Lesson
Plans

Quick Links
Library Links
Citing Sources

"Death of Ivan Ilyich"

General Questions | Group Questions | Criticism | Pictures | Links | Camping out

Country/Date Written/Published
Russia/-/1886

While reforms were beginning to take place in Russia freeing the serfs, the country still had a very strong class system.

Day #1
Structure of story; Irony; Ivan’s character

Day #2
Discussion of what you learned from library research; Critique of Society; Theme; Materialism; symbolism

Terms to know

Realism    A mode of writing that gives the impression of recording or ‘reflecting’ faithfully an actual way of life. The term refers, sometimes confusingly, both to a literary method based on detailed accuracy of description (i.e. verisimilitude ) and to a more general attitude that rejects idealization, escapism, and other extravagant qualities of romance in favour of recognizing soberly the actual problems of life. Modern criticism frequently insists that realism is not a direct or simple reproduction of reality (a ‘slice of life’) but a system of conventions producing a lifelike illusion of some ‘real’ world outside the text, by processes of selection, exclusion, description, and manners of addressing the reader. In its methods and attitudes, realism may be found as an element in many kinds of writing prior to the 19th century (e.g. in Chaucer or Defoe, in their different ways); but as a dominant literary trend it is associated chiefly with the 19th‐century novel of middle‐ or lower‐class life, in which the problems of ordinary people in unremarkable circumstances are rendered with close attention to the details of physical setting and to the complexities of social life.

The outstanding works of realism in 19th‐century fiction include Honoré de Balzac 's Illusions perdues ( 1837 -- 43 ), Gustave Flaubert 's Madame Bovary ( 1857 ), and George Eliot 's Middlemarch ( 1871 -- 2 ); and in early 20th‐century fiction Arnold Bennett 's The Old Wives' Tale ( 1908 ) and Edith Wharton 's The House of Mirth ( 1905 ). In France, a self‐consciously realist school announced itself in 1857 with the publication of Champfleury's Le Réalisme, but the term normally refers to the general convention rather than to this barely significant group. In the work of some novelists, realism passes over into the movement of naturalism , in which sociological investigation and determinist views of human behaviour predominate. Realism also established itself as an important tradition in the theatre in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in the work of Henrik Ibsen , Bernard Shaw , and others; and it remains a standard convention of film and television drama. Despite the radical attempts of modernism to displace the realist emphasis on external reality (notably in the movements of expressionism and surrealism ), realism survived as a major current within 20th‐century fiction, sometimes under the label of neo‐realism . For a fuller account, consult Pam Morris, Realism (2003).

"realism."  The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Ed. Chris Baldick. Oxford University Press, 2008. Oxford Reference Online. Web.  17 October 2010.

Materialism    In common usage, materialism describes the privileging of material comforts over spiritual, ethical, and philosophical concerns. In its philosophical sense, materialism holds that speculative thought, social processes, and institutions are directly shaped by the physical world; as such, materialism takes issue with idealism —the belief that external reality cannot be understood apart from consciousness, or, more radically, that some ideas or categories of understanding exist prior to experience. The roots of materialist thought can be traced to India in the seventh century BCE and to ancient Greece (as represented in the thought of Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus). The Early Modern version of materialism is attributed primarily to Thomas Hobbes , who used principles of mechanics and geometry to ground his philosophical system. Later works by David Hume and John Locke are important contributions to the materialist tradition, while critiques by George Berkeley and Immanuel Kant contributed some of the key texts of idealism. The debate between materialism and idealism formed a central dialectic in modern thought that continues to this day.

In social thought, a significant turn in this debate was Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx 's contestation of Georg Hegel 's philosophy of history. Hegel claimed to have privileged neither the subject (as in the transcendental idealism of Kant) nor the object (as in the empiricist or materialist traditions). He claimed that the development of consciousness and knowledge evolved immanently through the material conditions of history, while at the same time determining them. Marx, drawing on Feuerbach, claimed to have "stood Hegel on his head, or rather, on his feet" by arguing that changes in material conditions—most importantly in the modes of economic production—led to changes in speculative thought (as well as in legal and political systems, aesthetics, ethics, and all manner of social relations). Whether or how these "superstructural" elements in turn alter the material "base" of historical development has been at the core of debates between various schools of Marxist thought ever since (see Louis Althusser , dialectical materialism , Antonio Gramsci , and historical materialism ). The Marxist turn also gave rise to a lasting subfield in sociology —the sociology of knowledge (see Karl Mannheim ). In the theory and practice of non-Marxist social science, the materialist perspective has been carried forward by various schools of behaviorism , positivism , and realism ; it has been most directly opposed by neo-Kantianism and postmodernism.

"materialism."  Dictionary of the Social Sciences. Ed. Craig Calhoun.Oxford University Press 2002. Oxford Reference Online. Web.  17 October 2010.

acedia
a chronic state of ennui and discouragement, a general atony of soul and body that prevents one from carrying out any manual, intellectual or spiritual activity. Its symptoms are instability, disgust for the way of life being led, the feeling of being abandoned by everyone, nostalgia for past life.

When Evagrius made his analysis and theory of acedia in the late 4th c., it was mainly as a monastic vice that attacked solitaries. In becoming secularized, the notion lost much of its substance. It was sometimes likened to tristitia, sometimes a synonym of laziness and spiritual torpor. It was in these impoverished forms that it survived in the West, after Gregory the Great had removed it from the list of capital sins, in Hugh of Saint-Victor, Guillaume Peyraut and St Thomas Aquinas.

Géhin, Paul. "acedia." Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, Oxford Reference, James Clarke & Co, 2002. http://www.oxfordreference.com.libproxy.ocean.edu:2048/view/10.1093/acref/9780227679319.001.0001/acref-9780227679319-e-29. Accessed 12 Feb. 2018.

Thoreau from Walden - written 32 years before The Death

“the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." (rest of paragraph is pretty good too).

Questions to mull over as you interpret the story

• Why does Tolstoy make Ivan a judge instead, say, a politician or a businessman?
• What is materialism?  What is Tolstoy's view of materialism?  How can you tell?  Why is it negative?
• How is this a "realistic" story?  How is it a "naturalistic" story?
• Describing Ivan's corpse, the narrator writes "Its expression implied that what needed to be done had been done and done properly. Moreover, there was in this expression a reproach or a reminder to the living. This reminder seemed out of place to Pyotr Ivonvich, or a least in applicable to him. He began to feel somewhat uncomfortable and so crossed himself hurriedly (all to hurriedly, he felt, from the standpoint of propriety), turned, and headed for the door" (35). Different translation : "The expression on the face said that what was necessary had been accomplished, and accomplished rightly.  Besides this there was in the that expression a reproach and a warning to the living.  This warning seemed to Peter Ivanovich out of place, or at least not applicaple to him.  He felt a certain discomfort and so he hurriedly crossed himself once more and turned and went out of the door" (1424 i). 
  • Why would this sentence not make so much sense the first time you read the story?  Why does it make more sense now? Why?
  • What had been accomplished? What was the warning?
  • Why did Peter think it out of place or not applicable to him?  Why did he feel such “discomfort”?
  • How does Tolstoy illustrate the decline of religion?
• What does II come to understand about the meaning of his own life and death?  What meaning does his death have for his friends? Peter Ivanovich For his wife?
• How do Gerasim’s first words (41 i) establish his character? How would the story be different if Gerasim had been raised in the town?   How is class used in the story?
• Why are there French phrases in a famous Russian short story?  Note which section they appear in -- and consider the connotation of French.
• Why did Ivan get married? (48-49 ii)  What does it say about his character?
• 102 ix; 108 xi; existentialist questioning -- what’s Tolstoy’s answer?
• ***Small detail -- why does he reach for a candle-stick after questioning his existence, and more importantly, why does he knock it over? Chapter 5 and connection all the way at the end.
• Why does Ivan consider death an "abyss"? What are the connotations of the word?  What is Tolstoy suggesting by having Ivan use this word? Does Ivan’s thinking toward death change?
• What does it seem that Tolstoy want's people to realize by reading this story -- would you say that he is relatively clear about it?
• On 1456 xi, why was his childhood "painful" to remember?
• Symbolism of the light
• What is the meaning of his last words "What joy!"
• Why does Tolstoy choose to begin with I's death and funeral and then work backwards?  What kind of context does the opening section provide for the story that follows?
• What kind of man is Ivan? How have the values which Ivan has chosen to live by shaped the kind of man he is?
• What purpose does Gerasim serve in the story?
• How is the story both religious and secular?

Group Questions Day 1

1. Why does Tolstoy choose to begin with Ivan's death and funeral and then work backwards?  What kind of context does the opening section provide for the story that follows?
2. What does Tolstoy suggest Ivan lacks by the paragraph beginning "As a student he had done things. . ." (44, ii)
3. What does he mean by ""Ivan Ilyich's life had been most simple and commonplace -- and most horrifying" (43,ii) "Ivan Ilyich's life had been the most simple and most ordinary and therefore the most terrible" (1427).  What connection is Tolstoy making?  How can something simple and commonplace be horrifying -- and indeed, "most horrifying"? See excerpt from Walden above.
4. What role does materialism play in Ivan's life? In his cultural milieu?
5. Does Tolstoy make him a sympathetic character?  Why or why not?

Group Questions Day 2

1. State your quote and how it helped you understand the story. (Aggregate your thoughts into a single theme or idea illustrated by a word or two).
2. Okay, this is often considered a work of realism, but what romantic elements does it contain? And what does this blurring suggest about literary "movements"?
3. Why is almost everyone afraid to admit that Ivan is dying?  What does this suggest about the culture he is living in?  Who isn’t afraid to admit Ivan’s condition?  What does this suggest? For possible answers, consider the following commentary on the story by Edward Wasiolek:

   The society is built upon a pursuit of well-being and an avoidance of discomfort. "Self-pleasure" is the law of society. The avoidance of "pain" and ultimately death explains the series of abstract and impersonal relations that obtain in the story. One protects oneself from involvement in the pain others suffer by formalizing and thus impersonalizing relations with others.

4. What does this story suggest about power?  Who has power first? Who has it next? For starters, consider the following quote: "Ivan Ilyich felt that all [ . . . ] were in his power" (47 ii); now move from here.
5. Towards the end of the story, the narrator notes that "his physical agony was dreadful, and that was true, but even more dreadful was his mental agony and it was this that tormented him most" (108 xi). Why is the mental worse? What is Tolstoy suggesting with this quote?
6. For a story about death, how can this be read as an optimistic work (which is how Tolstoy viewed it)?

What the author/critics say

"Life as Ivan Ilyich had lived goes on after he is dead. As Ivan had a passion for bridge, so Pyotr Ivanovich, weariedly performing the duty of paying respects to the dead, hurries away to meet the impish and impious Schwartz for a game of bridge" (Wasiolek).

"As Ivan Ilyich treated people before death, so they treat him after death. The "worth" of his colleagues was their capacity to advance his welfare and his pleasure, and the "worth" of Ivan Ilyich in death is the opportunity his passing gives to others to advance their welfare and pleasure. He treated people impersonally and was indifferent to their vital interests. This was most evident in his relationship with his wife, with whom he talked at times only when a third person was present. She pays him back in death. We learn of his death in the opening scene by way of the formal obituary that Praskovya Fyodorovna has written, which Fyodor Vasilievich reads to his colleagues in the judicial chamber. The conventional expression of sorrow in the obituary is the precise correlative, in impersonality, of the actual emotions Praskovya Fyodorovna has toward her deceased husband. The items of description in this opening scene are a duplication of the kinds of feelings, human relationships, and objects in which Ivan Ilyich had lived. Tolstoy is saying that Ivan Ilyich's life is the ironical factor in his death" (Wasiolek).

Wasiolek, Edward. "Review of 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich." Tolstoy's Major Fiction. The University of Chicago Press, 1978. 167-179. Rpt. in Literature Resource Center. Detroit: Gale, 2010. Literature Resource Center. Web. 3 Nov. 2010.

"Sharing the Romantic concern for right consciousness, Tolstoy [230]  fashioned a version of the Fall myth that retained contours familiar in European Romanticism while adapting to his own iconoclastic moral and psychological attitudes. Reduced to its baldest features, this version may be described as a four-stage process: an integrated condition of natural honesty and wholeness which Ivan had known "at the beginning of life"; a subsequent fall into a false relation to life based on a mendacious denial of mortality and ironically coinciding with Ivan's rise in the professional world; a second fall, marked by Ivan's physical fall from a stepladder, into a conscious awareness of his low estate; and a final reintegration and moral regeneration enabled by this awareness. Thus Tolstoy divines in selfconsciousness both a problem and a solution. Ivan awakens to his false relation to life, based on selfish egotism and denial of death, and subsequently adapts a new, right view made possible by a belated acceptance of death as life's ultimate reality. In accepting death, Ivan becomes psychologically integrated, and finally capable of the truth and love he had previously forfeited. The catalyst of this change is the introspection and self-analysis which result from the consequences of a seemingly trivial household accident, his plunge from the stepladder. It is in this sense, then, that one may speak of a Fortunate Fall in 'Ivan Ilych.'" (Williams 229-230)

Williams, Michael. “Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilych": After The Fall.”  Studies in Short Fiction. 21: 23 (1984): 229-235. Literature Reference Center. Web. 3 November 2010.

Pictures

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/b0/3b/c3/b03bc34799fe3a8ceb5e576901e6885d.jpg

Links

Camping Out

"And so the first thought that occurred to each of the gentlemen in this office, learning of Ivan Ilyich’s death, was what effect it would have on their own transfers or promotions or those of their acquaintances" (32, i)

"The pleasures Ivan Ilyich derived from his work were those of pride; the pleasures he derived from society those of vanity; but it was genuine pleasure that he derived from playing whist" (61).

"After supper his friends went home, leaving Ivan Ilyich alone with the knowledge that his life had been poisoned and was poisoning the lives of others, and that far from diminishing, that poison was penetrating deeper and deeper into his entire being" (71).

"And then It would come back and stand there and stare at his eyes, and again he would begin asking himself: 'Can It alone be true?'" (81).

"When, in the morning, he saw first the footman, then his wife, then his daughter, and then the doctor, their every gesture, their every word, confirmed the horrible truth revealed to him during the night. In them he saw himself, all he had lived by, saw clearly that all this was not the real thing but a dreadful, enormous deception that shut out both life and death" (109,xi)

"What prevented him from getting into it was the belief that his life had been a good one. This justification of his life held him fast, kept him from moving forward, and caused him more agony than anything else" (111, xii).

© 2010 David Bordelon