational strategies, and lead to unwarranted disparagement of such potentially valuable concepts as the notorious 'critical realism'.

In conclusion, it is a matter for some regret that, although few commentators would disagree with Lenin's description of Tolstoi as 'an artist of genius',37 most would be reluctant to accept the challenge posed by his analysis of Tolstoi's work. Preference is increasingly likely to be given to the already popular line taken by, for example, Henry Gifford, whose whole approach to Tolstoi in his Past Masters volumne follows from his remark in the Preface that 'primarily he counts as an artist'.38 No doubt there will be arguments about how much, if any, subversion or subversiveness follows from a reversion to (obliquely) Leninist positions in these distinctly post-Leninist days; but surely The Death of Ivan Il'ich is too rich in contradiction to invite or underwrite that weary and wearisome gesture whereby consideration of literature is transformed (or converted) into an activity where discussion of society and ideology has no part to play.

36 On this prototype, Ivan Il'ich Mechnikov, see L. P. Grossman, 'Smert' Ivana Il'icha. Istoriia pisaniia i pechataniia', in Tolstoi, PSS, XXVI, pp. 679-91 (68o-8i). An example of the text's use of 'unrealistic' social contradictions is the portrayal in Gerasim of a male servant carrying out domestic labour which would have been the responsibility of female servants at the time (I am grateful to Catriona Kelly for drawing my attention to this point). This distortion both serves Tolstoi's purpose (to mark Gerasim's vitality as something specifically masculine) and undermines it (by further highlighting the construction of Gerasim as ideal by external viewpoints and manipulations). 37 Lenin, 'Lev Tolstoi', p. 49. 38 Henry Gifford, Tolstoy, Past Masters, Oxford, I982, [p. i].



Conversion, Reversion and Subversion in Tolstoi's "The Death of Ivan Il'ich"

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