The Insufferable Loneliness of Dying

Lev Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan llyich conveys the unique experience of dying through the narration of the eponymous protagonist’s descent into abyss of the death. Described by Ronald Blythe as evoking “the sheer desolating aloneness of dying,” Tolstoy’s novella paints a grim and unfortunate picture of a man who is alone not only in terms of physical experience from which he suffers but also in terms of the inner agony that accompanies the waiting for the termination of one’s existence.

Following his unexpected fall while decorating his house to look like that of every other man’s of his class, Ivan, or Jean if were Francophiles, begins his dark period of aloneness. He understands his condition, or at least the symptoms of it, while all who surround him are without a modicum of knowledge as to cause of his suffering. One doctor thinks the malady is a “floating kidney”—and Russians wondered why western Europeans thought them backward—another thinks his illness is “something…in the vermiform appendix.” But in reality, none of them are certain to any significant degree. All the while Ivan suffers “with the consciousness that his life was poisoned and was poisoning the lives of others.” Furthermore, his wife, a constant thorn in his side whose pain occasionally goes into remission, thinks Ivan’s illness is his own fault. These attitudes exhibited by those around him all contribute to his feeling he is “all alone on the brink of an abyss, with no one who understood or pitied him.” Tolstoy conveys the classic emotion almost every individual experiences at one point in time: the feeling that nobody understands what one is going through. In Ivan’s case, this sentiment his exponentially heightened with his impending demise.

Moreover, though, Ivan is suffering from an existential crisis that 1) is primarily irrelevant to people who are not about to die and 2) only he can resolve for himself. Ivan wrestles with the fear of what he will be, when he is not, while the others—family and friends—are unfazed by such mysteries. Ivan, and in turn Tolstoy, conveys the universal qualm when he says “Death. Yes, death. And none of them knows or wishes to know it, and they have no pity for me.” When his wife comes in after he has had a bout with this plaguing question, Ivan immediately assumes that she will not understand. It is as though Ivan has become an inconvenience to those around him. The people who would have been regarded as being close to him now await his passing so that this unpleasant period may quickly fade. Ivan is left alone to painfully “sweat out” this final chapter in his life without any for company, with Gerasim as a possible exception. This unfortunate reality compels Ivan to feel that he is and will be all alone throughout this tortuous experience; a sentiment that seems to be reasonably true, considering the strikingly absent mentioning of his family or friends tending to him.

While it may not be difficult to describe the “aloneness of death” for a man with a family like Ivan’s, Tolstoy’s attempt to depict Ivan’s situation raises a broader question: how can something so personal and intimate as the process of dying be adequately conveyed by an external observer? This question is not intended to be a criticism of the masterful Tolstoy. Rather, it reveals that the assumption that has been made in affirming Blythe’s aforementioned statement is that one can truly understand this experience. While I have no intention of resolving the question posed, I will readily concede that at the very least, Tolstoy displays a profoundly convincing conjecture in The Death of Ivan Iliych. (614)