Highlights
Apart from the speculations aroused in each of them by this death, concerning the transfers and possible changes that this death might bring about, the very fact of the death of someone close to them aroused in all who heart about it, as always, a feeling of delight that he had died and they hadn't.
The dead man lay as all dead men lie, unusually heavy with his dead weight, with rigid limbs sinking into the soft lining of the coffin and his head bowed for eternity on the pillow, [...]
[...] but, as with all dead bodies, his face had acquired greater beauty, or, more to the point, greater significance, than it had had in life. Its expression seemed to say that what needed to be done had been done, and done properly.
'Three days and three nights of horrible suffering, and then death. Just think, it could happen to me any time, now,' he thought, and he felt that momentary pang of fear. But immediately he was saved, without knowing how, by the old familiar idea that this had happened to Ivan Ilyich, not him, and it could not and would not happen to him, and that kind of thinking would put him in a gloomy mood, for which there was no need, [...]
As a student he was already the kind of person he remained for the rest of his life, a capable man, cheerful and kind, sociable and convinced of the need to follow the path of duty — duty being anything so designated by a higher authority.
Far from abusing this power, he did his best to play it down, but his consciousness of that power and the very chance to play it down were what gave his new job its interest and appeal.
But it was at this stage, during the first months of his wife's pregnancy, that something happened, something new, unexpected, unpleasant, difficult and disgusting, something that could not have been anticipated and could not in any way be got rid of.
For no reason that Ivan Ilyich could fathom, other than what he called gaieté de cœur, his wife did begin to disrupt the pleasant and decent run of his life.
His work was the one thing that impressed Praskovya, and it was through his work and the commitments associated with it that he took on his wife and asserted his own independence.
As his wife grew more and more and irritable and demanding, Ivan Ilyich gradually shifted his life's centre of gravity on to his work. He loved his work more and more, and became more ambitious than he had been.
They were left with a few short periods of amorousness that came over them as husband and wife, but these did not last long. These were nothing more than little islands where they could anchor for a while, only to plunge back into a sea of hidden hostility as they grew further and further apart.
It was a year in which it transpired, for one thing, that they couldn't make ends meet financially, and, for another, that he was a forgotten man and, whereas he saw himself as the victim of an outrageously cruel injustice, everyone else thought it was just the way things went.
In the country, with no work to occupy him, Ivan Ilyich had his first experience of not just boredom but unbearable anguish. He decided he couldn't go on like this — definite steps must be taken.
But these were essentially the accoutrements that appeal to all people who are not actually rich but who want to look rich, though all they manage to do is look like each other: damasks, ebony, plants, rugs and bronzes, anything dark and gleaming — everything that all people of a certain class affect so as to be like all other people of a certain class. And his arrangements looked so much like everyone else's that they were unremarkable, though he saw them as something truly distinctive.
This was how they lived. This was how things went, nothing changed, and everything was fine.
They were left once again with nothing more than those little islands, all too few of them, on which husband and wife could come together without an explosion.
Convinced that her husband was a horrible man who made her life a misery, she was now sorry for herself. And the sorrier she became, the more she hated her husband. She began to wish he was dead, and then not to, because without him there would be no income. All of which made her even more exasperated with him. She felt thoroughly miserable at the thought that not even his death could rescue her.
From the summary Ivan Ilyich drew only one conclusion: he was in a and way and the doctor didn't care, nobody cared probably, but he was in a bad way.
The time for himself was over: something new and dreadful was going on inside Ivan Ilyich, something significant, more significant than anything in his whole life. And he was the only one who knew it; the people around him didn't know, or didn't want to know — they thought everything in the world was going as before.
All his life the syllogism he had learned from Kiese-wetter's logic — Julius Caesar is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caesar is mortal — had always seemed to him to be true only when it applied to Caesar, certainly not to him.
Yes, Caesar is mortal and it's all right for him to die, but not me, Vanya, Ivan Ilyich, with all my feelings and thoughts — it's different for me. It can't be me having to die. That would be too horrible.
How it came about in the third month of Ivan Ilyich's illness no one could have said, because it came on imperceptibly, by stages, but it happened that all of them — his wife, and daughter, and son, and the servants, and their friends, and the doctors, and most importantly he himself — everybody knew that the only interesting thing about him now was whether it would take him a long time to give up his place, finally release the living from the oppression caused by his presence, and himself be released from his suffering.
He could see that no one had any pity for him because no one had the slightest desire to understand his situation.
And in his imagination he started to run through the best times of his happy life. But what was strange was that all the best times of his happy life no longer seemed anything like what they had been before. Nothing did — except the first recollections of his childhood. There, in his childhood, there was something truly happy that he could have lived with if it returned. But the person living out that happiness no longer existed; it was like remembering someone quite different.
At the point where he, today's Ivan Ilyich, began to emerge, all the pleasures that had seemed so real melted away now before his eyes and turned into something trivial and often disgusting.
And the further he was from childhood, the nearer he got to the present day, the more trivial and dubious his pleasures appeared.
'It's as if I had been going downhill when I thought I was going uphill. That's how it was. In society's opinion I was heading uphill, but in equal measure life was slipping away from me . . . And now it's all over. Nothing left but to die!
Life, a series of increasing sufferings, flies ever faster towards its end, the most terrible suffering.
It occurred to him that what had once seemed a total impossibility — that he had not lived his life as he should have done — might actually be true.
His career, the ordering of his life, his family, the things that preoccupied people in society and at work — all of this might have been wrong. He made an attempt at defending these things for himself. And suddenly he sensed the feebleness of what he was defending. There was nothing to defend.