“The expression on the face said that what was necessary had been accomplished, and accomplished rightly.” So it seems to Peter Ivanovich as he gazes at the corpse of Ivan Ilyich in the parlor on the day of his funeral. It also seems that Ivan’s face speaks a reproach and a warning back to the living, a warning that disturbs Peter so deeply that he flees the room. But what was this warning? What message is Tolstoy sending to Peter Ivanovich, and though him also to us?
When Tolstoy introduces Ivan’s life he begins with a strange statement: “Ivan Ilyich’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.” As he takes us through this ordinary man’s life, he proves this statement to be true and even more tragic for its ordinary accepetance. Ivan’s pleasures in life were few “the pleasures connected with his work were pleasures of ambition; his social pleasures were those of vanity” and even these were meaningless and empty, for nothing much stood out about him. His ambition? He was passed over for promotion like any man would be; and as for his social life “just as his drawing-room resembled all other drawing rooms so did his enjoyable little parties resemble all other such parties.” Ivan loves neither his wife nor his children, and like all men of society “with clean hands, in clean linen, with French phrases…and consequently with the approval of people of high rank” he visits dark allies and houses of questionable reputation. Ivan has reached the height of happiness in his life – and it is a sad happiness.
However, Tolstoy offers a very different perspective. When Ivan’s illness settles into his body, what torments him most is the deception with which everyone seems to approach him. It is poison to him. Yet Tolstoy shows that this falsity is not only external, but is also internal to Ivan’s state of mind and that “this falsity around him and within him did more than anything else to poison his days [italics added].” For weeks, Ivan suffers – unwilling to address the source of his internal mental anguish and his impending death. He asks only why he suffers so much, “and whenever the thought occurred to him as it often did, that it all resulted from his not having lived as he ought to have done, he at once recalled the correctness of his whole life and dismissed so strange an idea.”
Physical pain builds and finally drives him to call on God who answers him by asking him what he wants and what he lives for. God takes Ivan on a journey through his life showing him the good he had done and the happiness he enjoyed. Tragically, “the further he went the less there was.” Finally, Ivan is driven to ask questions…to ask the question: “What if my whole life has been wrong?” and suddenly “it occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly laced people….which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false.” His eyes are finally opened to the falsity of his life. But now he only has hours left to live and must answer the next question, “What is the right thing?” It is through this question that Tolstoy saves Ivan. For even while he only has hours left to change his life, he still labors. Ivan sees his wife and son and “felt sorry” for them, sincerely pitying them he tries to speak to them “forgive me”. He sees that his death will best relieve them of pain and so chooses to act, in a way, for them. He bravely faces his death, defiantly confronting the pain, “stretched out, and died.”
Now his face is sealed with the expression of his final thoughts. So what is the message he sends to Peter Ivanovich? As Ivan died, he became aware of the fate of his family, “in them he saw himself – all that for which he had lived – and saw clearly that it was not real at all, but a terrible and a huge deception which had hidden both life and death.” This, I believe, is the message that Tolstoy places in Ivan’s face as “a reproach and a warning to the living”. Men cannot live for ambition and vanity alone – the only way a man can live with purpose is to think of others, and if necessary to even die if it be for their good. Ivan realized this; and like the last laborer to come to the field he received his full wages.
