The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Master and Man (6 page)

As the Governor’s special assistant Ivan Ilyich had danced; as examining magistrate this became an exception. Now his dancing implied—although I administer the reformed Code and rank fifth grade in the civil service, if it comes to dancing, watch me prove I can do that better than anyone else, too. So at the end of an evening he occasionally danced with Praskovya Feodorovna and it was mainly during these dances that he won her. She fell in love with him. Ivan Ilyich did not have a clear and distinct intention to marry, but when the girl fell in love with him, he considered the question. “And, really, why shouldn’t I marry?” he said to himself.

The young lady came from good aristocratic stock. She was not unattractive. She brought a small property with her. Ivan Ilyich could have counted on a more dazzling match, but even this was not a bad one. He had his salary. She, he hoped, would have as much. Her birth was good. She was sweet, pretty, and eminently respectable. To say that he married because he fell in love with his fiancée and found in her an answering echo to his own view of life would be as inaccurate as to say that he married because the people in his circle approved of the match. He married for both reasons: he was pleasing himself by taking such a wife, and at the same time he was doing what his superiors thought the right thing to do.

And Ivan Ilyich married.

The very process of getting married, and the beginning of married life—with its marital caresses, new furniture, new crockery, new linen—passed very happily until his wife’s pregnancy. Ivan Ilyich even began to think that, far from wedlock upsetting his light, pleasant, gay manner of life, his marriage would actually intensify this congenial state of affairs—always respectable and popularly respected, the qualities Ivan Ilyich thought natural to life in general. But from the first months of his wife’s pregnancy, something new emerged. It was so unexpected and unpleasant, so burdensome and unseemly, it could hardly have been predicted and was impossible to ignore.

For no evident reason, as it seemed to Ivan Ilyich—
de gaîté de cœur,
¹⁴
as he said to himself—his wife began disrupting the ease and propriety of his life. For no reason at all she became jealous, demanded his attentions, found fault with everything, and made rude, disagreeable scenes.

At first Ivan Ilyich hoped to free himself from this unpleasant situation by the same light, proper response to life that had served him well in the past. He tried to ignore his wife’s moods, continued to live as lightly and pleasantly as before; he invited friends to his home to make up a hand of cards and tried to go out to his club or to visit his friends. But on one occasion his wife began to abuse him in such coarse language, with such energy and with such persistent aggression that Ivan Ilyich was appalled. She had evidently decided not to give up until he submitted—that is, until he stayed at home and was as dull as she was. He realized that the married state, at any rate with his wife, was not always conducive to the pleasures and proprieties of life, but, on the contrary, often disrupted them; for this reason it was imperative that he should protect himself from such disturbances. And Ivan Ilyich began searching out the means to achieve this. His official duties were the one thing that made some impression on Praskovya Feodorovna, and through his official duties and the responsibilities arising from them Ivan Ilyich began his struggle with his wife to stake out his independent world.

With the birth of the child, the attempts to feed it and the various failures to do so, with the real and imagined illnesses of mother and child, all of which demanded his participation but none of which were in the least comprehensible to him, Ivan Ilyich’s need to create his own space outside the family became even more imperative.

The more irritating and demanding his wife became, the more Ivan Ilyich transferred the center of gravity of his life to his official duties, and the more ambitious he became.

Very soon, not longer than a year after his marriage, Ivan Ilyich understood that matrimony, while offering some conveniences in life, was in fact a very complicated and difficult matter and that, in order to fulfill his duty—that is, to lead a decent life that everyone approved of—he must work out a definite approach to married life, just as he had done for his official life.

And Ivan Ilyich worked out an approach to married life. He asked no more of it than the conveniences which it was able to provide—dinner at home, a housewife, and a bed, and, above all, that propriety of external forms required by public opinion. For the rest, he looked for pleasure and good cheer, and when he found them, was very grateful. If, on the contrary, he met with antagonism and querulousness, he immediately retreated into his palisaded world of work and found his pleasure there.

Ivan Ilyich was valued as a good colleague, and after three years was made assistant public prosecutor. The new duties, their importance, the power to bring anyone to trial and imprison him, the public attention his speeches received, the success Ivan Ilyich enjoyed in this capacity—all this attracted him further to his employment.

More children came. His wife became even more querulous and bad tempered, but the approach Ivan Ilyich had evolved to family life made him almost impervious to her scenes.

After seven years’ service in the same town Ivan Ilyich was transferred to a different province to take up the post of public prosecutor. They moved; money was short; and his wife took an aversion to the place where they were stationed. Although his salary was slightly higher, life was more expensive, and, apart from that, two children died, so that family life became even more disagreeable for Ivan Ilyich.

In their new home Praskovya Feodorovna laid the blame for every mishap on her husband. Most of the subjects discussed by husband and wife, particularly the children’s upbringing, led to questions that raised memories of former quarrels, and were always apt to raise fresh quarrels. There remained only those rare periods of love that overtook the couple but did not last long. They were islands at which they anchored briefly before setting sail once again over a sea of suppressed hostility, which was expressed in mutual aloofness. This aloofness could have saddened Ivan Ilyich had he thought it should not have been so, but by now he recognized that this situation was not only normal but the very aim of his role in the family. His aim increasingly was to free himself from these unpleasantnesses, to give them a character of harmless propriety, and he achieved this by spending less and less time with his family. When that was impossible, he tried to protect himself by having outsiders present. The main thing was that Ivan Ilyich had his work. All his interest in life was focused in his work. And this interest absorbed him. The consciousness of his own power, the potential to ruin anyone he wanted to ruin, the external pomp and real importance of his entry into court and his meetings with subordinates, his success in the eyes of high and low, and, above all, his mastery in conducting affairs, of which he was well aware—all this made him happy and, along with discussions with his friends, dinners and whist, filled his life. So that, all in all, Ivan Ilyich’s life continued to pass as he thought it should: pleasantly and properly.

So he lived another seven years. His oldest daughter was already sixteen
¹⁵
; another child had died, and there remained his schoolboy son, the subject of dissension. Ivan Ilyich wanted to enter him in the School of Jurisprudence, but Praskovya Feodorovna sent him to high school, purely to spite him. His daughter was educated at home and was growing up well, and the boy was not doing badly either.

3

Ivan Ilyich’s life continued in this way for seventeen years
¹⁶
after his marriage. He was by now a public prosecutor of long standing, having declined various transfers, waiting for a more desirable post, when, quite unexpectedly, something unpleasant happened, which nearly destroyed his peaceful life altogether. He was waiting for the post of presiding judge in a university town, but somehow Hoppe sneaked ahead and got the job. Ivan Ilyich lost his temper, complained, and quarreled with Hoppe and his immediate superiors. They grew distant toward him and in the next reshuffle he was passed over again.

This was in 1880. It was the worst year of Ivan Ilyich’s life. In this year it became apparent that his salary was inadequate for his way of life, and, moreover, that everyone had forgotten him. What was more, the thing that seemed to be the most massive and grave injustice, as far as he was concerned, seemed to everyone else an ordinary matter. Even his father did not consider it his duty to help him. He felt that everyone had abandoned him, considering his position with an annual salary of 3,500 rubles quite normal, even fortunate. He alone knew that, what with his sense of how he had been slighted, the iniquities that had been done to him, his wife’s endless nagging, and the debts he had started to build up, living as he did above his means—he alone knew that his position was far from normal.

In the summer of that year, to economize, he took leave and spent the summer months with his wife at his brother-in-law’s place in the country.

In the country, without work, Ivan Ilyich experienced not only boredom but unbearable melancholy for the first time. He decided that living like this was impossible. It was essential to take some decisive action.

Having spent a sleepless night pacing the terrace, he made up his mind to travel to Petersburg and put pressure on the right people. He would transfer to a different ministry and punish the colleagues who failed to value him properly.

The next day he set off for Petersburg, in spite of his wife and brother-in-law’s attempts to dissuade him.

He traveled with a single aim: to solicit a post that would bring him an annual salary of five thousand rubles. He was no longer set on any particular ministry, type, or area of work. All he needed was a post, any post bringing five thousand rubles—in government administration, in the banks, or the railways, or in the Empress Maria’s institutions,
¹⁷
or even the customs—but the five thousand rubles were imperative, and it was imperative to leave the ministry where his merits went unrecognized.

And, lo and behold, this journey undertaken by Ivan Ilyich was crowned with extraordinary, unexpected success. At Kursk an acquaintance of his, F. S. Ilyin, joined him in his first-class carriage, and told him about a telegram received by the governor of Kursk with the white-hot news that in a few days there would be a shake-up in the ministry, and Piotr Ivanovich’s place would be assigned to Ivan Simyonovich.

Apart from its importance for Russia, the predicted reshuffle
¹⁸
was particularly important for Ivan Ilyich, because it would bring into play a new figure, Piotr Petrovich, and, self-evidently, his friend Zakhar Ivanovich—and this was particularly favorable to Ivan Ilyich’s own interests. Zakhar Ivanovich was an old friend and colleague of Ivan Ilyich.

The news was confirmed in Moscow. And when he reached Petersburg, Ivan Ilyich found Zakhar Ivanovich and was definitely promised a post in his old department, the Ministry of Justice.

A week later he telegraphed his wife: “Zakhar in Miller’s place; my appointment follows first report.”

Thanks to this change of personnel Ivan Ilyich unexpectedly obtained a grading in his previous ministry that set him two grades above his colleagues, with a salary of five thousand rubles, plus three thousand five hundred in removal allowances. All his resentment against his former enemies and the whole ministry was forgotten, and Ivan Ilyich was completely happy.

He returned to the country a cheerful and contented man, such as he had not been for a very long time. Praskovya Feodorovna also cheered up, and a truce was reached between them. Ivan Ilyich told how he was feted in Petersburg, how all those who had been his enemies had been put to shame and were fawning on him now, how everyone envied him for his new position, and, especially, he told them how everyone loved him in Petersburg.

Praskovya Feodorovna listened and pretended to believe it all, not contradicting him in anything, simply planning a new way of life in the town where they were going. And Ivan Ilyich saw with pleasure that her plans were his plans, that their interests coincided, and that his life, after a minor hiccup, was reverting to its due and proper character of cheerful pleasure and propriety.

Ivan Ilyich returned for only a short while. He had to take up his job on the tenth of September, and, besides, he needed time to settle into the new posting, move his belongings from the provinces, and in addition order and buy many new things—in a word, to set himself up in exactly the way he had himself decided, and almost exactly the same way as Praskovya Feodorovna had decided.

And now that everything was settled so well, he and his wife saw eye to eye. Apart from that, they spent little time together, and were more amiably inclined to each other than they had been since the first years of their married life. Ivan Ilyich thought he would take his family with him straight away, but the persuasions of his sister and her husband,
¹⁹
who had suddenly become particularly loving and familial toward him, resulted in his setting off alone.

Ivan Ilyich left, and the cheerful state of mind brought about by his success and the harmony with his wife, the one intensifying the other, continued to stay with him. An excellent set of apartments was found, exactly what both husband and wife had dreamed of. Spacious, high-ceilinged reception rooms in the old style, a comfortably imposing study, rooms for his wife and daughter, a schoolroom for his son—everything seemed made on purpose, just for them. Ivan Ilyich oversaw everything himself: he chose the wallpaper, bought more furniture, with a particular bent for old pieces, which he thought comme il faut, had them upholstered, and everything grew and grew, steadily approaching the ideal he set himself. When he had done only half of what he intended, the results far exceeded his expectations. He could already see that comme il faut elegance, that freedom from vulgarity everything would have when it was complete. Falling asleep, he imagined the reception room as it would become. Looking into the still-unfinished sitting room, he envisaged the fireplace, the fire screen, the étagère,
²⁰
the occasional chairs, the dishes and plates displayed on the walls, the bronzes, when they would all be assembled in their place. The thought of how he would amaze Pasha and Lizanka,
²¹
who also had taste in these matters, made him glad. They can’t possibly expect all this. Above all, he managed to find old furniture and buy it cheap, which gave everything a distinctly aristocratic flavor. In his letters he purposely described things worse than they were, in order to surprise them. It all absorbed him so much that his new job preoccupied him less than he expected, even though he liked that kind of work. When the court was in session he had moments of inattention; he would be pondering what kind of valances to have over the curtains, straight or curved. He was so taken up with it all that he often did things himself, moving the furniture and rehanging the curtains on his own. Once he climbed a small ladder to show the obtuse decorator how he wanted the fabric to be draped, missed his footing, and fell, but, being a strong and agile man, saved himself, only hitting his side against the handle of the window. The knock hurt for a little but soon passed off. Throughout this period Ivan Ilyich felt particularly well and cheerful. He wrote, “I feel as though fifteen years have simply slipped off me.” He thought he would finish by September, but the work dragged on till mid-October. But then it looked delightful—not only he said so, but everyone who saw it said so to him.