Lectures on Russian literature "Death of Ivan Ilyich" (1884–1886). Death of Ivan Ilyich. The end of the story l. N. Tolstoy "Death of Ivan Ilyich", its ideological meaning and artistic originality

Shishkhova Nelli Magometovna 2011

UDC 82.0(470)

BBK 83.3(2=Pyc)1

Shishkhova N.M. The concept of death in L.N. Tolstoy "The Death of Ivan Ilyich"

The originality and features of the concept of death in L.N. Tolstoy "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" in the light of the modern ethical and philosophical approach, the meaning-forming function of death for structuring a literary plot is considered. Tolstoy's story is constantly in the field of view of researchers of recent decades in this field, who emphasize the writer's concept of the fundamental incomprehensibility of death. The human mind is only capable of stating such a fact, but is not capable of revealing it empirically.

Keywords:

Concept, thanatology, death and immortality, the phenomenon of death, modern ethic-philosophical approach, basic metaphors of death.

Candidate of History, Associate Professor of Literature and Journalism Department, the Adyghe State University, e-mail: [email protected]

Concept of death in L.N. Tolstoy"s great story "Ivan Ilich"s Death"

The paper analyzes the originality and features of the concept of death in L.N. Tolstoy "s great story "Ivan Ilich" s Death" in the light of the modern ethic-philosophical approach. The author examines a sense-forming function of death for constructing a plot structure. The great story by Tolstoy is always in the field of vision of researchers of the last decades who emphasize the writer’s conception on fundamental incomprehensibility of death. The human consciousness is capable only to establish such a fact, but it is not capable to uncover it empirically.

Concept, thanatology, death and immortality, a death phenomenon, the modern ethic-philosophical approach, basic metaphors of death.

The ethical and philosophical approach, characteristic of Russian literature, provides the most profound understanding of the phenomenon of death. The spiritual experience of Russian culture clearly shows that death is not the norm, and fixes its morally negative essence. According to Yu.M. Lotman, "... a literary work, introducing the theme of death into the plot, should in fact subject it to denial" [Lotman, 1994, 417].

In recent decades, there has been a kind of rediscovery of death in culture, which acquires a variety of motives. A relatively new science thanatology emerged as a humanitarian discipline. In K. Isupov's encyclopedia, this term is defined as a philosophical experience of describing the phenomenon of death” [Culturology of the 20th century: Encyclopedia, 1998]. The term is interpreted in the same vein in G. Tulchinsky's article "New terms and concepts, one of the main topics of personology" [Projective Philosophical Dictionary, 2003]. In the humanitarian branch of thanatology, literary experience occupies one of the key places. The meaning-forming function of death for structuring a literary plot, for example, is considered in the article by Yu.M. Lotman "Death as a Problem of Plot". It expresses some fundamental ideas that are equally important for both culturology and literary criticism. For example, about the possibility of creating basic metaphors of death as

interpretative models of culture.

Recently, the postmodernist discourse of death has been popular, the fundamental principles of which manifest death as a “naked” argument of the absurd beyond any philosophical and moral reflections. That is why spiritual and intellectual traditions, national originality of typological features regarding this issue in domestic literature and philosophy acquire a special sound.

The philosophical, aesthetic and artistic experiments of L. Tolstoy in comprehending the phenomenon of death are in the constant field of view of modern researchers in philosophy and literary criticism, because in Tolstoy the problem of death is included in both philosophical, and religious, and moral, and social problems, although this does not exclude its existential solution. Thoughts about death, especially in the late Tolstoy, are generated not only by a biological feeling, but by other, religious and spiritual quests. For the writer, the diversity of individual manifestations of death is very important. But death for Tolstoy is, first of all, the revelation of the true essence of the life of this or that person.

V.F. Asmus, analyzing his philosophical views, wrote: “At the center of Tolstoy’s worldview, and therefore at the center of the concept of faith, there was a contradiction of faith between the finite and infinite existence of the world.<...>Tolstoy was aware of this contradiction as a vital contradiction, capturing most deeply the core of his personal existence and consciousness.<...>The desire to strengthen the root of life, shattered by the fear of death, Tolstoy draws not from the power of life itself, but from the religious tradition” [Asmus, 1969, 63].

Reflection on death is most capable of “igniting” the metaphysical “passion” of a person, awakening in him a genuine philosophical burning, and therefore making his being spiritual.

Programmatic in terms of conceptualizing the idea of ​​death in the work of the late Tolstoy is the story "The Death of Ivan Ilyich", about which he wrote: ". a description of a simple death of a simple person, describing from it” [Tolstoy, 1934, 63, 29]. His hero is one of those people whom Tolstoy ("The Kingdom of God is within you") called "conventional", who lived out of inertia, out of habit. The ordinary life of people, subject to automatism and lack of freedom.

It is curious that, according to one version, the term "thanatology" was introduced into the medical and biological sciences at the suggestion of I. Mechnikov, and in 1925 Professor G. Shor, a student of Mechnikov, published in Leningrad the work "On the death of a person (Introduction to thanatology) ". Shor's book is addressed to physicians, but important steps were taken in it for the development of science as a whole. The author creates a kind of typology of death: "accidental and violent", "sudden", "ordinary"

[Mechnikov, 1964, 280]. It is known, according to Tolstoy himself, that the life story of Ivan Ilyich Mechnikov, the prosecutor of the Tula District Court, who died on June 2, 1881, from a serious illness, laid down in the plan of his story. In his memoirs about the death of his brother, Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov spoke of his reflections, “full of the greatest positivism”, about the fear of death and, finally, about reconciliation with it [Mechnikov, 1964, 280]. T. A. Kuzminskaya, according to the words of the widow of the deceased, conveyed to Tolstoy the conversations of Ivan Mechnikov “about the futility of his life” [Kuzminskaya, 1958, 445-446].

It is obvious how much all this fits into the mainstream of the ideas of the artistic creativity of the writer of the 80s, who believed that the story of the dying and enlightenment of an official is “the simplest and most ordinary”, although “the most terrible”. The insight and awakening that came before death take away the fear of imminent disappearance and the rejection of death, but do not remove the inevitability of the end.

The fear and horror of dying go through such painful stages that any "trickery" prepared by Ivan Ilyich became useless. Any consolation almost immediately lost its meaning. As Boris Poplavsky wrote in an essay on "Death and Pity", "no, not the horror of death, but the resentment of death<...>strike his imagination” [Ivanov, 2000, 717]. This

the resentment of the hero of the story is caused by the accident and ambiguity of the cause of the fatal illness: “It is true that here, on this curtain, I, as in an assault, lost my life. Really? How terrible and how stupid? It can't be! It cannot be, but it is” [Tolstoy, 1994, 282]. For Ivan Ilyich, the most terrible thing about the phenomenon of death is inevitability. The appearance of death becomes more and more “material” with the course of the hero’s illness, i.e. carnal, physiological, causing both extreme horror and disgust: “torment from impurity, indecency and smell”, “powerless thighs”, “hair flatly pressed against a pale forehead”, etc. That is why Ivan Ilyich looks at his wife with a “physiological” look and hatefully notes “whiteness and plumpness”, “the cleanliness of her hands and neck”, “the gloss of her hair” and “the sparkle of her eyes full of life”. The hero’s gaze sharply picks out signs of carnal health, and this gaze is directed at all heroes: Gerasim, wife, daughter and her fiancé with “huge white breasts and strong tight thighs in tight black trousers” In comparison with this excess flesh, his disappearing body becomes frightening, it smells of cold and stench. From these physiological details, on the one hand, death looks even more reliable, on the other hand, even more incomprehensible. We see the perception of death by the dying person himself. And no matter how strange his dying pastime may seem, Tolstoy does not let us forget that this perception is completely different from the view of dying from the outside. Hope and despair replace each other, hatred takes away the last strength. Ivan Ilyich in Tolstoy agrees that Kai is mortal (how can one dispute something that is so natural and legitimate!), but his whole being screams that he is not Kai. The death of another, the experience of his dying does not console the Tolstoyan hero, he is focused on external and internal signs only of his individual process of leaving. The past life seems to him "good", and Ivan Ilyich never sought to get rid of it. The ordinary life of people, subject to automatism and lack of freedom, according to the Russian philosopher L. Shestov, is not life, but death: “Some, very few, feel that their life is not life, but death” [Shestov, 1993, 50]. This feeling will come to the hero, but only in the last minutes. The fear of death and the end put Ivan Ilyich before the need to understand the reality of life as something deliberate. The search for the meaning of his life becomes for the Tolstoy hero not so much an awakening of consciousness as a deadly poison, which he was unable to endure: “And his service, and his life arrangement, and his family, and these interests of society and service - all this could be not that. He tried to defend it all in front of him. And suddenly he felt all the weakness of what he protects. And there was nothing to defend. The consciousness of the revealed truth "has increased tenfold his physical suffering", hatred of everything around him, from clothes to the sight of his wife, carried away his dwindling strength. The premonition of an irrevocably passing life plunges Ivan Ilyich into a panicky, traditional, metaphysical horror.

It is interesting in what way Gaito Gazdanov interprets the creative nature of the Russian writer in The Myth of Rozanov. Gazdanov considers it in an existential vein: "Rozanov is the process of dying," and his merit lies in the fact that he embodied this process. It is no coincidence that the author of the article recalls "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" in connection with Rozanov. He explains the secret of Rozanov's human and artistic nature by the tragic feeling of death: “There are no laws for the agonizing. There is no shame, no morality, no duty, no obligation - there is too little time for all this. The absence of hopes and illusions, according to Gazdanov, is fraught with immorality [Gazdanov, 1994].

The naturalistic picture of three days of agony, pain and a continuous cry of "U / Ou / U" says that the source of unbearable horror - the fear of death - has become an absolute reality for the Tolstoy hero, no "tricks" can already get rid of him. It was obvious that it was useless to wallow in a black bag that could never be untied. There is only one thing left: to suck into "this black hole", to fall into it. Ivan Ilyich finally merged with his tormentor - fear - and got rid of him. At the end of the black hole that tormented him, “something lit up” indicating the “real direction”, and immediately he realized that “his life was not what it needed, but that it could still be corrected.” And he, indeed, manages to correct this at the last moment, opening his heart to others. Ivan Ilyich

does what he dreamed about in the process of dying for himself as the highest good: pities those close to him. And not only his little son, a thin schoolboy with black circles under his eyes, but also his hated wife, whom he tries to say “forgive” with cold lips.

The symbols used in religious books are of great importance to the writer. For example, in the Old Testament, resurrection is described as awakening from the sleep of death, returning to the light after immersion in full night, i.e. into a life devoid of spirituality. Just before his physical death, Ivan Ilyich sees light in a black hole, which finally destroys the fear of death, kills death itself.

The story "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" was repeatedly compared with the story "The Master and the Worker" (1895), in which the merchant Brekhunov is suddenly overcome by a feeling of pity, love for his neighbor, a desire to serve him and even sacrifice his life. He saves the peasant Nikita from freezing with his body, and in return, peace, peace and meaning settle in his soul. It is no coincidence that at the end of the story the dying merchant thinks "that he is Nikita, and Nikita is he, and that his life is not in himself, but in Nikita."

It is interesting that Tolstoy's metaphor of moving from life's journey to the last, death journey is connected with the train, with the feeling of being "in a railway carriage, when you think that you are going forward, but you are going back, and suddenly you find out the real direction." Another metaphor is the image of a stone flying down at increasing speed, faster and faster towards the end, a fall that the writer calls fearful and destructive. The mythologeme of the mountain (eternity, the top) also gets its fully justified place: “I walked downhill exactly evenly, imagining that I was going up the mountain. And so it was. "). Illusion of Eternity and Top - the next "tricks" for Ivan Ilyich.

Tolstoy finds a lot of additional impulses for the development of the theme of dying, extinction. Many mythologemes and metaphors are now habitually common for

postmodern literature actively developing the theme of death (Yuri Mamleev, Milorad Pavich, Viktor Pelevin, Andrey Dmitriev). For the apocalyptic

worldview of the postmodern era, the death mythologeme is one of the

fundamental. And in solving this problem, it is not so difficult to find points of contact between traditional Russian classical literature and postmodern literature. According to Andrey Dmitriev, "death is not a kind of punishment and illness is not a kind of punishment, but rather a kind of edification." These words could serve as a kind of epigraph to L.N. Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilyich.

Critic Marina Adamovich writes about Dmitriev's ability to "generate an accurate system of time - eternity, thereby preserving reality in the artistic space", and ends her reasoning with the following conclusion: "That is why the official term once uttered by one of the Russian critics is "neorealism" ( or new realism, whatever) seems to me to work for this type of prose” [Adamovich. Continent. - 2002].

Notes:

1. Lotman Yu.M. Death as a plot problem // Yu.M. Lotman and the Tartu-Semiotic School. M.: Gnosis, 1994.

2. Cultural studies. XX century: encyclopedia. T. 2. St. Petersburg, 1998. 446 p.

3. Projective philosophical dictionary: new terms and concepts. SPb., 2003. 512s.

4. Asmus V.F. Tolstoy's worldview // Asmus V.F. Selected Philosophical Works. T. 1. M., 1969. S. 40-101.

5. Tolstoy L.N. Full coll. cit.: in 90 vols. T. 63. M., 1994. S. 390-391.

6. Shor G.V. On the death of a person (Introduction to thanatology). SPb., 2002. 272 ​​p.

7. Mechnikov I.I. Sketches of optimism. M., 1964. C^: http://whinger.narod.ru/ocr.

8. Kuzminskaya T.N. My life at home and in Lesnaya Polyana. Tula, 1958. Central Committee:

http://dugward.ru/library/tolstoy/kuzminskaya_moya.html.

9. Ivanov Vyach. Sun. Russian diaspora: language and literature // Ivanov Vyach.Vs. Selected works on semiotics and cultural history. T. 2. Articles about Russian literature. M.: Languages ​​of Russian culture, 2000.

10. Shestov L. On the scales of Job. Heart-to-heart wanderings // Shestov L. Works: in 2 vols. T. 2. M., 1993. URL: http://www.magister.msk.ru/library/philos/shestov.

11. Gazdanov G. The myth of Rozanov // Literary review. 1994. No. 9-10. C. 73-87.

12. Adamovich M. Tempted by death. Myth-making in the prose of the 90s: Yuri Mamleev, Milorad Pavich, Viktor Pelevin, Andrey Dmitrov // Continent. 2002. No. 114.

I. Adamovich M. Tempted by death. Creating myths in prose of the 90s: Yury Mamleyev, Milorad Pavich, Victor Pelevin, Andrey Dmitrov // Continent. 2002. No. 114.

2. Asmus V.F. Tolstoy "s world view // Asmus V.F. The selected philosophical works. V. 1. M., 1969.

3. Gazdanov G. The myth on Rozanov // Literary review. 1994. No. 9-10.

4. Ivanov Vyach. Vs. Russian diaspora: language and literature // Ivanov Vyach. Vs. The selected works on semiotics and culture history. V. 2. Articles on Russian literature. M.: The Languages ​​of Russian culture, 2000.

5. Kuzminskaya T.N. My life at home and in Lesnaya Polyana. Tula, 1958.

6.Culturology. The XX century: encyclopedia. V. 2. SPb., 1998.

7. Lotman Yu.M. Death as a plot problem // Yu.M. Lotman and Tartuss-semiotic school. M.: Gnosis, 1994.

8. Mechnikov 1.1. The sketches of optimism. M., 1964.

9. The projective philosophical dictionary: new terms and concepts. SPb., 2003.

10. Rudnev V.P. Encyclopedic dictionary of culture of the XX century. M.: Agraph, 2001.

II. Tolstoy L.N. Complete collection of works: in 90 vol. V. 63. M., 1994.

12. Shestov L. On the Scales of Job. A Peripateia of Souls // Shestov L. Col.: in 2 vol. V. 2. M., 1993.

13. Shor G.V. On the death of a person (Introduction to thanatology). SPb., 2002.

One of the pinnacles of world psychological prose. Tracing the thoughts and feelings of a terminally ill official, Tolstoy shows how a person runs away from thoughts of death and how death leads him to understand what his life was.

comments: Yuri Saprykin

What is this book about?

A chronicle of the illness and death of a judicial official, preceded by the story of his life. The only work of its kind that tells how a person experiences the approach of the end, what psychological tricks he uses to dodge the realization of its inevitability, and how he finally realizes death is the most important thing in life, which completely changes the understanding of life itself.

Lev Tolstoy. Moscow, 1885. Atelier "Scherer, Nabgolts and Co"

When was it written?

The beginning of the 1880s for Tolstoy was the time of a “spiritual upheaval”: he reconsiders his own life, formulates his creed, and sets out the ideas that will form the basis of Tolstoyism. The idea of ​​the story about the "simple death of a simple man" dates back to 1881; its original title is "Death of a Judge". At the same time, Tolstoy was preparing his Confession for publication, finishing his main religious and dogmatic works - "A Study in Dogmatic Theology" Tolstoy's religious and philosophical work, in which he explores Orthodox dogma and sets out his own understanding of the Gospel. The work was based on the "Orthodox-Dogmatic Theology" of the Moscow Metropolitan Macarius. For the first time, Tolstoy's work, entitled Critique of Dogmatic Theology, was published in Geneva (in 1891 the first volume, in 1896 the second). In 1908, "Research" was published in Russia. ⁠ And "Combining and translating the four gospels" In this work, Leo Tolstoy re-translates the Gospel from the ancient Greek language, trying to separate the "true" meaning of Christianity from its subsequent church distortion. In addition to the exposition of the Gospels, Tolstoy gives his understanding of Christian teaching. In a letter to Chertkov, he writes that "this essay - a review of theology and analysis of the Gospels - is the best work of my thought, there is that one book that (as they say) a person writes throughout his life." In 1901, the work was published by the Chertkov publishing house in England, in 1906 - as an appendix to the journal World Herald. ⁠ - and begins work on treatises "What is my faith?" A religious and philosophical treatise in which Tolstoy outlined his understanding of the teachings of Christ and the belief system that his followers would call Tolstoyism. One of the central ideas of the book is the preaching of non-resistance to evil by violence, which, according to Tolstoy, is the main value of the Gospel. The treatise was published in 1884, but arrested by the censors because of its criticism of the Church. It was reprinted in Geneva in 1888. ⁠ And "So what are we to do?" The work was created in the wake of the Moscow census of 1882, in which Tolstoy personally took part. In the first part of the book, the writer talks about the urban poverty that struck him, repents of the “lordly” lifestyle of his family, and in the second, he tries to find ways to change the unjust structure of society. Fragments of the treatise were published in the journal "Russian wealth" in 1885-1886. The book was published in full in Geneva in 1886 under the title "What is my life", and in Russia - in the publishing house "Posrednik" in 1906. ⁠ . The idea of ​​the story remains unrealized for a long time; On April 27, 1884, Tolstoy writes in his diary: “I want to start and finish something new: either the death of a judge, or the notes of a madman”; it follows from subsequent entries that some outline of the story already existed by that time. The name "Death of Ivan Ilyich" was first mentioned in a letter from Sophia Andreevna Tolstoy to Tatiana Kuzminskaya ⁠ dated December 4, 1884: she reports that her husband was reading an excerpt from a new story; “He writes, as if he had experienced something important.” In the original version, the story was a diary of Ivan Ilyich himself, later (approximately in the autumn of 1885) Tolstoy proceeds to narrate on behalf of the author. The final version of the text is dated March 25, 1886.

House in Dolgo-Khamovnichesky Lane (now - Leo Tolstoy Street), where the Tolstoy family lived since 1881. Photo from 1920

How is it written?

"The Death of Ivan Ilyich" is one of the pinnacles of Tolstoy's introspection: the author follows not only changes in emotions and moods, conscious or unconscious motives of actions, but even the smallest physiological sensations. The story marks a turn towards the "late Tolstoy": the author seems to be trying to muffle the beauty of the style in favor of didacticism. The language becomes drier and more minimalistic: in the words of the literary critic Sergei Bocharov, “the author’s word began to shorten and simplify, shrink, it began to dry out and at the same time become extremely aggravated.” The rhetorical figures of "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" are reminiscent of Tolstoy's treatises (partly created at the same time as the story), but, unlike his journalistic works, the questions asked by the hero "why?" The author does not give a direct answer.

Draft version of the manuscript "Death of Ivan Ilyich"

What influenced her?

Acquaintance of Tolstoy with Ivan Mechnikov, the prosecutor of the Tula court, as well as the history of his subsequent illness and death. Departure from the life of loved ones - Ivan Turgenev (1883) and the prince Leonida Urusova Leonid Dmitrievich Urusov (1837-1885) - official, translator, public figure. He served in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, was the Tula vice-governor. In 1877, Urusov met Tolstoy, and in 1885 they traveled together to Simeiz. He translated Tolstoy's treatise “What is my faith?” into French, considered himself a follower of Tolstoy. ⁠ (1885). Own reflections on the meaning of death, passing through the most diverse texts of Tolstoy - from early diary entries to the scene of the death of Prince Andrei in "War and Peace", from the story "Three Deaths" to "Confession" and religious and philosophical writings of the 1880s.

In 1886, in the next, twelfth part of the "Works of Count L. N. Tolstoy", published by Sophia Andreevna Tolstaya.

Lev Tolstoy. Yasnaya Polyana, 1885. Photo by Semyon Abamelek-Lazarev

Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images

How was it received?

In the very first reviews appearing in the letters and diaries of contemporaries, the story is regarded as one of the pinnacles of Tolstoy's work and world literature in general.

“Not a single nation, anywhere in the world has such a brilliant creation,” writes Tolstoy Vladimir Stasov Stasov Vladimir Vasilyevich (1824-1906) - music and literary critic, art critic, public figure. He began publishing in 1847, collaborating with Otechestvennye Zapiski. For his connection with the circle of Petrashevists, he was arrested and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress. After his release, Stasov went abroad. In 1854 he returned to Russia, took part in the creation of the group of composers "The Mighty Handful" (it was Stasov who came up with its name), helped with the organization of the first exhibitions of the Wanderers. Until the end of his life he worked as head of the art department of the Public Library. ⁠ April 25, 1886. “Everything is small, everything is small, everything is weak and pale in comparison with these 70 pages.” On July 12, 1886, Pyotr Tchaikovsky writes in his diary: “I read The Death of Ivan Ilyich. More than ever, I am convinced that the greatest of all former writer-artists ever and anywhere is L.N. Tolstoy. It alone is enough for the Russian man not to bashfully bow his head when they calculate before him all the great things that the world has given to mankind. Europe...»

The degree of enthusiasm around the new story is such that Nikolai Leskov has to stand up for contemporary writers, whose talent, by all accounts, is incomparable with the greatness of Tolstoy. In the article "About the kufelny peasant and so on." he's writing:

“With worthy praise to the count, some of the critics, in several ways, tried to reveal their especially contemptuous attitude towards all other writers who “also write” and are also “called writers”.
This is reminiscent of one of Pisemsky's heroes, who, riding in a worn fur coat, says to her contemptuously:
- Oh, you bastard! And also called a fur coat "

For Leskov, the main content of the story is how indifferent to the grief of others the “so-called educated people of Russian society” turn out to be, and how “above all this insensitive crowd rises high and majestically... more sympathetic, because he lives, knowing that he "will have to die himself!". Nikolai Mikhailovsky Nikolai Konstantinovich Mikhailovsky (1842-1904) - publicist, literary critic. Since 1868, he was published in Otechestvennye Zapiski, and in 1877 he became one of the editors of the magazine. In the late 1870s, he became close to the Narodnaya Volya organization, and was expelled from St. Petersburg several times for his connections with the revolutionaries. Mikhailovsky considered the goal of progress to be raising the level of consciousness in society, and criticized Marxism and Tolstoyism. By the end of his life, he became a well-known public intellectual and a cult figure among populists. ⁠ , in turn, believes that the new story "is not the first number either in artistic beauty, or in the strength and clarity of thought, or, finally, in the fearless realism of writing," but such discreet reviews remain in the minority - Tolstoy's authority as a writer by this time is indisputable, and if his religious and philosophical writings (which, however, are under censorship) provoke fierce disputes, then the merits of the new story are not questioned by almost anyone.

Nikolay Leskov. 1884 Leskov's article "About the kufelny peasant and so on." (1886) - one of the first printed reviews of "The Death of Ivan Ilyich"

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Vladimir Stasov. End of the 19th century. The critic Stasov was one of the first readers of The Death of Ivan Ilyich and highly appreciated the story in a letter to Tolstoy.

Vladimir Nabokov, in his Lectures on Russian Literature, calls the story "Tolstoy's brightest, most perfect, and most complex work." “One of [Tolstoy's] greatest creations,” writes Lydia Ginzburg. Many more such reviews can be cited: the story is deservedly considered one of the pinnacles of Tolstoy's work. The experiences of alienation, abandonment, tragic absurdity described by Tolstoy, covering a person on the verge of death, will become the subject of research by existentialist philosophers: the researchers note that the concept "being-to-death" According to Heidegger, one of the main modes of existence, in which the true being of a person is revealed. Death is not chosen by us, it is unimaginable for us, but it is always individual - it is impossible to share it with anyone. Awareness of the inevitability of death returns the fullness of human existence: the knowledge that you may not be, makes it possible to understand that you really exist. ⁠ Martin Heidegger largely follows Tolstoy's discussion of death (Heidegger mentions "Ivan Ilyich" in a footnote to the treatise "Being and Time"). The motives of the story will be continued in a variety of works dealing with death: Chekhov in the story “The Bishop” will return to experiencing death as liberation, Bunin in “The Gentleman from San Francisco” will again show how death makes meaningless the usual everyday existence, for Kafka (“ Metamorphosis”), Beckett (“Malon Dies”) and modernist literature in general will be important for Tolstoy’s description of the feelings of absurdity and alienation associated with experiencing one’s own mortality.

There are several free-form adaptations of the story, the most famous of which is Akira Kurosawa's To Live (1952), and the most curious is Ivan on Ecstasy (2000), an independent American film about sex, drugs and the death of a Hollywood producer. The closest thing to the text of the story is the painting by Alexander Kaidanovsky "A Simple Death" (1985), which also uses fragments from other works and diaries of Leo Tolstoy.

Film simple death. Directed by Alexander Kaidanovsky. 1985

How does Tolstoy understand death?

“If a person has learned to think, no matter what he thinks, he always thinks about his death” - these words of Tolstoy, spoken in 1902 in the Crimean Gaspra (when Tolstoy himself was on the verge of death In May 1902, Leo Tolstoy, just recovering from severe pneumonia, fell ill with typhoid fever. From Tolstoy's diary: “Typhus has passed. But I'm still lying. I am waiting for the 3rd illness and death. ⁠ ), cites Gorky in his memoirs. Thoughts about death permeate all of Tolstoy's diary entries (he keeps diaries intermittently from 1847 to 1910), his works of art, journalism and philosophical treatises: death is the starting point or, rather, an impenetrable wall from which Tolstoy's thought is repelled. Death is an unsolvable question and at the same time the source of answers to all questions. It is impossible to reconcile with the thought of death: the human "I" is not able to imagine and accept the need to destroy itself. And at the same time, the thought of death pulls a person out of the cycle of everyday life and returns to the main questions: why do we live, what should we do, what is the meaning and justification of life.

The thought of death is associated with a worldview crisis extended over time, which changed Tolstoy's life, his views on the world and his relationship with literature. Its beginning can be considered the so-called Arzamas horror experienced by Tolstoy on September 1, 1869 on the way to the Penza province, where he was going to acquire an estate. Tolstoy describes this episode in the unfinished story Notes of a Madman (1884-1903). Stopping for the night in a small hotel in Arzamas, in the middle of the night he experiences an inexplicable fear and at the same time feels the physical presence of death: “What kind of stupidity is this,” I said to myself, “what I yearn for, what I am afraid of.” “Me,” answered the voice of death inaudibly. - I'm here". Death creates an insoluble, incomprehensible contradiction for the mind (“There is nothing in life, but there is death, but it should not be”). In the face of death, all past and future life loses its meaning: “I live, I lived, I must live, and suddenly death, the destruction of everything. Why life? Die? Kill yourself now? Afraid. Waiting for death when it comes? I'm even worse." Death devalues ​​life and deprives it of meaning, and this thought occurs to Tolstoy long before the "Arzamas horror"; So, on October 17, 1860, he writes to Afanasy Fet about the death of his brother Nikolai: “He really used to say that there is nothing worse than death. And how good it is to think that it is still the end of everything, so there is nothing worse than life.

Like all the dead, his face was more beautiful, most importantly, more significant than it was on the living. There was an expression on his face that what needed to be done had been done; and done right

Lev Tolstoy

Reflections on death accompany the "spiritual upheaval" taking place in Tolstoy's life in the late 1870s and early 1880s. This process can be imagined as a search for an answer to the question posed by Tolstoy in his Confession: “Is there any meaning in my life that would not be destroyed by my inevitable death?” Awareness of the inevitability of death leads Tolstoy to what he himself calls “stopping life”: “Among my thoughts about the economy, which greatly occupied me at that time, the question suddenly occurred to me:“ Well, you will have 6,000 acres in Samara province, 300 heads of horses, and then? .. ”It was at this outwardly prosperous and happy moment of his life that he was increasingly visited by thoughts of suicide: “And then I, a happy man, took out a string from my room, where I was alone every evening , undressing so as not to hang himself on the crossbar between the cabinets, and stopped going hunting with a gun, so as not to be tempted by a too easy way to rid himself of life ”(he will entrust these thoughts to Lyovina in Anna Karenina).

The realization of the inevitability of death makes Tolstoy seek salvation in religion, and then leads to the thought of its imperfection, of the need to correct and purify Christianity. Here are the origins of the socio-moral doctrine, which became known as Tolstoyism: it is in the face of death that a person comes to the need to abandon any form of coercion and power over his neighbor, which the state, property, civilization and culture bring with them. “All our actions, reasoning, science, art - all this appeared to me as pampering. I realized that it is impossible to look for meaning in this. The actions of the working people, who create life, appeared to me as a single real deed. And I realized that the meaning given to this life is the truth, and I accepted it.

On January 12, 1895, Sofya Andreevna writes in her diary a remark from her husband: “Life would not be so interesting if it were not for this eternal mystery ahead - death.” On September 7 of the same year, Tolstoy writes in his diary: “Recently, I feel death very closely. It seems that material life is hanging by a thread and must end very soon. More and more I get used to it and I begin to feel - not pleasure, but the interest of waiting. "This is the end, and nothing!" - one of the last phrases that Tolstoy utters before his death. In these and many other statements of the late Tolstoy, it is no longer fear that sounds, but humility and acceptance of death - similar to what Ivan Ilyich Golovin, the hero of Tolstoy's story, experiences in the last seconds of his life.

The coffin with the body of Leo Tolstoy is taken out of the house at the Astapovo station, where he died. November 9, 1910

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Leo Tolstoy on his deathbed in the house of the head of the station, I. I. Ozolin. Astapovo station, 1910

What is said about death in other works of Tolstoy?

Death appears already on the first pages of Tolstoy's first story "Childhood": its main character Nikolenka tells his teacher Karl Ivanovich a dream he invented - he seemed to dream that his mother had died. "Childhood" ends with the real death of the mother, which makes Nikolenka experience "a proud feeling: either the desire to show that I am upset more than anyone else, or concerns about the effect that I have on others, or aimless curiosity, which forced me to make observations over Mimi's cap and faces present. I despised myself for not experiencing only one feeling of sorrow, and tried to hide all others; from this my sadness was insincere and unnatural ”(a subtle psychological analysis, which will respond later in the first chapter of Ivan Ilyich”).

In the story "Three Deaths" (1859), Tolstoy comes to the conclusion that death has a kind of gradation of quality - it can be more or less correct, worthy and fair: here, a consumptive lady leaving for Italy for treatment, to the latter clinging to life, a peasant dutifully dying in a coachman's hut, and a tree that is cut down to become a cross on the peasant's grave and make room under the sun for other trees. Obviously, Tolstoy gives preference not even to the peasant, who accepts death with humility and dignity, but to the tree, whose death is included in the natural cycle of life: death is red where the human ego with its desires and passions is absent in it.

In the description of the death of Prince Bolkonsky, another important image for Tolstoy appears - death as an awakening from a life dream: “Yes, it was death. I died - I woke up. Yes, death is an awakening! - suddenly brightened in his soul, and the veil that had hidden the unknown until now was lifted before his spiritual gaze. He felt, as it were, the release of the previously bound strength in him and that strange lightness that has not left him since then. The description of the death of Nikolai Levin is extremely physiological: the suffering of the dying person, shown in the most painful details, as in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, leads to his alienation from everyone around him, removal from all previous earthly life. It is concentrated at one point - the desire for death, which is felt at this moment as liberation: “In him, obviously, that revolution was taking place, which was supposed to make him look at death as the satisfaction of his desires, as happiness.”

Finally, in the story "The Master and the Worker", written ten years after "Ivan Ilyich", we again meet with the understanding of death as liberation, communicating a joyful understanding of the true meaning of life, and affairs- the most important thing that is possible to do in life and which must be done with dignity. The merchant and his driver fall into a snowstorm, the owner saves his worker from death by covering him with himself, and he himself turns out to be a worker who faithfully fulfilled the will of the supreme Boss: “He remembers about money, about a shop, a house, purchases, sales and millions of Mironovs; it is difficult for him to understand why this man, whose name was Vasily Brekhunov, did everything he did. “Well, he didn’t know what the matter was,” he thinks about Vasily Brekhunov. I didn't know, but now I know. Now there is no error. Now I know". And again he hears the call of the one who has already called out to him. "I'm coming!" - joyfully, tenderly says his whole being. And he feels that he is free and nothing else holds him. And Vasily Andreevich no longer saw, heard, or felt anything in this world.

Leo Tolstoy in the circle of relatives and friends. Yasnaya Polyana, 1887. Photo by Semyon Abamelek-Lazarev

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How does Tolstoy convey the psychological stages of illness and death?

Tolstoy is infinitely attentive to the very process of dying - a slow change in sensations, a reassessment of values, a restructuring of the picture of the world. All these changes can be reduced to one denominator: the approach of death pulls a person out of an ordinary, semi-automatic existence, makes him see himself, those around him and his own life anew, and face the last truths of being. Not only is death itself understood as an awakening; even the approach to death turns out to be a kind of awakening from the “sleep of life”. Like Natasha Rostova in the opera (a textbook example elimination Detachment is a literary technique that turns familiar things and events into strange ones, as if seen for the first time. Detachment allows you to perceive what is described not automatically, but more consciously. The term was introduced by literary critic Viktor Shklovsky. ⁠ ), the dying Ivan Ilyich ceases to understand what previously seemed obvious, feels his own body as someone else's, feels the lies and falsity of the usual way of life. “In this sense, dying and impending death is the most radical estrangement that Human" 1 Hansen-Löwe ​​O. A. At the end of the tunnel ... The death of Leo Tolstoy // New Literary Review. No. 109 (3). 2011. ⁠ .

Already after the first appointment with the doctor, Ivan Ilyich looks at the world with different eyes: “Everything seemed sad to Ivan Ilyich on the streets. The cabbies were sad, the houses were sad, the passers-by, the shops were sad. An ordinary picture appears in an unusual light: the emotions of the observer are projected onto it, it has depth. Ivan Ilyich is trying to return to the circle of everyday life: he begins to maniacally follow the doctor's instructions, but an attempt to restart the mechanics of everyday existence does not work - any failure of the vital mechanism, any trouble that would previously have remained unnoticed, leads him to despair. Painful sensations increasingly alienate him from loved ones who continue to fulfill their usual life duties; he begins to feel a lie in their habitual actions - including in the duty care of him. He feels his own body as something alien, not subject to him; the whole situation in which he finds himself is experienced as obscene and unpleasant - in contrast to the "decency" and "pleasantness" of his entire previous life. And finally, he is faced with the realization of the inevitable: “I will not be, so what will be? Nothing will happen. So where will I be when I'm gone? Is it death?

The Hungarian literary critic Zoltan Haynadi, tracing parallels between Tolstoy’s description of death and Martin Heidegger’s concept of “being-towards-death”, notes that awareness of one’s own mortality leads Tolstoy’s hero from inauthentic being to genuine: “In the course of confronting death, when a person measures being with horizon of death (non-existence), all banal everyday life disappears and the deepest foundations of being are revealed ... In the face of death, a person - turning away from the world of things - turns to himself. The meeting with death brings Ivan Ilyich back to himself: he can no longer perceive himself as just one of the ordinary, "pleasant" and "decent" people. Death is not "what happens to others", it happens directly to him and puts him before the question - what is his true "I". He sorts through the memories and impressions of life and finds the very “real” only in the memory of childhood: “It always began from the nearest time and came down to the most distant, to childhood, and stopped there. Did Ivan Ilyich remember the boiled prunes that he was offered to eat today, did he remember the raw, shriveled French prunes in childhood, about its special taste and abundance of saliva when it came to the stone, and next to this memory of taste a whole series of memories of that time arose : nanny, brother, toys. Time begins to flow in a different way, or rather, external time, objective time is increasingly at odds with the internal: “Whether it was morning, evening, Friday, Sunday, it was all the same, everything was the same: aching, not for a moment unrelenting, excruciating pain; consciousness of a hopelessly departing life; the same dreadful, hateful death approaching, which alone was reality, and still the same lie. What are the days, weeks and hours of the day? This stopped time is filled with the experience of physical pain and total meaninglessness - the life lived, the suffering experienced, the impending death. “Lying almost all the time with his face to the wall, he alone suffered all the same unresolved suffering and alone thought all the same unresolved thought. What is this? Is it really true that death? And the inner voice answered: yes, it is true. Why these torments? And the voice answered: and so, no reason. Beyond that, there was nothing else.”

And yet Ivan Ilyich continues to cling - no longer to life, but to the illusion of the correctness of the life lived; even in three days of agony, when his existence is reduced to an animal feeling of physical pain: “He felt that his torment was that he was sticking into this black hole, and even more so that he could not climb into it. Climbing is hindered by the recognition that his life was good. And only on the very threshold of death does he accept the idea that his life was “not right”, he is able to pity his relatives, to free himself from the illusion of his own infinite significance. And accepting his own death, Ivan Ilyich conquers death. Death is over, he told himself. “She is no more.”

Carolus-Duran. Recovery. Around 1860. Musee d'Orsay, Paris

How do the characters in the story try to escape from the fear of death?

In the first chapter of the story, we are told what Ivan Ilyich's colleagues think about when they receive news of his death. "... The first thought of each of the gentlemen who gathered in the office was about what significance this death could have on the movement or promotion of the members themselves or their acquaintances." In addition to career prospects, the comrades of the deceased think longingly that they now “need to perform very boring propriety”, going to a funeral service and visiting the widow, and with joy that death again happened to others: “What is it, he died ; but I’m not,” everyone thought or felt. Pyotr Ivanovich, a friend of Ivan Ilyich at the School of Law (that is, a person who knew him from his youth), being at the house of the deceased, is weighed down by the need to speak words of condolence and consoles himself with the thought of the upcoming card game. Someone else's death does not evoke sympathy in him, moreover, he does not allow the thought that it has anything to do with him.

Tolstoy does not write about this as a particular case; this is a natural train of thought of an ordinary person, Ivan Ilyich was the same ordinary person. Already seriously ill, he recalls a school course in logic: “That example of a syllogism that he studied in Kizeveter’s logic: Kai is a man, people are mortal, therefore Kai is mortal, seemed to him in his whole life to be correct only in relation to Kai, but not to him at all . It was Kai the man, a man in general, and it was perfectly fair; but he was not Kai and not a man in general…” Death is the fate of people in general, but a specific unique “I” is a completely different matter. This separation of oneself from “ordinary people”, a view of their life as something separate, perhaps even illusory, and certainly not related to it, makes Ivan Ilyich the most ordinary, ordinary person. According to Tolstoy, the inability to feel the suffering of others, to experience a common fate, before which all people are equal, creates a collective illusion in which “ordinary people” live, makes their existence mechanical, unconscious, inauthentic. As Lev Shestov writes, “the point here is not the ordinaryness of Ivan Ilyich, but the ordinaryness of the “common world”, which is considered not by Ivan Ilyich, but by the best representatives of human thought as the only real world.”

Which of the characters in the story has a “correct” attitude to death?

As almost always in Tolstoy's texts, an example of a correct (which almost always in Tolstoy's texts means "organic", "natural") attitude to life and death is a man from the people: "buffet man" Gerasim. While everyone around is trying in one way or another, showing formal sympathy, to get rid of the suffering of Ivan Ilyich, Gerasim shows simple human concern for him. As Ivan Ilyich becomes more and more helpless, Gerasim gradually takes on responsibilities that he is unable to cope with, including the dirtiest work. Tolstoy emphasizes the difference between the emaciated thighs of Ivan Ilyich and the strong, strong legs of Gerasim; putting Ivan Ilyich's legs on his shoulders, Gerasim literally takes his pain upon himself. Finally, Gerasim is the only one who simply pities the dying man: “... Ivan Ilyich at certain moments, after long suffering, most of all wanted, no matter how ashamed he would be to admit it, he wanted to be pitied like a sick child anyone. He longed to be caressed, kissed, to cry over him, as one caresses and consoles children.<...>And in relations with Gerasim there was something close to this, and therefore relations with Gerasim consoled him. And these relationships on the verge of death show Ivan Ilyich how important simple human feelings are, which he diligently avoided in life: as Nikolai Leskov writes, Gerasim “in front of an open coffin ... taught the master to appreciate true participation in a suffering person, - participation, in front of which everything that secular people bring to each other at such moments is so insignificant and disgusting.

Alexey Usachov. Illustration for "Death of Ivan Ilyich". First half of the 20th century

Ilya Repin. Illustration for "Death of Ivan Ilyich". 1896

Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images

Why does it appear at the beginning of the story that Ivan Ilyich has already died?

In the first editions, the story is a diary of Ivan Ilyich, the episode with a visit to the house of the deceased is needed in order to justify the appearance of the diary: the widow gives it to Ivan Ilyich's friend. Later, when Tolstoy realized that he could not narrate on behalf of a person with a fading consciousness, and moved on to the story on behalf of the author, this compositional necessity disappeared. But the chapter about how Ivan Ilyich's acquaintances meet the news of his death, and one of them pays a visit to his widow, remained in its place, and she had a new role in the space of the story.

Through the reactions of minor characters who will no longer appear in the story, not only the theme and the main character are presented here - but the main motives and images that will run through the whole story, from standard psychological tricks that allow you to get away from the thought of death, to understanding death as the most important in the life of a deed that must be worthily performed. This chapter is a concentrated demonstration of falsehood, which is present in the everyday existence of ordinary people and which, as will be shown later, was fully characteristic of the life of Ivan Ilyich; so far, the reason for demonstrating this falsehood is his death. In this sense, the episode with the “revolt of things” is characteristic - Tolstoy, with almost absurdist thoroughness, describes the physical, material awkwardness that accompanies the meeting of Comrade Ivan Ilyich with his widow: “Sitting down on the sofa and passing by the table (in general, the whole living room was full of gizmos and furniture) , the widow caught the black lace of her black mantle on the carving of the table. Pyotr Ivanovich got up to unhook it, and the pouffe freed under him began to agitate and push him. The widow herself began to unhook her lace, and Pyotr Ivanovich sat down again, pressing down on the pouf that rebelled under it. But the widow didn’t unhook everything, and Pyotr Ivanovich got up again, and again the pouffe rebelled and even clicked ... ”and so on. As the literary critic Mark Shcheglov writes, such an unnatural behavior of things exposes the unnatural behavior of people, it is just as embarrassing for them to pronounce the words of grief on duty, as to unhook lace from the carving of a table or sit down on an agitated pouffe: “The vulgar pretense of people“ pleasant and decent ”becomes rude, boring and explicit, it cuts eyes" 2 Shcheglov M. A. Tolstoy's story "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" // Shcheglov M. A. Literary and critical articles. M.: Nauka, 1958. S. 45-56. ⁠ .

The beginning of the story chronologically follows its finale, it is not only an exposition, an introduction to the subsequent narrative, but also its sad outcome. The understanding of life, to which Ivan Ilyich comes before leaving, leaves with him, all those around him, having survived his death, understood nothing and learned nothing, their world remained the same as it was, and in their turn the same terrible death awaits them. encounter with your true self. “The first chapter should not be perceived as a prelude to the life of a hero ... this is a peremptory sentence to a machine that exterminates man and time" 3 Volodin E.F. The Tale of the Sense of Time (“The Death of Ivan Ilyich” by L.N. Tolstoy) // Context 1984. Literary and theoretical studies. M., 1986. ⁠ .

Ivan Kramskoy. Inconsolable grief. 1884 State Tretyakov Gallery

Who was the prototype of Ivan Ilyich?

Ivan Ilyich Mechnikov, Tula judge, brother of physiologist Ilya Mechnikov.

Tatiana Kuzminskaya Tatyana Andreevna Kuzminskaya (née Bers; 1846-1925) - writer, memoirist, sister of Sophia Tolstaya. According to the writer, Kuzminskaya (along with Sophia) was the prototype of Natasha Rostova in War and Peace. She wrote stories, autobiographical novels, collaborated with the journal Vestnik Evropy. Author of the book of memoirs "My life at home and in Yasnaya Polyana", published in 1925-1926. ⁠ , the sister of Tolstoy's wife, writes in her book “My Life at Home and in Yasnaya Polyana”: “Ivan Ilyich Mechnikov was a man of 36-38 years old. I don't know his past. It seems he was a lawyer. He died before his wife and served as the prototype of the protagonist in the story "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" to Lev Nikolayevich. My wife later told me his dying thoughts, conversations about the futility of his life, which I conveyed to Lev Nikolaevich. I saw how during Mechnikov's stay in Yasnaya Polyana, Lev Nikolaevich fell in love with him directly, sensing with his artistic instinct an outstanding person.

Tolstoy accurately reproduces the age of Ivan Mechnikov (but Kuzminskaya is a little mistaken) - like the hero of the story, he dies at 45. The years of their lives practically coincide: for Mechnikov it is 1836 and 1881, Ivan Ilyich Golovnin is born and dies a year later. At the time of the deterioration of Ivan Ilyich's condition, his relatives gather for a performance with the participation of Sarah Bernhardt, who really toured in St. Petersburg and Moscow in the winter of 1881/82; it follows from this that Ivan Ilyich's last place of residence was Moscow (and not Tula, like Mechnikov's) - this was directly indicated in earlier editions of the story, but later Tolstoy removed the exact geographical reference to make Ivan Ilyich's lifestyle more generalized.

This is not the only discrepancy between the fate of the hero of the story and his prototype: as Ilya Mechnikov recalls, his brother died of a purulent infection and retained complete clarity of mind until the very end. “While I was sitting at his head, he communicated to me his reflections, filled with the greatest positivism. The thought of death terrified him for a long time. "But since we all must die," he ended up "reconciled, saying to himself that, in essence, there is only one quantitative difference between death at 45 or later." Contemporaries recalled Mechnikov as a person of the highest degree worthy, and Tolstoy himself, according to Kuzminskaya's memoirs, noted that he was "very smart", which does not quite coincide with the characteristics of Ivan Ilyich - however, among those around the hero of the story is also respected, and the true scale of his personality becomes visible only in the perspective that approaching death opens up.

Leo Tolstoy and Professor Ilya Mechnikov. 1909 The story of the death of Ivan Ilyich Mechnikov, the professor's brother, formed the basis of the story

Why does Tolstoy talk in detail about the career of Ivan Ilyich?

The life story of Ivan Ilyich, told in the story, is to a large extent the story of his career: after leaving the school of law, he goes to the province as an official on special assignments under the governor, after five years he is transferred to another province as a judicial investigator, after another seven years - already in the third province to the place of the prosecutor. In another seven years, he expects "a chairmanship in a university city," but it goes to someone else. Finally, Ivan Ilyich receives a position that suits him, which is not called Tolstoy - we only know that it puts Ivan Ilyich two steps above his comrades, belongs to the same ministry and involves a salary of 5,000 rubles a year. If it were not for the disease, this, obviously, would not have become the final point of a career: at the beginning of the story, we learn that Ivan Ilyich's father, Ilya Efimovich Golovin, was a privy councilor (a civil rank in which there were senior government officials - ministers and fellow ministers, heads of departments, senators, etc.) and rose to the position that allows officials to receive "fictitious fictitious places and fictitious thousands from six to ten, with which they live to a ripe old age."

Ivan Ilyich began working as a forensic investigator in 1864. It was at this time, on November 20, 1864, that Alexander II approved new judicial statutes, and this was the beginning of a large-scale judicial reform. General courts (responsible for civil proceedings, not spiritual and not military) are divided into two instances - the district court and the judicial chamber (Ivan Ilyich, before his death, holds a position in the court of second instance). A jury is being established, the irremovability of judges, and the independence of the legal corps. Ivan Ilyich is at the forefront of these changes; as Tolstoy writes, "he was one of the first people who worked out in practice the application of the statutes of 1864."

The fact that Ivan Ilyich serves in the judicial department is not accidental in the context of the story. From the point of view of the late Tolstoy, both the court and the laws, even ideally arranged, are contrary to human nature; there is something deeply vicious in the fact that some people take upon themselves the right to dispose of the destinies and lives of other people. Ivan Ilyich, as an investigator and prosecutor, administers a trial of people - and then he himself turns out to be a defendant in that highest court, before which any human establishments are insignificant. In his service, Ivan Ilyich "quickly mastered the method of removing from himself all circumstances not related to the service"; when he arrives at the doctor's office, he discovers with amazement how this principle now applies to himself: “Everything was exactly the same as in court. Just as he pretended to be over the defendants in court, so the famous doctor also pretended to be over him. Illness decides his fate as dispassionately as he passes judgment on the accused; It is no coincidence that Tolstoy several times uses the word “case” in one phrase, taken in different senses: “He went to court ... and started a case. But suddenly, in the middle, the pain in the side, not paying any attention to the period of development of the case, began own sucking business." Reflecting on how senselessly and incorrectly life was lived, Ivan Ilyich recalls the words of the bailiff "the trial is coming!" and understands that now they refer to himself: “The judgment is coming, the judgment is coming,” he repeated to himself. Here is the court! Yes, it's not my fault! he shouted angrily. - For what?" And he stopped crying and, turning his face to the wall, began to think about the same thing: why, why all this horror? There was a judge, there was a defendant, and this court is much more serious than anything people call this word: in the face of death, this concept also reveals its true meaning and scale.

Presidium of the Samara District Court in 1890. In one of these provincial courts, the hero of the story served most of his life

terrible" 4 Bocharov S. G. Two departures: Gogol, Tolstoy // Questions of literature. 2011. No. 1. S. 9-35.⁠ . The fate of Ivan Ilyich is only a particular example of a general principle; his life is terrible to the same extent as the life of any person who lives "like everyone else."

He cried about his helplessness, about his terrible loneliness, about the cruelty of people, about the cruelty of God, about the absence of God.

Lev Tolstoy

To describe the life of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy uses the words "pleasant" and "decent", these are the terms in which the hero himself thinks of his life, the qualities that he tries to give it - but Tolstoy, placing them in the perspective of impending death, seems to shine through them x-ray, showing their true content. “Pleasant” is everything that is easy and not burdensome in life, that which allows you to slide on the surface without thinking about the essence. Thus, Ivan Ilyich’s service is made pleasant by his ability to clothe any matter “in such a form in which the matter would only be externally reflected on paper and in which his personal view was completely excluded.” “Decent” is that “what was considered as such by the highest placed people”; not only a projection of the opinion of the authorities, but generally socially approved behavior, "everything that all people of a certain kind do to be like all people of a certain kind." The life of Ivan Ilyich is shaped by various forces: the order established in society, the formal machine of legal proceedings, the unwritten rules of "decency" and the tastes of his environment - but not by himself. When a wife, demanding attention to herself, violates “pleasantness” and “decency”, Ivan Ilyich moves away from the family and goes into that sphere of life where you can follow the established routine without exerting mental strength: “As the wife became more and more irritable and more demanding, Ivan Ilyich more and more transferred the center of gravity of his life to the service. In the end, the main joy of his life becomes an occupation, to the highest degree associated with the senseless killing of time: “The joys of service were the joys of pride; public joys were the joys of vanity; but the real joys of Ivan Ilyich were the joys of playing vint. The decoration of the apartment, his latest passion, is again associated exclusively with the decorative side of life, bringing gloss to its surface, and this decoration still obeys the tastes and ideas about the beauty of its surroundings.

What Ivan Ilyich experiences on the verge of death can be compared with instant enlightenment in Zen Buddhism: things suddenly open up to him with their true side, the past life reveals its true meaning. “What happened to him in a railroad car, when you think that you are going forward, but you are going back and suddenly you find out the real direction, happened to him.” What seemed pleasant and decent in a previous life is now experienced as false and false, and the “real direction” is felt only in the glimpses of memories from childhood - and makes the dying Ivan Ilyich feel pity for his wife and son for the first time in his life, who with tears on eyes fall on his hand. “He wanted to say “sorry” again, but said “miss it”, and, not being able to get better, he waved his hand, knowing that the one who needed it would understand.

Does Tolstoy see the highest meaning in the fear of death?

“Ever since people began to think, they have recognized that nothing contributes so much to the moral life of people as the remembrance of death,” writes Tolstoy in the Reading Circle. It is this fear that creates a situation in which Ivan Ilyich realizes the true value of life: if it were not for the disease, he would not have had the opportunity to get out of a mechanical semi-conscious existence. Existentialist philosophers, in particular Karl Jaspers, will write a lot about “boundary situations” that tear a person out of the sphere of everyday life and return him to true being; all these situations - whether it be a sudden illness, a mental shock or an act of self-sacrifice - are united by an acute experience of the finiteness of life. This experience creates a new scale of values ​​that allows you to rebuild life, to find in it something that will not be destroyed by suffering and death - although, as in the case of Ivan Ilyich, the borderline situation does not always leave time for such a "spiritual upheaval".

And at the same time, Tolstoy writes about the fear of death as a state that must be overcome. In his later writings, Tolstoy describes this fear as a manifestation of selfishness, a projection of the human ego, which is occupied only with itself. In the treatise “On Life,” he writes: “The fear of death comes only from the fear of losing the good of life with its carnal death. If a person could place his good in the good of other beings, that is, if he loved them more than himself, then death would not appear to him as the cessation of good and life, as it appears to a person who lives only for himself. It is this understanding of life that is revealed to Ivan Ilyich on the threshold of death: life for others, love and compassion for loved ones is the very “that” that is revealed before leaving. “Yes, everything was wrong,” he said to himself, “but it’s nothing. You can, you can do that.

The final scene of "Ivan Ilyich" can be interpreted in another way: Ivan Ilyich comprehends not only the true content of life, but also the meaning of death. He accepts death and thereby frees himself from fear, and, in a sense, from death itself (“he who is not afraid to die cannot die”). “He recognizes that death is not a punishment and belongs to the order of the world,” writes the Hungarian literary critic Zoltan Haynadi. “It is the law to which all men are subject: no man is immortal. It is impossible to leave life alive. Having recognized this, he is immediately freed from the trembling and fear of death, he becomes free. So freedom is not at the beginning, but at the end.

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The morally destructive power of money. In the same years, he writes one of the most profound works, the story "The Death of Ivan Ilyich". Tolstoy began working on the story as early as 1881, at the very height of that mental and worldview crisis that turned out to be so decisive in his life. He graduated in 1888. This is a story about the most powerful and disturbing person, about life and death, about meaning and nonsense.

The hero of the story "The Death of Ivan Ilyich", his owner, nikoi, appears in all its lies and emptiness in the face of death. Already dying, the hero looked back at the past and could not help but be horrified. Terrified and lead. He wants the readers to be horrified as well. Tolstoy has a very noticeable desire to spoil the reader, to convey to his consciousness, to his feelings the truth and untruth of life. This Tolstoy story about the death of the most ordinary, ordinary person is a lesson and teaching to the living. Tolstoy once said: "All thoughts about death are needed only for life." This applies to his story as well. As N. Ya. Berkovsky noted, in Tolstoy's story "death is taken to test life", it is about death "with a reverse movement to life."

The position in which Tolstoy places Ivan Ilyich is not exceptional in many respects and for many reasons. Most of the heroes of Tolstoy's later works find themselves in a state of crisis. The crisis is going through, recognizing in the defendant, whom he judges, the girl once dishonored by him. Ivan Vasilievich, the hero of the story “After the Ball”, finds himself in a crisis situation, when he sees in the father of his beloved, first a sweet and noble man, and then a ruthless torturer and executioner. The crisis is experienced by Fedya Protasov, who cannot come to terms with all sorts of lies, social and human. From the point of view of Tolstoy, the author of The Death of Ivan Ilyich and The Resurrection, a crisis of views and a crisis of conscience, whatever it may be caused, is not an exceptional, but rather a morally normal state of a person. This is what a person needs in order to open his eyes to the world around him and to himself, what allows him to know the truth and lies - this is ultimately what helps a person to become truly a person.

Ivan Ilyich is helped to become a man by the awareness of the proximity of death. Only now is he beginning to understand how bad he was, how devoid of human content she was: “He got up at 9, drank coffee, read the newspaper, then put on his uniform and went to court. There was already crumpled the collar in which he worked, he immediately fell into it. Petitioners, certificates in the office, the office itself, meetings - public and administrative. In all this, one had to be able to exclude everything that is raw, vital, which always violates the regularity of the course of official affairs: one must not allow any relations with people other than official ones and the reason for relations should be only official, and the relations themselves are only official ... ".

Ivan Ilyich's life was captivated by form, it was devoid of a truly living beginning - and therefore it was (the most simple and ordinary, but also the most terrible life. This life could be called a habit !!, if you look at it with a familiar look. She seems terrible when illuminated by a higher consciousness, an uncompromising judgment of conscience.

"The Death of Ivan Ilyich" is a story that is both psychological, philosophical, and social. The social element in the story is not only present - it is not always present in Tolstoy, but in many respects it is decisive, key. Tolstoy in his story depicts not just an ordinary human life, but a master's life. He denounces the lies of any formal, unspiritual life, but this is how he sees the life of a person of the ruling class. No wonder his hero is an official of the judicial department. He represents the ruling class as having. He is, as it were, a doubly representative of the ruling class, because in his hands, as a judicial official, there is direct power over people - including, first and foremost, over the working people, over the peasants.

And the hero of the story, and those who surround him, people of his class, live an unrighteous, false life. Only one person lives a natural and correct life in the story: a simple peasant, the barman Gerasim. He embodies a healthy, moral principle. He is the only one who does not lie either in words or deeds and does his life's work well. Only Gerasim was able to bring at least some reassurance to the sick and sight-seeing Ivan Ilyich: “... Ivan Ilyich sometimes became Gerasim's mother and forced him to hold mogi on his shoulders and loved to talk with him. Gerasim did this easily, willingly, simply and with a kindness that touched Ivan Ilyich. Health, strength, cheerfulness of life in all other people offended Ivan Ilyich; only the strength and vigor of Gerasim's life did not upset, but calmed Ivan Ilyich ... ”; “... the terrible, terrible act of his dying, he saw, was reduced by those around him to the degree of an accidental nuisance, partly indecent (in the way that a person is treated who, having entered the living room, spreads a bad smell from himself), thereby "decency", which he served all his life; he saw that no one would take pity on him, because no one even wanted to understand his position. Only Gerasim understood this situation and pitied him.

Gerasim plays in Tolstoy's story not an episodic, but an ideologically decisive role. He embodies the only truth of life. The truth that Tolstoy found on the path of his searches and in the name of which he now denounces the lies of both individual human existence and the entire social order.

Need a cheat sheet? Then save it - "The hero of the story by L.N. Tolstoy" The Death of Ivan Ilyich ". Literary writings!

Tolstoy has a story dedicated to the story of a man who, on the threshold of death, felt the meaninglessness of his life. The way the great Russian writer portrayed the torment of a dying soul cannot be understood by reading a summary. “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” (namely, this is the name of this story) is a deep work, leading to sad reflections. It should be read slowly, analyzing each fragment of the text.

However, for those who do not want to delve into bleak philosophical reflections, the story is also suitable. This article is a summary of it.

The death of Ivan Ilyich, the protagonist of the work, is an event that formed the basis of the plot. But the story begins from the moment when the soul of the aforementioned character has already left the mortal body.

First chapter (summary)

The death of Ivan Ilyich became an event not only ordinary, but far from being of paramount importance. In the building of judicial institutions, during a break, Pyotr Ivanovich, a colleague of the deceased, learned about the sad news from the newspaper. Having told the other members of the court session about the death of Ivan Ilyich, he thought first of all about how this event would turn out for him and for his family. The place of the deceased will be taken by another official. So, there will be another vacancy. Pyotr Ivanovich will attach his brother-in-law to her.

It is worth mentioning one feature of Tolstoy's work, without which it is not easy to present a summary. The death of Ivan Ilyich, as well as the last days of his life, are described in the story from the position of the protagonist. And he suffers all the time not only from physical pain, but also from the thought that everyone around is just waiting for his death. In this terrible conviction, Ivan Ilyich is partly right. After all, after the tragic news, each of his colleagues thinks about the upcoming transfer of posts. And also a sense of relief that arose from the fact that an unpleasant phenomenon called "death" happened somewhere near, but not with him. In addition, everyone thought of the boring duties of propriety, according to which one should go to a memorial service and express condolences.

As you know, Leo Tolstoy was a connoisseur of human souls. "The Death of Ivan Ilyich", a summary of which is set out in this article, is a penetrating work. The author outlined in a short essay the fate of the hero, all his joys and torments. And most importantly - the rethinking of spiritual values, which happened in the last days of life.

Ordinary and terrible story

It is impossible for the reader to understand the depth of emotional experiences of Ivan Ilyich without knowing the basic data from his biography. Therefore, in the second chapter we are talking about the life of the protagonist. And only then, in all colors, Tolstoy describes the death of Ivan Ilyich. The summary of the story is only the story of the life and death of the hero. But maybe it will inspire you to read the original.

Ivan Ilyich was the son of a Privy Councillor. His father was one of those happy people who managed to rise to high ranks, receive fictitious positions and fictitious monetary rewards. The family of the Privy Councilor had three sons. The elder is correct and lucky. The younger one did not study well, his career failed, and it was not accepted to remember him in his family circle. The middle son was Ivan Ilyich. He studied well. And already as a student, he became what he later was almost until his death: a person striving to be closer to high-ranking officials. He succeeded.

This is the portrait of the character that Tolstoy created. The death of Ivan Ilyich is, in a sense, not only the physical cessation of his existence. It is also a spiritual rebirth. A few days before his death, Ivan Ilyich begins to understand that his life was developing somehow wrong. However, people around do not know about it. And yes, nothing can be changed.

Marriage

In his younger years, Ivan Ilyich had an easy and pleasant position in society. There were connections with the milliners, and drinking parties with the aide-de-camp, and long-distance pleasure trips. Ivan Ilyich served diligently. All this was surrounded by propriety, aristocratic manners and French words. And after two years of service, he met with a person who was ideal for the role of his wife. Praskovya Fyodorovna was a smart and attractive girl. But above all - a good noble family. Ivan Ilyich had a good salary. Praskovya Fedorovna is a good dowry. Marriage with such a girl seemed not only pleasant, but also profitable. That is why Ivan Ilyich got married.

Family life

Marriage promised him only joy. In fact, it turned out differently. Difficulties in family life are one of the topics that Leo Tolstoy raised in his work. "The Death of Ivan Ilyich", the plot of which at first glance may seem very simple, is a complex philosophical work. The hero of this story sought to make his existence easy and trouble-free. But even in family life he had to be disappointed.

Praskovya Fedorovna arranged scenes of jealousy for her husband, she was constantly dissatisfied with something. Ivan Ilyich more and more often went into a separate world arranged by him. This world was service. In the judicial field, he wasted all his strength, for which he was soon promoted. However, for the next seventeen years, the bosses did not honor him with attention. He did not receive the desired place with a salary of five thousand, because, according to his own understanding, he was not appreciated in the ministry where he worked.

New position

Once an event occurred that affected the fate of Ivan Ilyich. There was a revolution in the ministry, as a result of which he received a new appointment. The family moved to Petersburg. Ivan Ilyich bought a house in the capital. For several years, the main topic in the family was the purchase of one or another interior detail. Life sparkled with new bright colors. Quarrels with Praskovya Fyodorovna, although they occurred from time to time, did not depress Ivan Ilyich as much as before. After all, he now had a good position and a significant position in society.

Everything would be fine if not for the death of Ivan Ilyich. The last months of his life can be summarized as follows: he suffered and hated everyone who did not know his pain.

disease

The disease came into his life unexpectedly. However, it is hardly possible to take the news of a terrible disease in cold blood. But the case of Ivan Ilyich was especially tragic. None of the doctors could say exactly what he was suffering from. It was a wandering kidney or inflammation of the intestines, or even an unknown disease. And most importantly, neither the doctors nor Ivan Ilyich's relatives wanted to understand that the diagnosis was not so important for him, but the simple, albeit terrible truth. Will he live? Is the disease that causes him so much pain fatal?

Gerasim

It is worth saying that the physical suffering of Ivan Ilyich was incomparable with his mental torment. The thought of him leaving caused him unbearable pain. Praskovya Fyodorovna's healthy complexion, her calm and hypocritical tone aroused only anger. He did not need the care of his wife and the constant examinations of the doctor. Ivan Ilyich needed compassion. The only person who was capable of this was the servant Gerasim.

This young man addressed the dying master with simple kindness. The main thing that tormented Ivan Ilyich was the lie. Praskovya Fyodorovna pretended that her husband was only ill, that he needed to be treated and remain calm. But Ivan Ilyich understood that he was dying, and in difficult moments he wanted to be pitied. Gerasim did not lie, he sincerely sympathized with the emaciated and weak master. And he more and more often called this simple peasant and talked with him for a long time.

Death of Ivan Ilyich

Reading the summary, as already mentioned, is not enough to feel the depth of the story of the great Russian writer. Tolstoy described the last moments in a person's life so vividly that it seems that he, along with his hero, experienced the sensations of the soul leaving the body. Ivan Ilyich in the last minutes began to understand that he was torturing his relatives. He wanted to say something, but he only had the strength to say the word "I'm sorry." He did not experience the fear of death that had become habitual in recent months. Just a feeling of relief. The last thing Ivan Ilyich heard was the word "It's over" uttered by someone nearby.

Practical classes in Russian literature of the 19th century Voitolovskaya Ella Lvovna

The story of L. N. Tolstoy "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" (Issues of the history of creation)

Introducing students to a specific textual analysis can go, in particular, by comparing the final text of the work with the published versions, reflecting the original intention of the author and his subsequent work on the text. This will not yet be a scientific study of the creative history of the work, but will be the initial stage of such work.

Usually, a work is taken that has already been studied in practical classes. Students know his idea, composition, images, style, etc. When comparing different editions of this work, it should be shown that the work being done contributes to a deeper understanding of the writer's creative intention and makes it possible to penetrate into his laboratory.

Let us dwell on the story of L. N. Tolstoy "The Death of Ivan Ilyich".

Before proceeding to compare the final text with the variants, the story was analyzed with students. Her idea - about lies and deceit reigning in the life of the ruling classes, is revealed in the light of the general problems of the writer's worldview and work during his "spiritual crisis" of the 1880s. During this period, L. Tolstoy broke with all the usual views of his environment and, as V. I. Lenin emphasizes, “he fell with passionate criticism on all modern state, church, social, economic orders based on the enslavement of the masses, on their poverty, on the ruin of the peasants and small farmers in general, on the violence and hypocrisy that permeate all modern life from top to bottom.

L. Tolstoy's article "On Life" outlines "the meaning of the relationship between life and death." In the face of death, says L. Tolstoy, a person realizes the meaninglessness of activity only for himself, and he is looking for a new meaning in life. Before his death, Ivan Ilyich comes to the realization of the contradictions of his actions, his life with "conscience" and "reason", to the idea of ​​the need for moral rebirth, "enlightenment", which he finds in self-improvement. The revealing, satirical power of the thoughts and images of this story is great. At the time of writing The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy believed that "enlightenment" was possible for all people, including those who were exposed. Here, the satirical power of the story is put to a limit, which is inferior in this respect to the Resurrection. The strongest side of The Death of Ivan Ilyich is in the artist's ingenious insight into the spiritual life of a dying person, in revealing the "dialectic of the soul" before death.

The direct work of the writer on the story took place in 1884-1886. But L. Tolstoy, even before that, had been thinking it over for several more years, writing something down. The final version of the story was studied by the students from the Complete Works of Leo Tolstoy. Now the teacher recommends that you familiarize yourself with the "Options for" The Death of Ivan Ilyich ", placed in the same volume.

Students are given the task to independently compare the versions of the story with the final version, to think over the direction in which L. Tolstoy's work went. At the same time, it is important to note that in the final version it coincides with the options and how they differ from one another. This will help to understand in what direction the work of the writer went.

In the final version, the presentation is on behalf of the author, in the original version (option No. 1) it is on behalf of the Friend of Ivan Ilyich - Tvorogov. This circumstance is of significant importance.

From option No. 1, it is known that the wife of Ivan Ilyich handed over to Tvorogov, on behalf of her husband, the notes that he kept in the last two months of his life. These notes made a great impression on Tvorogov and seemed to him "terrible." He became interested in the life of Ivan Ilyich, traveled to the family of the deceased, learned about him from his wife, children, Gerasim, remembered a lot himself and wrote the history of his life, which should appear before the readers and, perhaps, serve as an introduction to the notes of the deceased.

Thus, the suicide notes of Ivan Ilyich were taken as the basis for Tvorogov's story.

What could have prompted L. Tolstoy to refuse to present the story in the form of suicide notes, supplemented by the story of Tvorogov? Are there traces of the original idea in the final version, i.e., Ivan Ilyich's notes and Tvorogov's story?

Students believe that L. Tolstoy might have seemed unrealistic the very fact of the systematic keeping of notes by a seriously ill, dying person. The narration on behalf of Tvorogov inevitably had to lead to the personality of Tvorogov himself. This complicated the creative idea and led away from the main theme. The validity of this consideration is confirmed by option No. 2 “To Chapter I”, which says that, returning late at night after playing vint, Tvorogov (this was on the day of the funeral service for Ivan Ilyich), suddenly remembered how in the dormitory of the school of jurisprudence Golovin (“marquise ”) sat on the bed and played on his teeth the motive that Tvorogov remembered. Tvorogov's thoughts, however, were interrupted by the words of his awakened wife, etc. All this distracted from the life of Ivan Ilyich and led Tvorogov himself to life.

Not only in the final text, but also in a number of previous versions, Tolstoy refuses both the notes of Ivan Ilyich and the story on behalf of Tvorogov. Nevertheless, in the final text there are distinct traces of Ivan Ilyich's notes (their content and thoughts), as well as the image of a friend (Peter Ivanovich).

In a small passage from the notes of Ivan Ilyich, it is not so much about bodily, but about his mental suffering. Just before his death, Ivan Ilyich realized the lie reigning around him and in himself: “Lie, deceit, lie, lie, lie, lie, everything is a lie. Everything around me is a lie, my wife is a lie, my children are a lie, I myself am a lie, and everything around me is a lie. Here is the conclusion that Ivan Ilyich came to at the very end of his life. Ill, tormented by suffering, Ivan Ilyich was able only in this way (by repeating the word "lie" ten times on three lines of his notes) to convey his despair. To express deep human feelings, Ivan Ilyich, about whom his boss said: "... the first, best pen in the ministry," had no words. Giving Ivan Ilyich's notes to Tvorogov, Praskovya Fyodorovna pointed this out to him: “There is no connection, no clarity, no power of expression. And you know his style. His reports were masterpieces." It is possible that one of the reasons why L. Tolstoy abandoned the form of notes was the need that arose for him to embody the peculiarities of the speech of the terminally ill Ivan Ilyich, who in life knew how to write only business papers. Ivan Ilyich writes that if a lie makes him suffer so much, it means that “a small, tiny particle of truth” still lives in him. He sees his salvation in "thinking the truth with himself in the midst of this lie." And in order to find this truth, he wants to write it down (“and someone else will read it later and maybe wake up”). But after the phrase: “I’ll start over, how it all happened to me,” Ivan Ilyich’s notes break off. Nothing more is said about them either in the variants or in the final text. It is possible that the task that before Ivan Ilyich, to make him wake up, seemed to L. Tolstoy too directly expressed, too rationalistic. And this, among other reasons, led to the fact that L. Tolstoy abandoned the form of notes.

The task set by Ivan Ilyich: to force someone to wake up, was undoubtedly the task of Tolstoy himself. And in variant No. 2, he again refers to it, but expresses it differently, no longer with words from Ivan Ilyich's notes, but with the thoughts of someone who has changed under the influence of these notes: “It is impossible and impossible and impossible to live the way I lived, how I still live and how we all live. I understood this as a result of the death of my friend Ivan Ilyich and the notes he left. I will describe how I learned about his death and how I looked at life before his death and reading his notes. This is how L. Tolstoy formulates the idea of ​​the story for the second time.

But in order to embody this idea, the writer had to abandon both the form of the notes of a dying person and the narration from some other person, and come to a presentation “from the author”, whose face remains hidden. In the final text, with his characteristic penetration into the spiritual world of man, he wrote: “What do you want now? Live? How to live? Live like you live in court, when the bailiff proclaims: "the court is coming! .." The court is coming, the court is coming, he repeated to himself. Here it is, the court!

L. Tolstoy, through the perception of a terminally ill person, exposes the lie that reigns in life. Three lines from the notes of the original edition turn into thirty-one pages of merciless exposure in the final text.

This is how the original intention of L. Tolstoy changed in that part of the story (from the onset of illness to the death of Ivan Ilyich), in which the most important philosophical and moral questions are posed, characteristic of Russian society in the mid-80s. L. Tolstoy solves them at the moment when a person approaches death.

This most important part of the story is significantly expanded compared to the variants, while many places were completely omitted in the final version: version No. 2 "To Chapter I" (about Tvorogov), version No. 6 "To Chapter IV" (about how Ivan Ilyich, in a conversation with a friend, said that he considers himself a happy person), option No. 7 "To Chapter IV" (as Ivan Ilyich said that he did not understand the fear of death), option No. 10 "To Chapter IV" (about the change in Ivan's attitude Ilyich to his wife and children), option No. 11 "To Chapter VIII" (on the pretense of doctors).

Based on the features of the creative method of L. Tolstoy, students try to understand what caused these exceptions. They find that the variants and the 'final edition are closest to each other in the first three chapters. Both in the variants and in the final text - regardless of who is narrating, Tvorogov or the author - the story begins with the announcement of the death of Ivan Ilyich Golovin. Obviously, L. Tolstoy considered this moment in the composition of the story to be obligatory. Thus, the thought of a person's death accompanies, according to Tolstoy, everything that is told about his life. So, each of Ivan Ilyich's colleagues does not think about the death of a comrade, but immediately begins to think about how this death will affect him and his loved ones (moving in office, receiving a higher salary).

Both in the variants and in the final version, L. Tolstoy describes the atmosphere in the family of Ivan Ilyich after his death.

It is easy to detect many new details in the final text: the confusion of a person in the presence of a dead man is increased, whose face, in addition to significance, expresses "a reproach or a reminder to the living." The wife of Ivan Ilyich is depicted differently: the author, not in the same way as in the variants, speaks of her resemblance to other widows. In the final text, L. Tolstoy, as it were, closely examines the situation: each object, each impression becomes clearer and more tangible. So, in the variants there is no small incident with the pouffe, with its “out of order springs”. Meanwhile, this incident clearly showed all the insincerity of the feelings of Ivan Ilyich's wife.

Unusually for L. Tolstoy, things reveal the reigning coldness and falseness. But these things “speak” in a completely different way than they “speak” in Gogol. There, every thing complements the owner and, as it were, expresses him himself (“and I, too, Sobakevich”). In Tolstoy, not things in themselves, but a person's attitude towards them characterizes his state of mind. The poverty of the inner world of Ivan Ilyich's wife is emphasized by her story about the suffering of her husband. According to her, he, “without translating his voice”, shouted for three days. But it was not his torment, but the way his cry affected her nerves that occupied Praskovya Fyodorovna.

In the final version of the story, falsehood makes up the very atmosphere of the life of all these people.

Here is a friend of the deceased, Pyotr Ivanovich, after a conversation with Praskovya Fyodorovna, was horrified by the suffering of Ivan Ilyich. But it was not sympathy for Ivan Ilyich, not pain for him that shocked Pyotr Ivanovich, no, "he became afraid for himself."

"The past history of Ivan Ilyich's life was the most simple and ordinary and the most terrible." Talking about the life of Ivan Ilyich, in the variants and in the final text, the writer gives it not in a consistent development, but in stages, stepwise. It can be seen that Ivan Ilyich deviates more and more from the truth.

But in the final text of the story, L. Tolstoy emphasizes what was only indicated in the original versions: from the point of view of generally recognized morality and morality, Ivan Ilyich was not a bad person; in official matters he was "extremely restrained, official and even strict". He perfectly knew how to "separate official duties from private life." And when it was dictated by the moment, he adopted a tone of "moderate liberality", "slight dissatisfaction with the government", and this, undoubtedly, helped him to ensure that his life in the new city was "very pleasant." None of this was in the (original) versions.

Both the image of Praskovya Fedorovna and the motives for Ivan Ilyich's marriage in the final version are given by Tolstoy differently than in the original version. In the original version, Praskovya Fedorovna was no longer a young girl, who at first was “seduced”, and then “little by little began to drag Ivan Ilyich and pulled it”. In the final text, she turned into the most attractive, intelligent, brilliant girl of the circle in which Ivan Ilyich moved, and he "established a playful, easy relationship with Praskovya Fyodorovna." The image of Ivan Ilyich that L. Tolstoy created in the final version, Golovin’s constant desire for a life “easy, pleasant, cheerful and always decent and approved by society” made it impossible for him to marry a woman, like the “maiden” mentioned in the original story options.

The family life of Ivan Ilyich is also depicted differently, his disappointment in it is differently motivated. L. Tolstoy shows how, rising through the ranks, Ivan Ilyich finally turns into an official-bureaucrat with a well-established philosophy.

In the final version of the story, L. Tolstoy seeks to emphasize not so much the individual characteristics of a person’s personality as the typical features of people in a certain environment and occupation. For example, describing the apartment that Ivan Ilyich arranged with such care, L. Tolstoy writes: “In essence, it was the same thing that happens to all not quite rich people, but those who want to be like the rich, and therefore only look like a friend on a friend." Strengthening in the final edition the revealing criticism of the bureaucracy as a whole, L. Tolstoy to some extent follows in the footsteps of Gogol, unexpectedly repeating even Gogol's expression: “There was a certain kind of peace; for the inn was also of a well-known kind.”

Comparison of revisions is usually very exciting for students, it gives them the opportunity to note new, previously unnoticed aspects in the text. Such work acquaints students with the writer's creative searches and with the text of a work of art in more detail and deeper.

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From the author's book

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From the author's book

From the author's book

On the death of Tolstoy When, on a gloomy autumn morning, the carriage with the remains of Leo Tolstoy quietly approached the station, the coffin was picked up by the peasants of Yasnaya Polyana and slowly carried along their native hills and dales to their final resting place. And it seemed that, together with them,