Critical Essay | Critical Essay by David Patterson

Critical Essay by David Patterson

SOURCE: Patterson, David. “The Life of Ivan Il'ich.” Thought 65, no. 257 (June 1990): 143-54.

In the following essay, Patterson maintains that “Ivan's difficulty lies not in saying yes to death but in distinguishing between life and death, that is, in perceiving the substance of spiritual life.”

In an article on Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Il'ich, Gary Jahn asserts that “there are, in fact, few stories whose intended meaning is so abundantly clear” (237). But, judging from the varied reaction to the tale, nothing could be so abundantly false. Indeed, Jahn's article itself represents a misunderstanding of the work. Mistakenly supposing that Tolstoy sets out first to frighten and then to reconcile the reader with death, Jahn's concern is whether or not the piece is artistically successful. Not only is his point in valid, since his initial premise is wrongheaded, but any response to this text on a strictly aesthetic level constitutes a flight from its collisions in the manner of Ivan Il'ich himself. Jahn's false assumption that the problem facing Ivan is the acceptance of death, however, is fairly common among the critics. Such a view is shared, for example, by Edward Wasiolek (177), Robert Russell (629), and Michael V. Williams (230). Even Boris Sorokin, in one of the better studies of the tale, asserts that its theme is “the confrontation and eventual reconciliation of the individual with death” (487). The erroneous notion that Tolstoy explores the difficulty of giving death a nod has led further to perhaps the most misleading of the criticism of Ivan Il'ich [The Death of Ivan Il'ich], namely the psychology-of-death or the death-and-dying articles.¹ Like the articles that focus on the acceptance of death, these investigations fall prey to the very confusion—to the very death—that Ivan himself suffers.

Some critics, however, have had the insight to at least see that Ivan's difficulty lies not in saying yes to death but in distinguishing between life and death, that is, in perceiving the substance of spiritual life. Rima Salys, for instance, acknowledges the intensifying of Ivan's spiritual life (23), yet this study amounts to little more than a summary of Tolstoy's piece. In a more thorough analysis John Donnelly argues that “a person is dead when stripped of his autonomy regardless of how operative his cerebral functions. … Death is viewed as alienation from virtue” (117). Also taking up the virtue or value...
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