The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Summary

The Death of Ivan Ilyich begins at the end. In the law courts, colleagues of Ivan Ilyich Golovin read in the newspaper of his death, and each thinks first of the promotions and transfers it will bring. At the funeral his friend Peter Ivanovich feels severe before the corpse, and the widow, Praskovya Fedorovna, questions him about how to obtain a larger pension, while recounting how her husband screamed incessantly for three days before he died. Only the young servant Gerasim speaks simply of death as something that comes to everyone. The story then goes back to tell Ivan Ilyich's life, which, the narrator says, was most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible. The son of an official, he studied law, became a correct, pleasant, ambitious magistrate, and married a suitable woman. When marriage brought quarrels and demands, he retreated into his work and the agreeable world of official life and cards. After a setback he obtained a lucrative post in St Petersburg and threw himself into decorating a fine apartment. Climbing a ladder to show an upholsterer how to hang a curtain, he slipped and knocked his side against a window frame. The bruise healed, but soon he had a strange taste in his mouth and a growing pain in his side. He consulted a celebrated doctor, who treated him exactly as Ivan Ilyich treated defendants in court, with a show of importance and an evasion of the one question that mattered, whether his condition was dangerous. Diagnoses multiplied: a floating kidney, chronic catarrh, the vermiform appendix. Ivan Ilyich grew irritable, then frightened, and finally understood that he was dying. He could not grasp this: the syllogism that all men are mortal had always seemed correct for others but not for himself. What tormented him most was the lie, kept up by his wife, his daughter, his doctors and friends, that he was not dying but merely ill and would recover if he followed treatment. Only Gerasim, the healthy young peasant servant, did not lie; he sat for hours holding Ivan Ilyich's legs on his shoulders to ease the pain, and said simply that all must die. Ivan Ilyich began to ask whether his whole life had been wrong. For three days he screamed in agony, struggling against being pushed into a black sack. Then, at the end, he felt his son kiss his hand, pitied his family, and sensed the dark give way to light. Searching for his old fear of death, he could not find it. In place of death there was light. Someone said it is finished; he heard and repeated to himself that death is finished, and he died.

Top Lessons

• The ordinary life examined

  Tolstoy's target is not crime but propriety: a life organized for comfort and approval rather than love. The story asks readers to examine their own 'correct' lives.

• The cruelty of the lie

  The family's and doctors' refusal to acknowledge his dying isolates Ivan Ilyich more than the pain does. The story is a classic text on honest communication with the dying.

• Care as presence

  Gerasim's holding of Ivan Ilyich's legs is a simple bodily kindness that eases pain. Tolstoy presents compassionate presence as the core of care.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

This is perhaps the single most important literary text in palliative care and medical education. Tolstoy dissects the doctor–patient encounter: the specialist's air of importance, his talk of floating kidneys and appendices, and his refusal to answer whether the case is serious, which Ivan Ilyich recognizes as the same professional manner he used on defendants. The family's collusion in hiding the prognosis and the patient's resulting isolation anticipate modern debates about truth-telling and 'conspiracies of silence'. The story documents opium and morphine use for pain, sleeplessness and despair, total pain in its physical, psychological and spiritual dimensions, and the healing value of simple bodily care in Gerasim's support of his legs. Readers sometimes speculate about the underlying disease (an abdominal cancer is often suggested), but the text deliberately leaves it vague, and its point is the experience, not the diagnosis.

• Ch. 1

  The widow tells Peter Ivanovich of her husband's three days of incessant screaming before death.

• Ch. 3–4

  The fall against a window frame, the pain in the side, the strange taste in the mouth, and the first consultation with a celebrated doctor.

• Ch. 4–5

  Competing diagnoses (floating kidney, appendix); Ivan Ilyich reads medical books and becomes absorbed in his symptoms.

• Ch. 6

  The Caius syllogism: he cannot accept that the logic of mortality applies to himself.

• Ch. 7

  The lie that he is only ill torments him; Gerasim holds his legs on his shoulders for hours and speaks honestly of death.

• Ch. 8

  Opium and morphine for pain and sleeplessness; the doctor's routine visit; the family goes to the theatre.

• Ch. 12

  Three days of screaming, the sensation of being pushed into a black sack, then light and the end of fear.