“For the man Caius, man in general, it was perfectly correct; but he was not Caius and not man in general, he had always been quite, quite separate from all other beings; he was Vanya, with mamá, with papá, with Mitya and Volodya, with toys, the coachman, with a nanny, then with Katenka, with all the joys, griefs, and delights of childhood, boyhood, youth.”
Among my greatest shames as a reader is that I have yet to truly bond with the Russians. Forty pages into any Dostoyevsky novel I feel a tide of irritable incomprehension (what is a privy councilor again?) rising past my chin. Many a story by Chekhov — beloved by all my beloveds — leaves me doing whatever is the literary equivalent of nervously laughing at a joke you didn’t quite hear.
The exception to this shameful litany is Tolstoy. His writing feels no more historical, no more bound to a particular era, than the sun does. Whenever I close one of his books I have a version of the thought that is my highest readerly compliment: this book is a spatial anomaly. By which I mean: how can this inch-thick lump of paper contain all these lives and landscapes and miseries and joys? Tolstoy’s books should, by rights, have the density of osmium: it should take a flatbed truck to carry one home.
The Death of Ivan Ilych is Tolstoy at his most spatially anomalous. It’s only fifty pages — you can read it in a couple of icily rapt sittings — but it will claim more space in your memory than certain years of your life.
The story starts (I’m surprised to remember each time that I reread it) not with Ivan but with his judicial colleagues at the courthouse. One of them, glancing through the newspaper, happens across Ivan’s obituary.
“‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘Ivan Ilych is dead!’
‘Can it be?’
‘Here, read it,’ he said to Fyodor Vassilievich, handing him the paper still smelling of fresh ink.”
Ivan’s colleagues do not, to put it mildly, take the occasion to mourn Ivan’s singular loss or to reflect on the brevity of their earthly passage: “…the first thought of each of the gentlemen assembled in the office was of what this death might mean in terms of transfers or promotions of the members themselves or of their acquaintances.” Human beings are not, Tolstoy isn’t the first to note, a sentimental species.
But the interesting thing, structurally, is that before we’re made to care about Ivan Ilych — and we’ll come to care about him desperately — we’re made to feel indifferent to him. This is the first move in the magic trick that is the novella: See this coin? No different than an ordinary coin, yes? Precisely the sort of coin you might step over in the street?
You’re going to weep over Ivan’s death, Tolstoy promises — but don’t think it’s because Ivan is any different than the people whose obituaries you blithely scrolled past (That guy was still alive?!) while eating your breakfast. Ivan is forgettability in human form. Tolstoy speeds us, in a matter of pages, through his unremarkable childhood, his middling career, his zestless marriage. Even his taste in home decor comes straight from the flabby center of the bell curve:
“… it was the same as with all people who are not exactly rich, but who want to resemble the rich, and for that reason only resemble each other…”
With all this Tolstoy is establishing the parameters of his challenge. How to make us mourn the loss of a man who appears to be approximately as irreplaceable as a ketchup packet?
And the answer is: by showing us what it’s like to be that ketchup packet. Because Tolstoy’s super-power — the thing he brings to bear whether he’s writing about Napoleon or a socialite or a fox — is his ability to inhabit subjectivities other than his own. Every creature, Tolstoy knows, is less an assemblage of demographic or biographical particulars than the occasion for a miracle: consciousness. The most significant thing about a candle isn’t the color of the wax or the length of the wick — it’s the flame.
And look how Tolstoy brings us into contact with Ivan’s (flickering) flame:
“In the depths of his soul Ivan Ilych knew that he was dying, but not only was he not accustomed to it, he simply did not, he could not possibly understand it.”
Ivan remembers a philosophy course he once took, in which he learned the famous syllogism: Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal.
“For the man Caius, man in general, it was perfectly correct; but he was not Caius and not man in general, he had always been quite, quite separate from all other beings; he was Vanya, with mamá, with papá, with Mitya and Volodya, with toys, the coachman, with a nanny, then with Katenka, with all the joys, griefs, and delights of childhood, boyhood, youth.”
Here is Ivan’s life, in all its unsummarizable idiosyncrasy, all its intimate particularity, compressed into sixty-four words. We’ve barely heard of Mitya or Volodya, we know almost nothing about Ivan’s parents, we have not a clue who this Katenka is — and this is precisely the point. Because for as long as we’re reading this sentence, we aren’t ourselves, with our needs for explanation and orientation — we’re Ivan.
And the bridge by which Tolstoy transported us from our familiar identities into Ivan’s was that deceptively simple opening about Caius — he was not Caius and not man in general, he had always been quite, quite separate from all other beings. Nothing is so universal, Tolstoy knows, as the secret conviction that we are exempt from the laws of the universe. Tolstoy gets us nodding in embarrassed identification — and then, before we know what’s happening, he dresses us in the memory and predicament of a dying Russian judge.
And that judge, like all of us, turns out to be a spatial anomaly in his own right. Ivan contains more — more memory, more fear, more insight, more pain — than his sallow, dying body would seem to allow. His life and his death are, seen properly, the stuff of opera — unfathomable torments, inexpressible joys. No obituary could ever capture the heartbreaking marvel that is his life.
Which is only to say that he’s utterly ordinary
.
Thank you for transporting my familiar morning with a deceptively simple sentence!
What a beautifully crafted essay.. this was a joy to read. Thank you.