The Death of Ivan Ilych, Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy [books to read in a lifetime TXT] 📗
- Author: Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
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poisoned and was poisoning the lives of others, and that this poison did not
weaken but penetrated more and more deeply into his whole being.
With this consciousness, and with physical pain besides the terror, he must
go to bed, often to lie awake the greater part of the night. Next morning he
had to get up again, dress, go to the law courts, speak, and write; or if he
did not go out, spend at home those twenty-four hours a day each of which
was a torture. And he had to live thus all alone on the brink of an abyss,
with no one who understood or pitied him.
VSo one month passed and then another. Just before the New Year his
brother-in-law came to town and stayed at their house. Ivan Ilych was at the
law courts and Praskovya Fedorovna had gone shopping. When Ivan Ilych came
home and entered his study he found his brother-in-law there — a healthy,
florid man — unpacking his portmanteau himself. He raised his head on
hearing Ivan Ilych’s footsteps and looked up at him for a moment without a
word. That stare told Ivan Ilych everything. His brother-in-law opened his
mouth to utter an exclamation of surprise but checked himself, and that
action confirmed it all.
“I have changed, eh?”
“Yes, there is a change.”
And after that, try as he would to get his brother-in-law to return to the
subject of his looks, the latter would say nothing about it. Praskovya
Fedorovna came home and her brother went out to her. Ivan Ilych locked to
door and began to examine himself in the glass, first full face, then in
profile. He took up a portrait of himself taken with his wife, and compared
it with what he saw in the glass. The change in him was immense. Then he
bared his arms to the elbow, looked at them, drew the sleeves down again,
sat down on an ottoman, and grew blacker than night.
“No, no, this won’t do!” he said to himself, and jumped up, went to the
table, took up some law papers and began to read them, but could not
continue. He unlocked the door and went into the reception-room. The door
leading to the drawing-room was shut. He approached it on tiptoe and
listened.
“No, you are exaggerating!” Praskovya Fedorovna was saying.
“Exaggerating! Don’t you see it? Why, he’s a dead man! Look at his eyes —
there’s no life in them. But what is it that is wrong with him?”
“No one knows. Nikolaevich [that was another doctor] said something, but I
don’t know what. And Seshchetitsky [this was the celebrated specialist] said
quite the contrary… “
Ivan Ilych walked away, went to his own room, lay down, and began musing;
“The kidney, a floating kidney.” He recalled all the doctors had told him of
how it detached itself and swayed about. And by an effort of imagination he
tried to catch that kidney and arrest it and support it. So little was
needed for this, it seemed to him. “No, I’ll go to see Peter Ivanovich
again.” [That was the friend whose friend was a doctor.] He rang, ordered
the carriage, and got ready to go.
“Where are you going, Jean?” asked his wife with a specially sad and
exceptionally kind look.
This exceptionally kind look irritated him. He looked morosely at her.
“I must go to see Peter Ivanovich.”
He went to see Peter Ivanovich, and together they went to see his friend,
the doctor. He was in, and Ivan Ilych had a long talk with him.
Reviewing the anatomical and physiological details of what in the doctor’s
opinion was going on inside him, he understood it all.
There was something, a small thing, in the vermiform appendix. It might all
come right. Only stimulate the energy of one organ and check the activity of
another, then absorption would take place and everything would come right.
He got home rather late for dinner, ate his dinner, and conversed
cheerfully, but could not for a long time bring himself to go back to work
in his room. At last, however, he went to his study and did what was
necessary, but the consciousness that he had put something aside — an
important, intimate matter which he would revert to when his work was done
— never left him. When he had finished his work he remembered that this
intimate matter was the thought of his vermiform appendix. But he did not
give himself up to it, and went to the drawing-room for tea. There were
callers there, including the examining magistrate who was a desirable match
for his daughter, and they were conversing, playing the piano, and singing.
Ivan Ilych, as Praskovya Fedorovna remarked, spent that evening more
cheerfully than usual, but he never for a moment forgot that he had
postponed the important matter of the appendix. At eleven o’clock he said
goodnight and went to his bedroom. Since his illness he had slept alone in a
small room next to his study. He undressed and took up a novel by Zola, but
instead of reading it he fell into thought, and in his imagination that
desired improvement in the vermiform appendix occurred. There was the
absorption and evacuation and the re-establishment of normal activity. “Yes,
that’s it!” he said to himself. “One need only assist nature, that’s all.”
He remembered his medicine, rose, took it, and lay down on his back watching
for the beneficent action of the medicine and for it to lessen the pain. “I
need only take it regularly and avoid all injurious influences. I am already
feeling better, much better.” He began touching his side: it was not painful
to the touch. “There, I really don’t feel it. It’s much better already.” He
put out the light and turned on his side… “The appendix is getting
better, absorption is occurring.” Suddenly he felt the old, familiar, dull,
gnawing pain, stubborn and serious. There was the same familiar loathsome
taste in his mouth. His heart sank and he felt dazed. “My God! My God!” he
muttered. “Again, again! And it will never cease.” And suddenly the matter
presented itself in a quite different aspect. “Vermiform appendix!
Kidney!” he said to himself. “It’s not a question of appendix or kidney, but
of life and… death. Yes, life was there and now it is going, going and
I cannot stop it. Yes. Why deceive myself? Isn’t it obvious to everyone but
me that I’m dying, and that it’s only a question of weeks, days… it may
happen this moment. There was light and now there is darkness. I was here
and now I’m going there! Where?” A chill came over him, his breathing
ceased, and he felt only the throbbing of his heart.
“When I am not, what will there be? There will be nothing. Then where shall
I be when I am no more? Can this be dying? No, I don’t want to!” He jumped
up and tried to light the candle, felt for it with trembling hands, dropped
candle and candlestick on the floor, and fell back on his pillow.
“What’s the use? It makes no difference,” he said to himself, staring with
wide-open eyes into the darkness. “Death. Yes, death. And none of them knows
or wishes to know it, and they have no pity for me. Now they are playing.”
(He heard through the door the distant sound of a song and its
accompaniment.) “It’s all the same to them, but they will die too! Fools! I
first, and they later, but it will be the same for them. And now they are
merry… the beasts!”
Anger choked him and he was agonizingly, unbearably miserable. “It is
impossible that all men have been doomed to suffer this awful horror!” He
raised himself.
“Something must be wrong. I must calm myself — must think it all over from
the beginning.” And he again began thinking. “Yes, the beginning of my
illness: I knocked my side, but I was still quite well that day and the
next. It hurt a little, then rather more. I saw the doctors, then followed
despondency and anguish, more doctors, and I drew nearer to the abyss. My
strength grew less and I kept coming nearer and nearer, and now I have
wasted away and there is no light in my eyes. I think of the appendix — but
this is death! I think of mending the appendix, and all the while here is
death! Can it really be death?” Again terror seized him and he gasped for
breath. He leant down and began feeling for the matches, pressing with his
elbow on the stand beside the bed. It was in his way and hurt him, he grew
furious with it, pressed on it still harder, and upset it. Breathless and in
despair he fell on his back, expecting death to come immediately.
Meanwhile the visitors were leaving. Praskovya Fedorovna was seeing them
off. She heard something fall and came in.
“What has happened?”
“Nothing. I knocked it over accidentally.”
She went out and returned with a candle. He lay there panting heavily, like
a man who has run a thousand yards, and stared upwards at her with a fixed
look.
“What is it, Jean?”
“No… O… thing. I upset it.” (“Why speak of it? She won’t
understand,” he thought.)
And in truth she did not understand. She picked up the stand, lit his
candle, and hurried away to see another visitor off. When she came back he
still lay on his back, looking upwards.
“What is it? Do you feel worse?”
“Yes.”
She shook her head and sat down.
“Do you know, Jean, I think we must ask Leshchetitsky to come and see you
here.”
This meant calling in the famous specialist, regardless of expense. He
smiled malignantly and said “No.” She remained a little longer and then went
up to him and kissed his forehead.
While she was kissing him he hated her from the bottom of his soul and with
difficulty refrained from pushing her away.
“Good night. Please God you’ll sleep.”
“Yes.”
VIIvan Ilych saw that he was dying, and he was in continual despair.
In the depth of his heart he knew he was dying, but not only was he not
accustomed to the thought, he simply did not and could not grasp it.
The syllogism he had learnt from Kiesewetter’s Logic: “Caius is a man, men
are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal,” had always seemed to him correct as
applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. That Caius — man
in the abstract — was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius,
not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others.
He had been little Vanya, with a mamma and a papa, with Mitya and Volodya,
with the toys, a coachman and a nurse, afterwards with Katenka and with all
the joys, griefs, and delights of childhood, boyhood, and youth. What did
Caius know of the smell of that striped leather ball Vanya had been so fond
of? Had Caius kissed his mother’s hand like that, and did the silk of her
dress rustle so for Caius? Had he rioted like that at school when the pastry
was bad? Had Caius been in love like that? Could Caius preside at a session
as he did? “Caius really was mortal, and it was right for him to die; but
for me, little Vanya, Ivan Ilych, with all my thoughts and emotions, it’s
altogether a different matter. It cannot
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