Fooling the System

Stella Onochie

Professor van de Stadt

Russian 206-Tolstoy

Final Paper, 5/14/08

Subverting Christian Imagery in Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych

Compared to his previous novels such as Anna Karenina or War and Peace, Tolstoy’s post-conversion works read more like theoretical meditations, focused upon the inevitability of suffering. However, despite what seems to be a somewhat drier, didactic style, one feels Tolstoy’s authorial presence more keenly within stories like “The Devil,” “Kreutzer Sonata,” and “Ivan Ilych”—stories where it seems as if Tolstoy had as much to lose, (or gain), as his central characters in the confrontation of their inner torments. As one deeply invested in the same questions that arise in the heart of his Ivan Ilych, he presents himself to us in the caricature of character. Consequently, “The Death of Ivan Ilych” reveals more about Tolstoy’s own understanding of life and religion as interpreted through a lens of death against that of Orthodox Christianity, which he rejected.

As the quintessential “Everyman,” Ivan Ilych is not expected to be as developed as Tolstoy’s novelistic characters such as Levin from Anna Karenina. He is not a singularity. Universality lends itself to generalities— for the maximum amount of readers to be able to resonate with Ilych, his character has to possess attributes that make him no lesser and no greater than any other man. Yet Tolstoy’s conception of resonance with a character does not necessarily equal sympathy. On the contrary, Anna Karenina is an exercise in sympathy. There, we are brought to love a fallen woman, a victim of society’s hypocrisy and apathy, despite simultaneously condemning her selfish manner of living and ending her life. Here, resonance is directed more towards Ivan Ilych’s situation, the end of his life, than the person of Ilych himself. This is perhaps the greatest aspect of his universal appeal—he confronts and experiences death in all of its magnitude for those in self-denial of their own inevitable finitude.

The apparition of death is wholly overwhelming. It comes for all; it is non-discriminating. But death is also an event that remains relegated to a far distant future. When Ilych’s associates learn of his passing, they are quick to leave it undigested. Even his wife continues the denial, acting as though “death was an accident natural to Ivan Ilych but certainly not to [anyone else]” (253). Yet, Tolstoy has Peter Ivanovich perceive Ivan Ilych as a “reproach and warning to the living” (250). Why? The rationale is as follows: the horror of Ilych’s death lay in the fact that it disrupted his complacency, forcing him to consider examining his life, not only thorugh the eyes of a mortal judge, but a supernatural one. And for a man like Tolstoy, described by critic Richard Pevear, (in the preface of Tolstoy’s What is Art), as a “Christian anarchist,” the sudden question of what lies beyond death becomes suddenly dreadful. If Ilych can consider that “Maybe [he] did not live as [he] ought to have done,” then what is to stop one from questioning every conclusion they had made in regards to life, in regards to ambition, and in regards to one’s faith (295)?

Tolstoy, despite his blatant renunciation of the Russian Orthodox Church, believed God existed. But this God was not a “Father” in the traditional Christian sense. Nor was Christ the divine Son, born of woman, and so also mortal. He believed that the divinity of Christ was a myth created by the Church which obscured Christ “true” nature as a mortal man. Yet, the logic follows that if Christ was wholly man, then the cornerstone of the Christian faith—that of the Resurrection and consequently, Heaven— can not exist. The Russian Orthodox Church and the Western Rite Roman Catholics view suffering as a consequence of the Fall, brought into the world through man’s own choice, not God’s initiative. Christ’s crucifixion “sanctified” this suffering, and offered through His resurrection, the peace and hope that life, despite the anguish it can bring, is worth living. Tolstoy, in rejecting this, then brings Ivan Ilych to face death without any consolation or hope in eternity. Instead, like Tolstoy, Ilych begins to place his peace in the finding of his own answers, not God’s answers, to questions concerning the meaning of life and suffering. There is no Christ figure to bring him past death into new life.

At this moment, Tolstoy seems to become inconsistent. The majority of his audience is Christian and yet he himself cannot endorse the doctrine of Christ. How was he to share his own conceptualization of death without relying on this near universal lens through which most view death—Christianity? In order to address this as both a narrative dilemma and conflict of principles, Tolstoy compromised. Ivan Ilych became a superficial Christ figure. Reading through the novella, we encounter numerous juxtapositions of Ilych with Christ. Someone around his death bed speaks, “It is finished,” the same words Christ spoke on the cross. That exclamation is followed by an image of Ivan breathing his last as Christ in His final moment as recorded in the Gospels. Ilych cries to God in his moments of suffering: ‘Why hast Thou done all this?... in a desperate manner shared by Christ, “My God, My God, why have You abandoned me?”(294). But upon closer examination, the connections fall flat. If Ilych is to be Christ like in suffering, then innocence is required. But even Tolstoy does not refrain from pointing out every fault in Ilych’s extremely egotistical character. We pity him because of the suffering he endures, but our pity is accompanied by a cruel sense of judgment or karma—Ilych seems to have received what he deserved. The biblical allusions serve to obscure the death scene, making it palatable. Otherwise, most readers would be made far too uncomfortable by the ambiguous ending. There is no tangible sense of transcendence. Rather, it just feels as if Ilych is falling away, free from the “black sack” but vanishing away in to the light, which is not life or eternal life, but non-existence. As Pevear eloquently writes, “Tolstoy’s heaven is empty. It was this he concealed behind the ‘brilliant edifice of his preaching.’ [Death and heaven are] the abyss of the night in Arzamas, and it is within the prophet himself” (Pevear, Richard, xxii, What is Art?). Life too, its meaning discounted along with the rejecting of the Russian Orthodox Church, is nothing but a blight of darkness. Reasons Ilych, “There is one bright spot there at the back, at the beginning of life and afterwards all becomes blacker and blacker and proceeds more and more rapidly—in inverse ratio to the square of the distance from death” (297). Therefore, the light he sees that fills him with joy is not Heaven, but a morbid realization that death, coming now to free him from life, will throw him into non-existence where pain falls away. Death is “no more” because he simply ceases to exist. Ilych vanishes. Consequently, the allusions to Christ are not there for us to equate the man and Son of God to each other, but rather, to see how they differ. Ilych’s finality is death… Christ offers the Resurrection.

Tolstoy cannot see beyond the "brink of the grave"—life escapes no further than its edge, (Father Gary Caster).

Ivan is sacrificed for the sake of Tolstoy’s dismemberment of death and with it, Christianity’s doctrine of Resurrection. The suffering figure does not always equal the redemptive figure. The true poignancy of Tolstoy’s “Death of Ivan Ilych” then lies in the fact that at least for Ilych, his torments ended, and the answers were no longer necessary, given his abrupt and superficial epiphany at the brink of death. But for a brilliant, but crippled mind like Tolstoy, these questions would continue to bear against him, weighing him down, threatening to throw him into the abyss he dreamt about in his Confessions.