Facing the End: Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" and a Life Well Lived

Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich is short, barely a hundred pages, and it may be the most unsettling thing I have ever read about an ordinary life. Ivan Ilyich is a respectable judge who has done everything right by the standards of his society: a good career, a proper marriage, the correct furniture, the approved opinions. Then he develops a mysterious illness, and as he lies dying he is ambushed by a terrible question. What if the whole life he was so proud of was wrong? What if “doing everything right” was itself the mistake?

Here is what this small, ferocious book taught me about the lives we lead on autopilot, and about the clarity that sometimes arrives only at the very end.

Key takeaways

• A “proper” life can be a hollow one. Ivan’s respectability hid a deep absence of real living.
• The denial of death runs through the whole society around him, and through him, until it cannot.
• Honesty arrives late but real. Facing death finally lets Ivan see his life clearly.
• Simple compassion matters most. A servant’s plain kindness gives more comfort than any status.
• The question “have I lived rightly?” is one we are wiser to ask before the deathbed, not on it.

The most ordinary, most terrible life

Tolstoy tells us at the start that Ivan Ilyich’s life was “most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.” That word “therefore” is the whole story. Ivan did nothing scandalous. He climbed, pleased the right people, avoided unpleasantness, and arranged his home tastefully. He lived, in other words, exactly as he was supposed to, and Tolstoy’s devastating suggestion is that this conventional, comfortable, unexamined existence was a kind of slow death long before the illness came. I found this genuinely frightening, because Ivan’s mistakes are not dramatic sins. They are the quiet defaults of a respectable life, the very ones easiest to slip into without noticing.

The lie everyone agrees to tell

As Ivan sickens, he is tormented less by pain than by a lie. Everyone around him, his doctors, his wife, his colleagues, pretends he is merely ill and will recover, when all of them, and he, know he is dying. This conspiracy of pretence isolates him utterly. Tolstoy is exposing how a whole society organises itself to avoid looking at death, and how that avoidance, meant to comfort, actually abandons the dying person to face the truth alone. The one exception is Gerasim, a young peasant servant who simply tells the truth and helps without flinching. His plain, unembarrassed kindness is worth more than all the polite evasions combined.

The light at the end

In his final hours Ivan asks himself the question he spent a lifetime avoiding: what if I did not live as I should have? The answer, when it comes, is shattering and then, strangely, freeing. He sees that he lived for appearances, for the approval of others, and that he failed the people who actually loved him. But in seeing it, something releases. He feels pity instead of self-pity, and at the very end the fear of death dissolves into something like light. Tolstoy gives him a late, hard-won honesty, and with it a kind of peace. It is not a comforting book, but it is a hopeful one, in its severe way.

What I’m taking with me

The Death of Ivan Ilyich works like a warning delivered from the future. It shows me a man who realised, too late, that a life can be entirely correct and entirely missed. The lesson I am keeping is to ask Ivan’s question now, while there is still time to answer it differently: am I living my own life, or merely the life I am supposed to want? And it leaves me with a smaller, plainer resolve, to be more like Gerasim, honest and kind, especially to those who are suffering and being lied to for their comfort.

Frequently asked questions

What is The Death of Ivan Ilyich about?

A respectable judge confronts his own death and realizes that the conventional, status-seeking life he led may have been empty. It is a meditation on mortality and how to live authentically.

Why is Ivan Ilyich’s life called “most terrible”?

Because it was so ordinary and conventional. Tolstoy suggests that a life lived entirely for appearances and approval, without honesty or real love, is a kind of living death.

What role does Gerasim play?

Gerasim, a peasant servant, is the only person who treats the dying Ivan with honest, simple compassion. His kindness contrasts with the polite denial of everyone else.

References & further reading

1. Tolstoy, Leo. The Death of Ivan Ilyich. (Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude.)
2. Bayley, John. Tolstoy and the Novel. Chatto & Windus, 1966.
3. Wilson, A. N. Tolstoy. Hamish Hamilton, 1988.