Book Five- The Death of Ivan IIyich

Another day, another book to aid my procrastination. The Death of Ivan Illyich is another one of those books I had to read in some far-away classroom and haven't picked up again since. It's strange, a lot of the art I've encountered recently has dealt strongly with the themes of death- a recent movie I watched, the Iron & Wine song "Die" I've become obsessed with, and this book. Reminders of death are always skirting around us, yet we choose to see them as harmless, nothing more than entertainment. And that's kind of the whole point Tolstoy tries to make, isn't it? That those of us living see death as some kind of faraway thing, which cannot intrude without our permission. We do our best to shut our eyes and ears to it, but it comes all the same, as Ivan Illiych discovers. Whenever I recall this book, it calls to mind a piece of art by Damien Hirst, a famous British modern artist. The art itself is a dead tiger shark preserved in a tank of formadelhyde, but what gets me isn't the shark itself, but the title of the piece, "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living."

The book itself is a very quick read-  a retelling of the "successful" life of Ivan Illyich, his industrious career, his marriage to an agreeable woman, his nice house full of trinkets and antiques. But when he falls ill, none of this seems to matter anymore, and slowly slipping into death's embrace, he is forced to reconsider the purpose of his entire life.

And what a sad book it is! To realize -on death's door - that,

"his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false..."

Well, let's hope that none of us feels that way, when Death comes for us. Here, Tolstoy makes several points that might seem obvious to modern readers but which were surely very wild indeed for nineteenth century Russian society. In a little novel about the death of an unimportant man, Tolstoy manages to deftly put aside the desire for power, money, rank, and all the trivialities of high society, and instead assert that, for Ivan Illyich at least, sucking the pit of a wild plum in childhood was truer happiness than anything else that had followed. However, Ivan Illyich dies shortly after realizing this, and cannot act on this newfound revelation. But the question remains: if he had recovered, would he have changed his ways, or is death necessary to reveal truths which have been buried within us for a lifetime?

In summary: A quick read, but not a light one. Memento mori, and happy Saturday!