'Ivan Ilyich has messed things up...'

Memento mori and the lessons of Tolstoy's 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich'

We will be reading Mrs Dalloway starting at the beginning of June. Please join us! If you are new to Virginia Woolf or have struggled with her writing before, perhaps take a look at this short primer. For now, a small interlude in which I discuss an excellent story by Tolstoy.

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The first time I saw a dead human body was recently. A dear friend died and his wife had his body brought home from the hospital to their small farm. She invited us, his friends, to come over, drink some of the friend’s famous (very sweet) blackberry wine and say goodbye. In a few weeks there would be a proper funeral but for now it was just a small gathering to remember a good and decent man.

I was frightened of seeing my friend deceased. It seemed to me a shocking breach of bodily privacy – something I couldn’t fathom agreeing to in relation to my own body. So, when I added my car to the cluster of other cars outside the little farmhouse, my grief had been overtaken by trepidation.

My friend’s wife, also a dear friend, hugged me when I arrived and we cried. Others were gathered in the kitchen, talking and laughing and telling stories. The body was laid out in the lounge room and there was a curtain across the doorway with a small gap which I avoided looking through. It was alright if we didn’t want to go in, the wife said. We could choose what was right for us. It wasn’t expected. We could stay in the kitchen if we preferred or gather in the garden.

Finally, one of the other women, feeling the same apprehension as me, took my hand and said we should go in together. We drew back the curtain.

Our friend was laid out in the middle of the room on a special type of bed that plugs into the wall and keeps the body cool. He was dressed in a collared shirt and jeans. On his feet were socks but no shoes. His hair was combed. His eyes were closed and his face was smiling slightly. His skin was grey and waxy. He was so obviously dead.

Sitting with my friend’s body was a life changing experience and an overwhelmingly positive one. Previously, death had been hidden, mysterious and terrifying. People didn’t die, they just sort of disappeared. Being confronted with an actual body – the body of a friend, a friend I’d so recently had lunch with – changed that. Death was revealed to be both profound and ordinary. A strange relief overtook me – that this thing that I feared so dreadfully was in fact the most natural thing in the world. I needn’t be afraid. I need only be human and nature would do the rest. Everything extraneous fell away. Life felt simpler and enlarged.

But the effect, which lasted several weeks, faded.

Writers and artists have understood the powerful impact of memento mori (Latin for ‘remember you must die’). One need only look at the vanitas paintings of the 16th and 17th centuries with their skulls and hour glasses and wilting flowers and rotting fruit. These paintings emphasised the transience of life and the hollowness of ambition and worldly pleasure. Their message was that time passes and death is certain. Soon, you too – with your big plans, your pride, your achievements, your standing among peers – will be worm food.

Vanitas Still-Life with a Bouquet and a Skull, Adriaen van Utrecht, 1642

My favourite example of the vanitas genre is a piece of literature rather than a painting: The Death of Ivan Ilyich – a novella by Leo Tolstoy first published in 1886. (I particularly like Anthony Briggs’ 2008 translation.) The story opens with the friends and colleagues of Ivan Ilyich reading a notice of his death in the newspaper. Rather than being upset by the news or reminded of their own mortality, the men experience ‘a feeling of delight that he had died and they hadn’t’ and immediately contemplate how Ivan Ilyich’s death might benefit them – Ivan Ilyich was a senior official in the Ministry of Justice so his death will create an opening and a chain reaction of promotions. Each man is energised by self-interest.

One of the men assembled is Pyotr Ivanovich who was a friend of Ivan Ilyich and who travels to pay his respects to the widow. Pyotr Ivanovich acts as a proxy for the reader. Like him, we are bystanders to Ivan Ilyich’s death. With him as our guide, we have an opportunity to experience insight in the wake of death.

But Pyotr Ivanovich does not take up this opportunity. There are moments when unpleasant thoughts of death and suffering break through – when he looks on the corpse of his friend, when the widow describes how Ivan Ilyich screamed in agony for three days – but Pyotr Ivanovich reminds himself that all of this happened to Ivan Ilyich and not him. Whenever an unpleasant feeling arises, he returns to the comforting thought that this reminder of death doesn’t apply to him.¹    

Pyotr Ivanovich is further fortified by the appearance of his colleague Schwartz at Ivan Ilyich’s house. Schwartz appears as a symbol of worldly success and death denial. He winks at Pyotr Ivanovich in a way that Pyotr Ivanovich interprets to mean: ‘Ivan Ilyich has messed things up – not what you or I would have done.’ Later, when Pyotr Ivanovich is again assailed by uneasiness, he is once more reassured by the presence of Schwartz: ‘One glance at his mischievous, immaculately elegant figure and Pyotr Ivanovich felt restored. He could see that Schwartz was above all this…’

If Schwartz is the symbol of worldly success and death denial, Gerasim, Ivan Ilyich’s peasant servant, symbolises the opposite. He first appears as Pyotr Ivanovich is leaving to give him his coat and when Pyotr Ivanovich comments on the sadness of the occasion, Gerasim replies: ‘Tis God’s will, sir. Twill come to us all.’

From here, the story goes back in time to give an account of Ivan Ilyich’s life – how he rose through the ranks, becoming an examining magistrate, then assistant chief prosecutor, then public prosecutor, then accepting a senior position in Petersburg at the Ministry of Justice for 5000 roubles a year. (Almost more important than the salary is the fact that the position is two grades higher than his peers.) He marries, choosing a woman that will meet with the approval of society but who will ultimately make him unhappy, and they have a daughter, then a son. He and his wife discard their shabby friends and relatives. With each life advance, Ivan Ilyich enjoys his rise in social status and the gravitas with which people treat him. And, although he plays it down, he relishes his power over people.

Throughout this recital of Ivan Ilyich’s successes, there is frequent reference to pleasure, enjoyment, ease and respectability. Together, these are Ivan Ilyich’s North Star.

Plainly, Tolstoy is setting Ivan Ilyich up for a big shock.

It seems appropriate that Ivan Ilyich’s demise is brought on not by a noble or valorous deed but by an accident when he is decorating his new apartment in Petersburg. He mounts a stepladder to show the upholsterer how to hang the drapes and falls, bumping his side on the knob of the window frame. Later – after a pain develops and gets progressively worse; after he sees doctors and takes medicines to no avail; after the pain becomes unbearable and he realises, finally, that he will not recover – he will be tormented by the thought: ‘I have lost my life here on this curtain, my battleground. Have I really? How horrible and how stupid!’

As Ivan Ilyich dies, slowly and agonisingly, he is most distressed by psychological rather than physical pain – the realisation that he has wasted his life on hollow things. He is further distressed by the reaction of those around him – his wife, his daughter, his doctors – who refuse to acknowledge that he is dying. His wife chides him for not taking his medicine. His daughter chitchats about the opera. His doctors wonder whether his health issues stem from a floating kidney or a problem with the blind gut. He realises that not only are those around him lying to him but that they want him to be a party to the lie. And this lying was ‘inexorably reducing the solemn act of his death to the same level as their social calls, their draperies, the sturgeon for dinner…’

The only people capable of understanding what Ivan Ilyich is going through are his 12-year-old son, who is still young enough not to have been socialised out of an awareness of death, and Gerasim, whose kind ministrations and honesty about what is happening comfort Ivan Ilyich.

As with another of Tolstoy’s stories, Master and Man, the climax arrives when the dying man experiences a momentous revelation in the moments before his death which releases him from earthly suffering. And we, the reader, can experience that revelation too. We can practice adopting the mindset of someone close to death and learn what is important in our lives and what is unimportant.

Memento mori (or ‘respice finem’ (Latin for ‘consider the end’) – which a young Ivan Ilyich, in a moment of irony, has inscribed on a medallion attached to his watch chain) offers a tool for digging ourselves out from the deluge of distraction and self-concern that characterises the age in which we live. If people were concerned about trivial matters in the time of Tolstoy, it is clear that those concerns have only been intensified in the digital age. It is hard to avoid becoming preoccupied with the reception of our online selves and the relentless ticking over of online metrics such as the number of followers, subscribers, views, downloads, likes and shares. It is hard to avoid fixating on the our curated digital avatars and the threat of being misconstrued in a world of short attention spans.

In such conditions, one’s attention struggles to rise to matters of importance, being drawn ceaselessly back into the online tumult.

Memento mori offers a powerful psychological counterweight in the age in which we live because it is so physically grounded, so embodied – the very opposite of the internet. The thumbs up symbol is immortal. Your thumb is not. Think of memento mori as a form of ‘counter-practice.’ This term, coined by

L. M. Sacasas

, is defined by Sacasas as ‘a deliberately chosen discipline that can form us in ways that run counter to the default settings of our techno-social milieu.’

The point is not to become morbidly obsessed with death and dying. The point is to remember that your life must end and time is short. Reminding ourselves of this fact offers a mental shortcut away from empty anxieties about ego, status, fame and competition. To ignore our mortality is to risk becoming distracted with trivial things or indifferent to the implications of our finitude – it is to risk the fate of Ivan Ilyich. The characters in Tolstoy’s novella err by falling for the fallacy that death is for other people. For, even though Ivan Ilyich understands the logic that ‘Caesar is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caesar is mortal,’ he is unable to apply that logic to himself and the effect is catastrophic. ‘Yes, Caesar is mortal,’ thinks Ivan Ilyich, ‘and it’s alright for him to die, but not me, Vanya, Ivan Ilyich, with all my feelings and thoughts – it’s different for me.’

Needless to say, my perspective about my own death – about allowing my family and closest friends to see my body – has undergone a full reversal. Might this not be a precious gift I can give my loved ones like the one my friend gave me? Even visualising my own body, grey and unmoving, is a powerful form of memento mori. I see that it is my body there, not someone else’s. I see that it is lifeless and cold but also inescapably and nobly human. Right now, sitting at my desk typing this, I’m alive with ‘all my feelings and thoughts’ but inevitably I will die. Twill come to us all.

1. The Existentialists would say that he has an inauthentic ‘being-toward-death’ in the sense that he believes that death happens only to other people. A more authentic attitude would be to understand one’s finitude as a fundamental part of one’s individual self. In fact, Martin Heidegger used The Death of Ivan Ilyich to illustrate this point in Being and Time.