Rating: 
Summary: Disdain the flesh
Review: Tolstoy's novella "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" tells the story of a man confronting his own imminent death. Dying is a deterministic process in that there is an infinite number of ways it can be done, but the result is always the same. The way Ivan Ilyich does it is slow and painful, but this is not by choice; indeed, he had never considered the way he would die or even that he would die at all, and when the burden is finally thrust upon him, he is unable to handle it. In Jean-Paul Sartre's "Nausea," written half a century later, the protagonist is horrified by the knowledge of his own inexplicably created existence; Ivan Ilyich is horrified to realize his existence is about to come to an inexplicable end.
Ivan Ilyich is a middle-aged man who has played it safe throughout his life, following all the rules of society, studying law, becoming a judge, marrying a lady from a good family, raising his kids properly, and enjoying evenings of whist with his colleagues. One day, while working in his apartment, he has an accident and injures his kidney, which though at first seeming trivial, soon cripples him with pain and confines him to bed. He notices with bitter irony that the doctors who treat him (to no avail) play God with his fate similarly to the way he has played God with the fates of men on trial.
His affection for his family cools as his thoughts become obsessed with death. His wife, who has always been little more than an accessory to his public image, and daughter consider the physical demands of his terminal illness more an inconvenience to their lifestyle, a clamp on their freedom, than a cause for lamentation; his friends find the social obligations of dealing with funerals and condolence calls tedious. His only comfort, small as it is, is his loyal servant Gerasim, who nurses him compassionately until the very end.
Ivan Ilyich's scream of despair is the swansong of a man who can't believe the life he has cultivated so lovingly is so soon going to end on a sudden whim. As one who was born dying, he failed to heed Marcus Aurelius's words to disdain the flesh, and now flesh is all he can treasure. Tolstoy could have written this story as a spritual or metaphysical meditation on death, but instead it is simply a brilliant dirge for a man embarking on a journey--the one we all have to make--into the final unknown.
Rating:
Summary: In Passing
Review: Tolstoy's novella makes rewarding and unsettling reading. Surely, I can think of no novel that treats dying as boldly. Death is a fact. In this story Ivan Ilyich's life and death are plainly represented in a fashion that remarkably resembles the times I have been aware of other, near people dying. What the novel puts on display in so satisfying and disconcerting a fashion is the remarkable inability or reluctance of most people (I ashamedly include myself in this group) to take part in the life of a person who is inevitably and rather immediately dying. Only one character in the novel has the goodness, humility and patience to care for a dying man, the rest scurry about and take care of their anticipated needs in the face of losing a loved one.I find that I read this book again every year and that it remains such a fine portrait of a bureaucrat whose family life does not entirely satisfy him and whose pursuit of a more meaningful life fails to cease even in sickness, when he understands that his mortality is soon to be demonstrated. There are few works of this nature that I can set in the company of this short novel. Despite many readings, I feel I still don't entirely understand it, but later in life I imagine I will do better. This book is so excellent and the edition here lends itself to portable and pleasant reading.
Rating:
Summary: Born knowing only life
Review: We are born knowing only life but it takes courage to realize this and rise above the mundane, to make the ordinary extraordinary, fully exploring and experiencing life for the gift that it is. This is what Ivan Ilyich becomes aware of, when there is not much more he can do about it other than acknowledge it. A profound novella!
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