The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Master and Man (4 page)

The parable is predictable and weakened by supernatural machinery—Pahom’s folly is diminished because he is the victim of the Evil One. “How Much Land” is less effective than the longer and more complex “What Men Live By”—though the two stories share a moral. After Michael, the fallen angel, has spent six years working for the cobbler, and his beautiful work is widely known, a rich merchant visits the hovel. He is a huge ox of a man. He demands a pair of boots to be made of the fine leather he provides. They must last a year without mending. The cobbler looks anxiously at Michael to see if he can do the job, but Michael is gazing into the corner behind the merchant, smiling. The cobbler agrees, the merchant leaves, and Michael sets to work. The cobbler’s wife is puzzled to see that he is doing the work all wrong. He has cut the leather round, and is sewing with one end of thread, not two. Instead of high welted boots with whole fronts he makes a pair of soft slippers with single soles, and the fine leather is wasted.* There is a knock at the door. The merchant’s servant has returned to change the order. His master died before reaching home; they need slippers for the corpse.

Michael smiled for the second time because he saw his old friend, the angel of death, behind the merchant, and learned the answer to God’s second question: Learn what is not given to man. It is not given to man to know his own needs.

“Master and Man” was written a decade later, from 1894 to 1895. Forty years had passed since Tolstoy was lost in the snowstorm at Belogorodtsevskaya. Over thirty had passed since he drove out to the distant Penza province to snap up an easy bargain from some fool who did not understand his own business. Like Tolstoy, Vassili Andreyich Brekhunov, the master, and his man Nikita—and the horse Mukhorty—are lost in a blizzard. Like Tolstoy and like Pahom in “How Much Land Does a Man Need,” Vassili Andreyich is impelled on his crazy journey by the determination to buy up land on the cheap. “Insensible of mortality, and desperately mortal,”
^†
like Pahom and the rich merchant of “What Men Live By,” Vassili Andreyich does not know his own needs. Finally, Vassili Andreyich discovers that pity dispels the terror of death and, dying himself, saves the life of his servant. Not unlike Ivan Ilyich, who is released into death by pity for his wife and son.

4

“Morality and art,” Tolstoy’s unabashed response to the execution in Paris, creates difficulties for a sophisticated readership. “We hate poetry that has a palpable design on us,” Keats complained about Wordsworth. Nabokov concurs: “I never could admit that a writer’s job was to improve the morals of his country, and point out lofty ideals from the tremendous height of a soapbox.” In his best work Tolstoy does not mount a soapbox, yet many readers resent his moralizing. Michael Beresford, the editor of the standard annotated Russian text of “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” writes as if Tolstoy believed in a punitive God: “The reason why all this pain and suffering have been inflicted on Ivan Ilyich [is] that he should come to see the error of the way he has lived and repent.” Yet the myth of redemptive suffering, Beresford points out sternly, is open to “serious objections” since “suffering afflicts good men as well as bad” and “pain does not necessarily ennoble men.” In his view, Ivan Ilyich “is granted the precious knowledge of love only in extremis, when it is too late for him to put it into practice, except to stutter a few incoherent syllables of forgiveness.”

Beresford is wrong. His reading postulates an avenging deity, an authorial alter ego, bent on the infliction of educative suffering on Ivan Ilyich. Tolstoy, on the contrary, points out from the start that Ivan Ilyich’s life had been “simple, commonplace, and most terrible.” He is not particularly good, nor particularly bad. Ivan Ilyich himself creates the moral deathliness of his life which is finally concretized in his illness. The focus of the story is not on “punishment” but on Ivan Ilyich’s response first to life and then to sickness and death. Moreover, Tolstoy is well aware that suffering is destructive as well as redemptive. Everything irritates Ivan Ilyich.

[H]e could feel his own anger killing him but was unable to restrain himself. You might think he should have realized that his fury against people and circumstances aggravated his illness and consequently he should avoid paying attention to any unpleasantnesses, but his reasoning went the opposite way—he said he needed peace of mind, scrutinized everything that might disrupt his peace of mind, and the slightest disruption infuriated him.

Love is not raised in the story’s last pages. It is his wife and son’s pity that rouses Ivan Ilyich’s reciprocal compassion. His last word, an attempt to say “
prosti
” (“forgive me”) is a stumbled apology and not a pardon. Ironically enough, no one understands what he says.

John Bayley, too, dislikes “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” because he finds the story is subordinated to its moral: “Action and outcome are preconceived, and the purpose of the writer is paramount.” He objects to Ivan Ilyich’s dying sensation of being bundled into a black bag, and his final sense of liberation—on the extraordinary grounds that, “as Tolstoy had obviously experienced neither of these states that he wished upon his character, the ending of ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ is the supreme example of his conviction that he now knew best about everything.” Conversely, perversely, Bayley praises “Master and Man” because “there is no moral, or rather the moral is a highly ambiguous one.” Bayley thinks—unaccountably, against the text—that Vassili Andreyich warms his servant in order to warm himself. So “death for the master comes without either terror or meaning.”

Bayley is wrong. Vassili Andreyich does not warm Nikita in order to warm himself. True, his hands and feet begin to freeze, “[but] he wasn’t thinking of his legs, or his hands; he thought only about how he could warm the peasant lying under him.” His death is full of meaning that he understands well:

He understands that this is death, but this doesn’t trouble him either. He remembers that Nikita is lying under him, and that he was warmed and is alive, and it seems to him that he is Nikita and Nikita is he, and that his life is not in himself, but in Nikita. He strains his ears, and hears breathing, and even a light snore, from Nikita. “Nikita is alive, and that means I am living too,” he says to himself triumphantly.

And he remembers his money, his shop, his house, his buying and selling, and the Mironov millions, and it is hard for him to understand why that man, whom people called Vassili Brekhunov, troubled himself with all those things that troubled him. “Oh well, he didn’t know what it was all about,” he thinks, of Vassili Brekhunov. “He didn’t know, as now I know. . . .”

As for Bayley’s indictment of Tolstoy’s arrogance in describing Ivan Ilyich’s unknowable sensations at the moment of death—if writers could only describe what they experienced at firsthand, most literature would remain unwritten. Tolstoy’s tales of sickness, exposure, and death are germinated by his own experiences. But they are transformed by his powerful, detailed, and supremely realistic imagination.

Chekhov wrote to Suvorin,

You are right to require from the artist a conscious attitude, but you mix up two ideas:
the solution of a problem
and
a correct presentation of the problem.
Only the latter is obligatory for the artist. In
Anna Karenina
and
Onegin
not a single problem is resolved, but they satisfy you completely only because all their problems are correctly presented.

Nothing, though, can stop willful readers from extracting the wrong solution to the problem.

What’s more, Chekhov’s formulation is not universally applicable. Tolstoy’s moral fables—like “What Men Live By” and “How Much Land Does a Man Need”—do set out to pose problems and provide answers. James Joyce thought that “How Much Land Does a Man Need” was “the greatest story that the literature of the world knows.” In “What Men Live By,” the solutions the fallen angel Michael finds to God’s three fundamental questions are extraordinarily satisfying. Like the Ancient Mariner’s wedding guest, we listen like a three years’ child, and our wish for a moral is candidly and profoundly answered.

Many English and American kindergartens have a weekly session called Show and Tell. The children bring their treasures, show them to the class, and talk about them. In his parables, Tolstoy shows and tells. In great stories like “Master and Man” and “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” he shows more and tells less. Detail wins our conviction. Conviction drives us to share the characters’ experiences. And the art is moral when it evokes a moral response. Gradually, reluctantly, we are appalled by Ivan Ilyich’s deathly aridity. We suffer with him in his miserable sickness. And we are hugely relieved when at last he recognizes his son’s pity, and pities him. We watch with increasing horror each time the master Vassili Andreyich rejects the offer of shelter because business calls, and drives out yet again into the storm. We are disgusted when, in a final paroxysm of selfishness, he flings himself belly down across Mukhorty’s back and rides off into the blizzard, leaving Nikita to die. We feel for him and with him when, lying on Nikita, warming him, his jaw trembles, something chokes his throat, and the tears come.

Not all artists want to evoke a moral response. Tolstoy does. But note his curious formulation—“Morality and art. I know, I love, and I can” (his diary entry after the execution in Paris). There is love in Tolstoy’s extraordinary capacity for universal empathy. He is the artistic equivalent of the peasant Nikita, who talks companionably to everyone and everything—the chickens squawking in the rafters, the intelligent horse Mukhorty, even his belt as he draws it tight.

Turgenev describes a happy visit to Tolstoy one summer. After lunch they went out with the children, sat on the seesaw together, and then wandered over to a tethered horse. Tolstoy stroked it, whispering in its cocked ear, and told them what it was thinking. “I could have listened for ever,” Turgenev said. “He had got inside the very soul of the poor beast and taken me with him.” Likewise, Tolstoy’s affection was roused by the baggage horse that laid back its ears and tried to overtake his sledge at Belogorodtsevskaya. And so it is that Mukhorty is as fully realized as the human beings in “Master and Man.”

Early in his career, in the Sevastopol sketches he wrote when fighting in the Crimea, Tolstoy set out an early version of his artistic credo.

Where in this tale is the evil that should be avoided, and where the good that should be imitated? Who is the villain and who the hero of the story? All are good and all are bad . . .

The hero of my tale—whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is, and will be beautiful—is Truth.

The Sevastopol sketches were noticed and admired by Tsar Alexander II. They were also censored.
A Confession
was banned in Russia. In 1901 Tolstoy was excommunicated by the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church. Perhaps the narrator of “Memoirs of a Madman” was right—and Tolstoy’s beliefs were folly to the world.

ANN PASTERNAK SLATER,
Fellow and Tutor in English at St. Anne’s College, Oxford, was brought up bilingually in Russian and English by her mother, the sister of Boris Pasternak. She has written and lectured on Pasternak’s translations of Shakespeare, and is the translator of his brother Alexander Pasternak’s memoirs,
A Vanished Present
(1984). Her grandfather Leonid Pasternak was Tolstoy’s friend and one of his first illustrators, working with him on
War and Peace, Resurrection,
and the late short story “What Men Live By.”

The Court in Session
by Leonid Pasternak (1862–1945).

T
HE
D
EATH
OF
I
VAN
I
LYICH

1

During a break in the hearing of the Melvinski case in the great hall of the Law Courts, members of the judicial council and the public prosecutor met in Ivan Yegorovich Shebek’s private chambers. The conversation turned to the famous Krasov affair. Feodor Vassilievich grew heated demonstrating that it was not subject to jurisdiction. Ivan Yegorovich held his own. Piotr Ivanovich, who had not participated initially, took no part in the argument and leafed through the newly delivered
Gazette.

“Gentlemen!” he said, “Ivan Ilyich is dead.”

“Not really?”

“Here; read it for yourself,” he said to Feodor Vassilievich, passing him the fresh sheets, still with their own smell.

The black-framed notice ran: “It is with deep regret that Praskovya Feodorovna Golovina informs relatives and friends of the death of her beloved husband, Ivan Ilyich Golovin, Member of the Court of Justice, on February the fourth of this year, 1882. The body will be laid to rest on Friday at 1
P.M.
”

Ivan Ilyich was a colleague of the gentlemen present, and everyone liked him. He had been ill for several weeks; people said the disease was incurable. His place had been kept open for him, but it was generally assumed that, were he to die, Alexeyev might get his place, and Alexeyev’s place would be taken either by Vinnikov or Shtabel. So when they heard of the death of Ivan Ilyich, the first thought of all those present in Shebek’s chambers was how this might affect their own relocations and promotions, and those of their friends.

“Now I’ll probably get Shtabel’s place or Vinnikov’s,” thought Feodor Vassilievich. “It’s been promised to me for a long time. The promotion will bring me a raise of eight hundred rubles, apart from the allowance for office expenses.”
¹

“I’ll have to put in for my brother-in-law’s transfer from Kaluga,” thought Piotr Ivanovich. “My wife will be very pleased. And then no one can say I never did anything for her relatives.”

“I thought he’d never get up from his bed again,” said Piotr Ivanovich aloud. “Very sad.”

“What exactly was wrong with him?”

“The doctors couldn’t make it out. That is, they could, but each one thought something different. The last time I saw him, I thought he’d get better.”

“And I didn’t manage to visit him after the holidays. I kept meaning to go.”

“Did he have property?”

“I think something very small came to him through his wife. But really quite insignificant.”

“Yes, we’ll have to pay our respects. They lived a dreadfully long way out.”

“A long way from you, you mean. Everything’s a long way from you.”

“He just can’t forgive my living beyond the river,” said Piotr Ivanovich, smiling at Shebek. The conversation passed to the distances between different parts of the city, and they went back into court.

Apart from the considerations prompted by this death—the changes of post and possible permutations at work that were its probable consequences—the fact of a near acquaintance dying evoked in everyone who heard about it the happy feeling that he is dead, not I.

“Well, there you go, he’s dead, but I’m not,” each of them thought. And close acquaintances, the so-called friends of Ivan Ilyich, involuntarily found themselves also thinking that now they would have to go through the tedious round of social duties, driving out to the funeral and paying their condolences to the widow.

The closest of all were Feodor Vassilievich and Piotr Ivanovich.

Piotr Ivanovich had been Ivan Ilyich’s friend from their time at law school
²
together, and felt under an obligation to him.

At lunchtime he told his wife about Ivan Ilyich’s death and the possibility of his brother-in-law’s transfer to their circle. Forgoing his usual after-dinner nap, he put on his tails and drove out to the Golovins.

A carriage and two cabs stood at the entrance to Ivan Ilyich’s apartment. In the entrance hall downstairs, propped against the wall by the coat stand, was the coffin lid, draped in silk, decorated with tassels and burnished gold braid. Two ladies in black were taking off their furs. He knew one of them, the sister of Ivan Ilyich, but the other was a stranger. Schwartz, a colleague, was on his way downstairs. Glimpsing Piotr Ivanovich as he entered, Schwartz stopped and winked at him from the top step, suggesting, as it were, “Ivan Ilyich has made a real mess of things, not like you and me.”

Schwartz’s face with its English side-whiskers, and indeed his entire figure, slim in evening dress, wore its usual air of elegant solemnity—a solemnity which was constantly contradicted by Schwartz’s jocular character, acquiring a particular piquancy in the present setting. Or so Piotr Ivanovich thought.

Piotr Ivanovich allowed the ladies to pass before him and followed them slowly upstairs. Schwartz did not come down but waited at the top. Piotr Ivanovich understood why: he wanted to arrange where they would play cards that evening. The ladies went through to visit the widow, and Schwartz, with tight, serious mouth and a playful glance, inclined his head, motioning Piotr Ivanovich to the right, the room where the corpse was laid out.

Piotr Ivanovich entered, as one always does, in total uncertainty over what he should do when he got there. But one thing was quite clear—there can be no harm in crossing yourself in such circumstances. Because he was not certain whether you should bow at the same time, he chose to compromise: he began crossing himself and inclining his head slightly. At the same time he was taking in the room, so far as the movement of his hands and head allowed. Two young men, one a schoolboy—the nephews, probably—were coming out of the room, crossing themselves. An old lady was standing motionless. And a woman with strangely raised eyebrows was whispering something to her. A hearty church deacon
³
in a frock coat was reading something loudly and resolutely, in a way that left no room for contradiction. Gerasim, the peasant who normally waited at table, passed in front of Piotr Ivanovich with a light step, strewing something over the floor. Seeing this, Piotr Ivanovich immediately caught the slight smell of decomposition. The last time Piotr Ivanovich had visited Ivan Ilyich, he had seen Gerasim in the sick room. He had taken on the duties of a nurse, and Ivan Ilyich was particularly fond of him. Piotr Ivanovich kept on crossing himself and bowing slightly to an indeterminate point somewhere between the coffin, the deacon, and the icons on the table in the corner. Then, when the movement of his hand crossing himself seemed to have gone on altogether too long, he paused and began looking at the corpse.

The dead man lay with that particular ponderousness common to all corpses, the dead limbs sunken deep in the lining of the coffin, the head bowed forever on its pillow, displaying—prominently, as the dead always do—a waxy yellow forehead with bald patches on the sunken brow, and a pendulous nose seemingly compressing the upper lip. He had grown much thinner and was considerably changed since Piotr Ivanovich last saw him, but his face, as with all the dead, was more beautiful and, more important than that, more meaningful than it had been in his lifetime. The expression on the face suggested that what needed to be done had been done, and done as it should be. Moreover, the expression held a rebuke or a reminder to the living. Such a reminder seemed to Piotr Ivanovich to be out of place here, or at least of no relevance to him. He became rather uncomfortable, somehow. He hastily crossed himself again—too quickly, it seemed to him, without due regard for the appropriate courtesies, and turned to leave. Schwartz was waiting for him in the next room, his legs set wide, his hands behind his back playing with his top hat. One look at Schwartz’s playful, neat, and elegant figure refreshed Piotr Ivanovich. He realized that Schwartz rose above such things and did not succumb to unpleasant impressions. His mere appearance proclaimed: the incident of the present obsequies cannot, in any way, serve as an adequate reason for the order of the session to be disrupted—that is, nothing can stop a new pack of cards being unwrapped and shuffled this very evening, while the footman sets out four fresh candles; there are, in short, no grounds for thinking that this episode can stop us spending this evening as pleasantly as any other evening. Schwartz even whispered this to Piotr Ivanovich as he went past, suggesting he should join the company at Feodor Vassilievich’s. But evidently it was not ordained that Piotr Ivanovich should play cards that evening. Praskovya Feodorovna came out of her quarters. She was a short, fat woman, whose figure grew progressively wider from head to foot, despite her attempts to achieve the opposite—dressed all in black, her head veiled in lace, and her eyebrows arched in the same peculiar manner as the other lady standing by the coffin. She was leading the other ladies to the room where the body lay, with the words, “The funeral will begin in a moment; please go through.”

Schwartz paused, bowing ambiguously, neither visibly accepting nor refusing her invitation. Praskovya Feodorovna recognized Piotr Ivanovich, sighed, came directly to him, took him by the hand, and said, “I know that you were a true friend to Ivan Ilyich. . . .” She was looking at him in expectation of an appropriate response.

Piotr Ivanovich knew that, just as it had been correct to cross himself there, so it was proper to press her hand here, to sigh, and say, “Believe me . . .” Accordingly, he did so. And, having done so, felt that he had achieved the desired result, that he was moved, and so was she.

“Come with me, before they start in there; I must have a word with you,” said the widow. “Give me your arm.”

Piotr Ivanovich gave her his arm, and they went into the inner room, passing Schwartz, who winked mournfully at Piotr Ivanovich. “So much for our card game! Don’t be offended if we find someone else. Five can always play, if you manage to get away,” said his playful glance.

Piotr Ivanovich sighed even more deeply and despondently, and Praskovya Feodorovna pressed his hand gratefully. They entered her dimly lit sitting room, upholstered in pink cretonne, and sat down by a table—she on a divan, Piotr Ivanovich on a low ottoman, whose broken springs yielded unpredictably to his weight. Praskovya Feodorovna wanted to warn him that he should sit somewhere else, but thought such a warning inappropriate to her present circumstances and changed her mind. Sitting down on the ottoman, Piotr Ivanovich remembered Ivan Ilyich furnishing the room and asking his advice about this same pink cretonne with its pattern of green leaves. On her way to the divan, the widow passed an occasional table (the room was full of furniture and knickknacks), and the black lace of her mantilla caught on its carvings. Piotr Ivanovich half rose to unhook it, and the liberated ottoman heaved under him and gave him a shove. The widow began unhitching the lace herself. Piotr Ivanovich sat down again, crushing the rebellious springs. But the widow had not freed herself completely. Piotr Ivanovich rose to his feet again, and the ottoman bounced back with a twang. When all this was over, she took out a clean cambric handkerchief and began crying. However, the business with the lace and the contretemps with the ottoman had cooled Piotr Ivanovich. He sat, looking sullen. This uncomfortable situation was interrupted by the entry of Sokolov, Ivan Ilyich’s butler, who announced that the plot in the cemetery ordered by Praskovya Feodorovna would cost two hundred rubles. She stopped crying and, with a martyred look at Piotr Ivanovich, said in French that it was very difficult for her. Piotr Ivanovich made a silent gesture indicating his incontrovertible conviction that it could not be otherwise.

“Do smoke,” she said in a magnanimous yet crushed voice, and turned to discuss the price of the plot with Sokolov. Piotr Ivanovich lit up and listened to her minutely questioning the butler about the different plot prices and deciding on the right one. When that had been dealt with, she turned to the fees for the choir. Sokolov left.

“I have to do everything myself,” she said to Piotr Ivanovich, moving to one side the albums lying on the table and, noticing that his cigarette ash threatened her table, promptly passed him an ashtray. “I find it mere affectation to protest that my grief prevents me from dealing with practical matters. On the contrary, if anything could console me . . . or at least distract me, it is the arrangements concerning him.” She took out her handkerchief again, as though on the point of tears, and suddenly, as if mastering herself, gave a little shake and started speaking calmly. “However, I have something I must discuss with you.”

Piotr Ivanovich bowed, repressing the ebullient ottoman springs, which immediately began to stir under him.

“He suffered dreadfully in his last days.”

“Dreadfully?” asked Piotr Ivanovich.

“Oh, it was terrible! In the last hours, let alone minutes, he didn’t stop screaming for a second. For three days on end he screamed without stopping. It was unbearable. I can’t understand how I survived it; he could be heard three rooms off, even with the doors closed. My God, how I suffered!”