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4.01 AVERAGE
4.01 AVERAGE
4/5
Read this if you'd like to become a little more terrified about death.
Read this if you'd like to become a little more terrified about death.
135th book of 2020.
The wind and rain has started driving here; by that I mean, it whistles in the gaps in my window, and the rain sometimes comes down sideways. It's not true rain yet, just drizzle - fine as mist. For this sort of weather there are certain books to be read, and this is one of them.
Death is a subject Art often attends, along with love. It seems to me that they are sometimes the two opposites rather than birth and death. Why is that? In actuality they are not opposites, one who is loved can still die. I've seen it. Is it our relationship with death, then? That there is love, which is surely, in turn, life, and the opposite of that must be, then, death? This doesn't entirely work either. I've known people who have chosen to die, and I've known people who are relieved when death finally comes. Whether they are or aren't is beside the point - the point here is that Ivan Ilyich is dead.
Ilyich pities those around him as he dies, which to me, as a twenty-three year old, seems bizarre, almost unbelievable. Imagine being on the precipice for death and not pitying yourself; I cannot understand it. There is a reason for that: I have not been close to death. In a way, I think partly I cannot truly appreciate Tolstoy's work. That's a cheat answer though. I can appreciate the writing, the character (for Ilyich has become a great interest of mine - I say that as if he is a type of plant or animal) and the revelations that strike at the end of the story... Well how can I not feel them within me, despite not feeling them myself? Once, in school, I described literature as my elder brother. I am the eldest son in my family and often felt cheated when looking back at my brother (two years junior) as he joined the school I had already been in for two years with comfortable ease; he had seen me wearing the uniform, heard the stories of my classes, the playground, it was as if he had already been there himself. I, on the contrary, had faced it alone - every new school I started was full of the thing I dreaded the most: the unknown. My point, with literature being my elder brother, was that I could read about things that people were doing before I had to: love, heartbreak, grief, etc. Maybe Tolstoy is my elder brother here and he is teaching me about what I will face (and who knows when?) when I face death itself. Before perhaps I lay about like Ilyich and wondered, Agony, death... What for? It is a question I ask the news these days more than my own existence. I'm too young for that. Ivan Ilyich has faced his death and met it - I saw him do it, I heard him do it. First I listened to his screams... his fall from grace, but one can only fall so far - there is always the ground.
Eventually it will be no more, and we will say - It's no more. For there is nothing else to say when we face it. Maybe we will understand that In the place of death there was light - in which death won't be the opposite of love, but perhaps part of it, or a product of it.
The wind and rain has started driving here; by that I mean, it whistles in the gaps in my window, and the rain sometimes comes down sideways. It's not true rain yet, just drizzle - fine as mist. For this sort of weather there are certain books to be read, and this is one of them.
Death is a subject Art often attends, along with love. It seems to me that they are sometimes the two opposites rather than birth and death. Why is that? In actuality they are not opposites, one who is loved can still die. I've seen it. Is it our relationship with death, then? That there is love, which is surely, in turn, life, and the opposite of that must be, then, death? This doesn't entirely work either. I've known people who have chosen to die, and I've known people who are relieved when death finally comes. Whether they are or aren't is beside the point - the point here is that Ivan Ilyich is dead.
Ilyich pities those around him as he dies, which to me, as a twenty-three year old, seems bizarre, almost unbelievable. Imagine being on the precipice for death and not pitying yourself; I cannot understand it. There is a reason for that: I have not been close to death. In a way, I think partly I cannot truly appreciate Tolstoy's work. That's a cheat answer though. I can appreciate the writing, the character (for Ilyich has become a great interest of mine - I say that as if he is a type of plant or animal) and the revelations that strike at the end of the story... Well how can I not feel them within me, despite not feeling them myself? Once, in school, I described literature as my elder brother. I am the eldest son in my family and often felt cheated when looking back at my brother (two years junior) as he joined the school I had already been in for two years with comfortable ease; he had seen me wearing the uniform, heard the stories of my classes, the playground, it was as if he had already been there himself. I, on the contrary, had faced it alone - every new school I started was full of the thing I dreaded the most: the unknown. My point, with literature being my elder brother, was that I could read about things that people were doing before I had to: love, heartbreak, grief, etc. Maybe Tolstoy is my elder brother here and he is teaching me about what I will face (and who knows when?) when I face death itself. Before perhaps I lay about like Ilyich and wondered, Agony, death... What for? It is a question I ask the news these days more than my own existence. I'm too young for that. Ivan Ilyich has faced his death and met it - I saw him do it, I heard him do it. First I listened to his screams... his fall from grace, but one can only fall so far - there is always the ground.
Eventually it will be no more, and we will say - It's no more. For there is nothing else to say when we face it. Maybe we will understand that In the place of death there was light - in which death won't be the opposite of love, but perhaps part of it, or a product of it.
dark
reflective
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
N/A
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
A book I read in lockdown last year about a wasted life going along getting along. Whatever the banality of the trite expression of following your dreams the wasted life of following expectations without a thought and compromising integrity for the comforts of a quiet life is worse. simple summation the unexamined life is not worth living and this book paints with the grotesquery of realizing on your death bed that the time spent was a waste. Very focusing book if heeded.
reflective
sad
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
I’d be curious to return to this story in ten years. There’s an irony in reading this for the first time as a first-year law student. An irony that I’m hesitant to unpack for the sake of self-preservation.
The Caius section, and its placement in the story, is brilliant. I continued to think of Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up.” I was reminded of Camus’ idea of dread as an inevitable checkpoint for the rational mind, too.
side note: homoeroticism w/ Gerashim?
Returning to The Crack-Up, Fitzgerald says he disliked all but the very young and the very old. Ivan is similar. I’m curious whether Gerashim exists as a bridge between Ivan and son (who remains innocent), or if Gerashim’s class (Russian Peasant) renders him child-like in Tolstoy’s eyes?
“He wanted to be caressed, kissed, wept over, as children are caressed and comforted.” I’m thinking of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor and of this story’s final scene.
There’s a choice to eschew the words of Ivan’s servants in an attempt at a dissociative effect (?)—it’s giving eat the rich—or it’s an attempt by Tolstoy to underscore Ivan’s lack of concern for anyone else in his house. Again, interpret according to the Marxist/Christian/Existentialist lens of your choice.
A brief Proust effect predating Proust by about a generation.
The story moves along Kierkegaard’s Aesthetic, Ethical, Religious stages so far as I can tell. I don’t know enough about either Tolstoy or Kierkegaard to connect the two more directly.
Three final things:
(1) “If I were to say that I have not lived as one ought. But that cannot possibly be acknowledged…” no further comment.
(2) “the boy seized it, pressed it to his lips, and wept.” Again, shades of TBK.
(3) TOBIAS WOLFF. I’ve never connected the two, but Tolstoy’s influences are ALL over Wolff’s work. I’ll read the rest of Tolstoy to better understand Wolff, if for no other reason.
On that note, here’s a Wolff interview snippet: “The stories of mine that I like the least are the ones I can look at now and see I already had the answers when I was writing them. I think that is a weakness in a story. I love “Master and Man” more than I love “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.”
Later in the interview, this Chekhov quote through Wolff’s memory:
“The human heart is a slumbering forest.”
The Caius section, and its placement in the story, is brilliant. I continued to think of Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up.” I was reminded of Camus’ idea of dread as an inevitable checkpoint for the rational mind, too.
side note: homoeroticism w/ Gerashim?
Returning to The Crack-Up, Fitzgerald says he disliked all but the very young and the very old. Ivan is similar. I’m curious whether Gerashim exists as a bridge between Ivan and son (who remains innocent), or if Gerashim’s class (Russian Peasant) renders him child-like in Tolstoy’s eyes?
“He wanted to be caressed, kissed, wept over, as children are caressed and comforted.” I’m thinking of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor and of this story’s final scene.
There’s a choice to eschew the words of Ivan’s servants in an attempt at a dissociative effect (?)—it’s giving eat the rich—or it’s an attempt by Tolstoy to underscore Ivan’s lack of concern for anyone else in his house. Again, interpret according to the Marxist/Christian/Existentialist lens of your choice.
A brief Proust effect predating Proust by about a generation.
The story moves along Kierkegaard’s Aesthetic, Ethical, Religious stages so far as I can tell. I don’t know enough about either Tolstoy or Kierkegaard to connect the two more directly.
Three final things:
(1) “If I were to say that I have not lived as one ought. But that cannot possibly be acknowledged…” no further comment.
(2) “the boy seized it, pressed it to his lips, and wept.” Again, shades of TBK.
(3) TOBIAS WOLFF. I’ve never connected the two, but Tolstoy’s influences are ALL over Wolff’s work. I’ll read the rest of Tolstoy to better understand Wolff, if for no other reason.
On that note, here’s a Wolff interview snippet: “The stories of mine that I like the least are the ones I can look at now and see I already had the answers when I was writing them. I think that is a weakness in a story. I love “Master and Man” more than I love “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.”
Later in the interview, this Chekhov quote through Wolff’s memory:
“The human heart is a slumbering forest.”
My fave of Tolstoy's works that I have read. Very interesting.
dark
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
went into this for a quick read before the year ends and came away with a renewed sense of existential dread :)
challenging
dark
reflective