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The Theme of Love and Death in Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2017

Temira Pachmuss
Temira Pachmuss*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois
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Extract

In his Ispoved' (Confession), Tolstoy gives us a painful picture of a man who, in his search for a solution to the problems of human existence, experiences the same feelings as a man lost in a dense wood:

He comes to an open plain, climbs up a tree, and sees around him endless space, but nowhere a house—he sees darkness, but again no house. Thus I lost my way in the wood of human knowledge, in the twilight of mathematical and experimental science, which opened before me a clear and distant horizon in the direction of which there could be no house, and in the darkness of philosophy, plunging me into a greater gloom with every step I took, until I was at last persuaded that there was, and could be, no way out. When I followed what seemed the bright light of learning, I saw that I had only turned aside from the real question.

Type
Articles
Information
American Slavic and East European Review , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , February 1961 , pp. 72 - 83
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 1961

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References

1 Tolstoy, L. N., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: GIKhL, 1959), XXIII, 21.Google Scholar

2 Tolstoy, Leo, On Life, trans, and with an Introduction by Maude, Aylmer (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), p. 164.Google Scholar

3 Ibid., p. 163.

4 Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, XXIII, 18.

5 Tolstoy, Leo, Father Sergius and Other Stories (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1912), p. 243.Google Scholar

6 Countess Tolstoy's Later Diaries 1891-1897 (London: Victor Gollanz, 1929), p. 216.Google Scholar

7 Kuzminskaya, T. A., Tolstoy as I Knew Him: My Life at Home and at Yasnaya Polyana (New York: Macmillan, 1948), p. 366.Google Scholar

8 Gorky, M., Vospominanija o L've Nikolaeviche Tolstom (Berlin, St. Petersburg, Moscow: Izd. Grzhebina, 1922), p. 47.Google Scholar

9 Ibid.

10 Mann, Thomas, Three Essays (New York: A. Knopf, 1929), pp. 106–07.Google Scholar

11 Merezhkovskij, Dmitrij, L. Tolstoj i Dostoevskij: Zhizn', tvorchestvo i religija (St. Petersburg and Moscow: Volf, 1912), pp. 37–38.Google Scholar

12 See, for example, Lavrin, Janko, Tolstoy: An Approach (London: Methuen, 1948).Google Scholar

13 Tolstoy, On Life, p. 77.

14 Ibid., p. 115.

15 Merezhkovskij, L. Tolstoj i Dostoevskij, p. 39.

16 Steiner, George, Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959), p. 251.Google Scholar

17 I. S. Turgenev, Smert', in Zapiski ohhotnika, Vol. I of Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Izd. Pravda, 1949), p. 165.

18 Tolstoj, L. N., Krug chtenija (Berlin: Izd. L. P. Ladyzhnikova, 1923), I, 183.Google Scholar

19 Ibid., 1, 297.

20 Jacqueline de Proyart de Bailescourt, “La representation de la mort dans l'oeuvre litteraire de Tolstoi,” in For Roman Jakobson: Essays on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday (The Hague: Mouton, 1956) , p. 406.

21 Prince Andrey Bolkonsky, who at one time struggled against death because of his love for life, soon reached a state of peaceful and joyful serenity, remote from the reality of earthly existence. This state of remoteness, which, Tolstoy surmised, was an understanding of the meaning of life, in connection with all other mysteries of the universe, we find again in Levin's observations at the bed of his dying brother. Levin saw the expression of sternness on his brother's face and understood that the dying man had perceived something still concealed from Levin himself, and he envied his brother this knowledge.

22 Jacqueline de Proyart de Bailescourt, “La represéntation,” p. 406.

23 de Unamuno, Miguel, Tragic Sense of Life (Dover Publications, 1954), p. 182.Google Scholar

24 Thomas Mann, Three Essays, p. 107.