thesis statement for the death of ivan ilych

Reason and Meaning

Philosophical reflections on life, death, and the meaning of life, tolstoy: “the death of ivan ilyich”.

Leo Tolstoy ’s short novel, The Death of Ivan Ilyich , provides a great introduction to understanding the connection between death and the meaning of life. It tells the story of a forty-five-year-old lawyer who is self-interested, opportunistic, and busy with mundane affairs. He has never considered his own death until disease strikes. Now, as he confronts his mortality, he wonders what his life has meant, whether he has made the right choices, and what will become of him. For the first time, he is becoming … conscious.

The novel begins a few moments after Ivan’s death, as family members and acquaintances have gathered to mark his passing. These people don’t understand death, because they cannot really comprehend their own deaths. For them, death is something objective that is not happening to them. They see death as Ivan did all his life, as an objective event rather than a subjective existential experience. “Well isn’t that something—he’s dead, but I’m not, was what each of them thought or felt.” [i] They only praise God that they are not dying, and immediately consider how his death might be to their advantage in terms of money or position.

The novel then takes us back thirty years to the prime of Ivan’s life. He lives a life of mediocrity, studies law, and becomes a judge. Along the way he expels all personal emotions from his life, doing his work objectively and coldly. He is a strict disciplinarian and father figure, the quintessential Russian head of the household. Jealous and obsessed with social status, he is happy to get a job in the city where he buys and decorates a large house. While decorating he falls and hits his side, an accident that will facilitate the illness that eventually kills him. He becomes bad-tempered and bitter, refusing to come to terms with his own death. As his illness progresses a peasant named Gerasim stays by his bedside, becoming his friend and confidant.

Only Gerasim shows sympathy for Ivan’s torment—offering him kindness and honesty—while his family thinks that Ivan is a bitter old man. Through his friendship with Gerasim Ivan begins to look at his life anew, realizing that the more successful he became, the less happy he was. He wonders whether he has done the right thing, and comprehends that by living as others expected him to, he may not have lived as he should. His reflection brings agony. He cannot escape the belief that the kind of man he became was not the kind of man he should have been. He is finally experiencing the existential phenomenon of death.

Gradually he becomes more contented and begins to feel sorry for those around him, realizing that they are too involved in the life he is leaving to understand that it is artificial and ephemeral. He dies in a moment of exquisite happiness. On his deathbed: “ It occurred to him 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.” [ii]

Tolstoy’s story forces us to consider how painful it is to reflect on a life lived without meaning, and how the finality of death seals any possibility of future meaning. If, when we approach the end of our lives, we find that they were not meaningful—and there will be nothing we can do to rectify the situation. What an awful realization that must be. It was as if Kierkegaard had Ilyich in mind when he said:

This is what is sad when one contemplates human life, that so many live out their lives in quiet lostness … they live, as it were, away from themselves and vanish like shadows. Their immortal souls are blown away, and they are not disquieted by the question of its immortality, because they are already disintegrated before they die. [iii]

Now consider an even more chilling question. What difference would it make even if a life had been meaningful? Wouldn’t death erase most, if not all, of its meaning anyway? Wouldn’t it be even more painful to leave a life of meaningful work and family? Perhaps we should live a meaningless life to reduce the pain we will feel when leaving it? But then that doesn’t seem right either.

Summary – Confronting the reality of death forces us to reflect on the meaning of life.

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[i] Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (New York: Bantam Books, 1981), 37. [ii] Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich , Chapter XI. [iii] Soren Kierkegaard, “Balance between Esthetic and Ethical,” in Either/Or , vol. II, Walter Lowrie, trans., (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1944).

Excellent summary of one of my favorite Tolstoy works. One thing only I would add. That to read “The Death of Ivan Ilych” is to know what it is like to die. Tolstoy’s description of Ivan’s final hours, in agony yet eventually breaking through that into a mystical calm, proved prescient, remarkably like the descriptions of those who have returned from near death experiences.

Wow extremely deep article, reminds me of Thoreau. “Most men live lives of quiet desperation ” “Make this your business in life, learn how to feel Joy ” Seneca

Ivan Ilyich, has never considered his own death until disease struck. Now, as he confronts his mortality, he wonders what his life has meant, whether he has made the right choices, and what will become of him. For the first time he is becoming , not conscious, he has always been conscious… but worried, what is he so worried about and why now? As we look in on the scene from our perch as a fly on the wall, we see his family and friends gathered and talking, perhaps not quite so grief stricken as Ivan might have thought he wished, but respectful and thoughtful as they consider how his passing will affect their lives and fortune! This is normal human behaviour, when we attend funerals we are all glad it was them and not us! In his final days Ivan had a friend, an impromptu friend, a man, who, because he was from a much different class with much different concerns, could look at Ivan and see him objectively and could detect and sympathize with his pain as he would have with any creature in pain, ideas of self importance or the meaning of life were far from his thoughts, but like all good people He tried to help any creature that He found suffering, without any need for self examination he felt he was a Good man, and that was all he needed to feel to claim his place among the Righteous here on Earth! and the place that surely awaited him in the hereafter! Did Gerasim (the friend’s) life have meaning? He was unimportant, and uncelebrated, can unimportant, uncelebrated people live meaningful lives? He was a blessing for Ivan Ilyich who surely appreciated him and has kind ministrations, but did anyone else note his presence or absence when he was gone? Possibly he didn’t have to worry about these things, his internal reverie protected him from such concerns. Perhaps the question is; to live meaningful lives do we have to be acclaimed by others as being meaningful and important, or can we accept that life is a lottery and what ever role turns up for you, you can be a good person and do what you can to make the World a better place! It probably is good to be regarded as important, a useful tool in your tool box, as long as you don’t start to think that you really are important, we live in an ephemeral ever-changing World where Death always awaits as it always has. The consequence of being born is that we have to die, once you are dead you will have no regrets!

Thank you Dr. M. and all the other posters.

My thoughts at 76 years of age: I neither confirm, nor deny the existence of God, or an afterlife. But the mere fact that I don’t know gives me, if not faith, at least a tiny hope that I might have another chance at achieving meaning.

thanks for the thoughtful comment. JGM

I have heard commentators say that a key part of the philosophical method employed by Socrates in every matter was to insist that his interlocuters state precise definitions of key terms before proceeding logically toward any moral judgment or conclusion on a matter.

So, for example, in this instance, Socrates might push us to arrive at precise-as-possible definitions of “death” and “meaning.”

But does this “philosophical method” really lead us to satisfying results? Does it just lead to endless discussion, arguing, theorizing, rationalizing, and nitpicking?

I wish there was a philosophical method or approach that could be used for all matters in life; a trustworthy, valid, convincing method.

Take for example this: Lately in the news we hear a lot about “Critical Race Theory.” I heard someone talking about Critical Race Theory on TV, and she used these phrases and terms:

“unconditional love” “equity” “trauma” “Black Lives Matter” “White Supremacy” “PSTD”

I believe that this person had, operating in her mind (almost like a computer Operating System), philosophical system (complete with views on metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, and aesthetics), whether she fully realized it or not. Mostly, I think she really did not have much of a perspective on her own mind, on how it works, on what it’s innate biological and psychological needs and limits are, and so forth.

The question is: How should I (or you) evaluate that person’s philosophical system?

There are all those Conservatives saying that Critical Race Theory is just warmed over, recycled, or revived Communism or Marxism. Is there ANY merit to that judgment? I think there is some degree of legitimacy to that view. Some people do get excited by Utopian visions (of the Left or of the Right), and so fail to exercise critical thinking on what excites them, much as a person who is in the throes of Romantic Love is often not a good judge of the character of the person they love.

But, to many in the Right Wing, everything that is not Right Wing is Communism or Marxism, and to many in the Left Wing, everything that is not Left Wing is Fascism or Nazism.

My point is this: Is there some non-arbitrary way to reason through cases like this and arrive at something like what Plato called the True, the Good, the Beautiful?

That’s what Western Philosophy seems to have been promising us for about 2,500 years now. But has Western Philosophy delivered on that promise?

I’m no one to judge, really, but I will anyway: NO, it has not delivered on that promise. We’ve been left hugely disappointed. Each year I imagine that many people take philosophy classes in our universities, and I suspect that somewhere between 99% and 100% of them end up disappointed with what they get out of it.

Stephen Hawking, the genius of physics, wrote that “Philosophy is dead.” Nietzsche said the same thing, in essence. Wittgenstein, too, I think. And others.

So, what then are we do to?

In the final analysis, must we just arbitrarily choose to follow our whim or best guess? Be a Trump zealot, or be a Black Lives Matter zealot, or be an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez zealot, or be a Scientology zealot, or be an Ayn Rand zealot, or be a Mormon zealot, or be a Roman Catholic zealot, or be like a despairing nihilist like the character Rust Cohle in season 1 of the “True Detective” TV series?

I like interacting with the minds of reasonable, thoughtful, serious, sincere, prudent, responsible, conscientious, benevolent, philosophical people. I like Socrates, Bertrand Russell, Will Durant, Cicero, Boethius, Miguel de Unamuno, John Messerly, Woody Allen, Karl Marx, Ayn Rand (yes, both Marx and Rand—both are philosophical, serious, and both make SOME good points). In Huxley’s “Brave New World,” I sympathized with the emotional John Savage, but I thought calm, benevolent, philosophical Mustapha Mond was the hero. But I wonder: to where or to what does all this contemplativeness lead? To anything good?

In the end, is everything just arbitrary? Is everything just biological, pecuniary, and transient? “Out, out brief candle!” When our sun goes supernova, and no mind in the universe recalls that any of us ever existed, will any of this even matter?

Is philosophy and philosophizing just a form of palliative care?

A fine death bed redemption story. Personally, I liked how Socrates left us, not by drinking poison, but fulfilling a dying obligation–reminding a friend to pay back a chicken he owed to a friend. Then he was gone…but not forgotten.

Question-Do we really need to be able to define death to live an elevated existence ? Is Death really Death ? Is it Death or the approaching of Death that distresses us ?

“If you would be Happy you must think on Death ” Seneca

I just don’t like Tolstoy’s Christian slop. The Abrahamic faiths attempt to put out fire with gasoline. Tolstoy wrote a long time ago, and back then one had to pay respect to Christianity for appearances’ sake. But that gives me to wonder: why read all this high flown prose? Because it is expected of a scholar? As with Solzhenitsyn? The more angst, the holier thou art? The holier thine artistry?

“In the end, is everything just arbitrary? Is everything just biological, pecuniary, and transient? ‘Out, out brief candle!’ When our sun goes supernova, and no mind in the universe recalls that any of us ever existed, will any of this even matter?” I completely hear you, Tom (above)! Part of me says that it’s like you took the words right out of my mouth, and I’m sure many others’ who come across your insightful comment. Your final paragraph, (I just had to quote that), reminds me of the final line in T. S. Elliot’s ‘Hollow Men’: “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.” And part of me says that the fact that you expressed yourself so eloquently in philosophical terms is the living proof that we (you) need philosophy. Any attempt in questioning ‘it’, or denying ‘it’, or escaping ‘it’, only results in further utilizing ‘it.’

You started by asking ‘What Is Good Philosophy?’ and then made a transition to another question, ‘What Good Is Philosophy?’ My gut reaction is that every philosopher (of the last 2500 years, as you mentioned), including Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, would have something profound to say, to answer those essential questions. Something that will just make us hang in there a bit longer. Who knows, maybe we won’t let go at all; of philosophy, I mean. Coincidentally I came upon the following by Wittgenstein the other day. “Philosophy hasn’t made any progress? — If somebody scratches the spot where he has an itch, do we have to see some progress? Isn’t it genuine scratching otherwise, or genuine itching? And can’t this reaction to an irritation continue in the same way for a long time before a cure for the itching is discovered?”

I’m a newbie to all this, so forgive me if my comment lacks coherence. Your observations resonate deeply in me and I just had to express my appreciation for your unreserved, sincere expression. But, dear Tom, is it possible that you’re seeking the wrong thing from philosophy? “It is through art, and through art only that we can realize our perfection; through art, and art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.” Oscar Wilde.

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The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Leo tolstoy.

In The Death of Ivan Ilyich , a novella detailing a wealthy man’s gradual death, Leo Tolstoy studies the human impulse to grasp for meaning in the face of mortality. As Ivan Ilyich succumbs to an ailment that is—at the time—mysterious and incurable, he begins to review his life, eventually concluding that he has wasted his energies focusing on his career and social status. To that end, he decides that nothing in life matters because everything he has ever believed in now appears empty and vain. In other words, everything he has focused on has done nothing but distract him from the fundamental truth of existence, which is that death is inevitable. Ivan derives some satisfaction from this thought because he thinks the thought itself gives life meaning. In reality, though, the inevitability of death doesn’t actually lend a sense of meaning or purpose to life—rather, it simply spells out an undeniable truth, one that Ivan apparently can only embrace by experiencing the process of death itself. Consequently, The Death of Ivan Ilyich doesn’t illuminate the meaning of life, but merely draws attention to the human desire to eke a sense of greater significance out of existence—whether or not this is actually possible, in either a tangible or spiritual way, Tolstoy doesn’t indicate.

For his entire life, Ivan Ilyich has kept thoughts about death at bay by committing himself to his career and searching for ways to improve his social status. These pursuits have ultimately distracted him from considering his own mortality. When he falls ill and realizes he’s dying, then, he finds it difficult to comprehend this harsh reality. Of course, Ivan knows that he is mortal, but he has on some level always rejected this idea. As a sick man, he thinks of a popular syllogism that helps people grasp the fact that everybody dies, no matter who they are: “Julius Caesar is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caesar is mortal.” When he considers this, though, he can’t help but feel that he has “always been a special being, totally different from all others.” Simply put, he isn’t Caesar, and he isn’t like anyone else either. In this moment, Tolstoy spotlights the way that human subjectivity can warp a person’s understanding of mortality, implying that it’s difficult for people to fully accept the limits of their own existence without actually facing death for themselves. In Ivan’s narrow focus on his singular experience—the specific way he moves through the world, his air of professional gravitas, his subjectivity—he has inadvertently come to see himself as immortal, effectively convincing himself that his life is too unique and meaningful to ever come to an end.

At a certain point in his illness, though, Ivan can no longer deny that he will soon die. With this realization comes the understanding that nothing he has done will save him from his fate; there is, he thinks, “nothing left but to die.” Accordingly, he cynically reviews his life and realizes that he has wasted it by focusing on inconsequential matters like power, status, and his career. This, in turn, causes him to question the entire meaning of life, wanting to know what actually matters if not the superficial things he used to hold dear. Moreover, he questions the point of the painful suffering he endures throughout his illness, asking, “Why all this horror? What’s the reason for it?” It’s worth pausing to consider who, exactly, Ivan is addressing in this moment. Although he has never shown any interest in religion, his existential questions seem directed at God, or at least at something that has an omniscient understanding of life and death, ultimately indicating that he is desperately grasping for answers in the face of death. More importantly, though, his questions underscore his assumption that existence must have some kind of inherent, overarching meaning in the first place.

The closest Ivan gets to wringing meaning out of existence comes when he decides that everything he has focused on in life has been a mere distraction from the inevitability of his own death. Once he accepts that he has squandered his life obsessing over meaningless things, he senses that these distractions have been nothing but “gross deception[s] obscuring life and death.” Thinking this way, he embraces the only tangible truth about human existence, which is that everyone dies. This comes to him as something of an epiphany, suggesting that only by experiencing death for himself can Ivan derive meaning from mortality. And yet, this thought does nothing to truly add purpose or significance to life and death—rather, it just provides him with a bit of clarity about death’s inevitability. Nonetheless, Ivan experiences this moment of realization as laden with meaning, and he even appears to have a spiritual awakening in the final minutes of his life, as death turns into “light” while he himself fades away from the material world. This religious awakening allows him to further embrace his own death, but it doesn’t actually imbue his life with a sense of meaning, or least not one that Tolstoy presents to readers. Rather, Ivan’s realization only changes his relationship to the fundamental dichotomy between life and death that people assume to be at the heart of existence. As Ivan dies, he sees death turn into “light”—the two states appear to join as one, illustrating that death is part of life, not separate from it. And though this is perhaps somewhat profound and might strike Ivan as an epiphany, it’s hard to argue that it actually gives readers a sense of meaning. For a novella in which the protagonist yearns to grasp the meaning of life, then, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is profoundly empty of any actual conclusions about the purpose of existence, instead simply assembling a portrait of human desperation and uncertainty in response to unsettling existential truths.

Meaning and Mortality ThemeTracker

Meaning and Mortality Quotes in The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Apart from the speculations aroused in each of them by this death, concerning the transfers and possible changes that this death might bring about, the very fact of the death of someone close to them aroused in all who heard about it, as always, a feeling of delight that he had died and they hadn’t.

‘There you have it. He’s dead, and I’m not’ was what everyone thought or felt.

Pyotr Ivanovich entered the room, and hesitated, as people always do on these occasions, not knowing precisely what to do. The only thing he was certain of was that in this situation you couldn’t go wrong if you made the sign of the cross. Whether or not you should bow at the same time he wasn’t sure, so he went for a compromise, crossing himself as he walked in and giving a bit of a bow as he did so. At the same time, as far as hand and head movements permitted, he glanced round the room.

He had changed a good deal; he was even thinner than he had been when Pyotr Ivanovich had last seen him, but, as with all dead bodies, his face had acquired greater beauty, or, more to the point, greater significance, than it had had in life. Its expression seemed to say that what needed to be done had been done, and done properly. More than that, the expression contained a reproach, or at least a reminder, to the living. The reminder seemed out of place to Pyotr Ivanovich, or at least he felt it didn’t apply to him personally.

‘Three days and three nights of horrible suffering, and then death. Just think, it could happen to me any time, now,’ he thought, and he felt that momentary pang of fear. But immediately he was saved, without knowing how, by the old familiar idea that this had happened to Ivan Ilyich, not him, and it could not and would not happen to him, and that kind of thinking would put him in a gloomy mood, for which there was no need, as Schwartz’s face had clearly demonstrated. Pursuing this line of thought, Pyotr Ivanovich calmed down and began to show a close interest in the details of Ivan Ilyich’s death, as if death was a chance experience that may have applied to Ivan Ilyich but certainly didn’t apply to him.

In his student days he had done things that at first he thought of as utterly revolting, things that made him feel disgusted with himself even as he was doing them, but in later life, noticing that the same things were being done by people of high standing without a qualm, although he couldn’t quite bring himself to think they were good, he did manage to dismiss them, and he felt no pangs of remorse when he recalled them.

Greed, Purity, and Corruption Theme Icon

He realized that married life—at least with his wife—didn’t always mean enjoyment and decency, but, on the contrary, it often disrupted them, and it was therefore necessary to guard against such disruptions. And Ivan Ilyich began to seek ways of doing this. His work was the one thing that impressed Praskovya, and it was through work and the commitments associated with it that he took on his wife and asserted his own independence.

In court he found his mind wandering; he would be miles away, wondering whether to have plain or moulded cornices with his curtains. He became so involved that he often did the work himself, rearranging the furniture and rehanging the curtains. On one occasion, climbing a stepladder to show a dull-witted upholsterer how to hang the draperies, he slipped and fell, though he was strong and agile enough to hold on, and all he did was bump his side on a window-frame knob. The bruised place hurt for a while but it soon passed off. And all this time Ivan Ilyich felt particularly well and in the best of spirits. ‘I seem to have shed fifteen years,’ he wrote home.

The doctor glared at him through one eye over his glasses as if to say, ‘Prisoner in the dock, if you will not confine yourself to answering the questions put to you I shall have to arrange for you to be removed from the courtroom.’

‘I have already told you what I consider necessary and appropriate. Anything further will be determined by the tests.’ The doctor bowed.

Absorption; the blind gut was curing itself. Then suddenly he could feel the same old dull gnawing pain, quiet, serious, unrelenting. The same nasty taste in his mouth. His heart sank and his head swam. ‘O God! O God!’ he muttered. ‘It’s here again, and it’s not going away.’ And suddenly he saw things from a completely different angle. ‘The blind gut! The kidney!’ he said to himself. ‘It’s got nothing to do with the blind gut or the kidney. It’s a matter of living or…dying. Yes, I have been alive, and now my life is steadily going away and I can’t stop it. No. There’s no point in fooling myself. Can’t they all see—everybody but me—that I’m dying? It’s only a matter of weeks, or days—maybe any minute now. There has been daylight; now there is darkness. I have been here ; now I’m going there . Where?’

All his life the syllogism he had learned from Kiesewetter’s logic—Julius Caesar is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caesar is mortal—had always seemed to him to be true only when it applied to Caesar, certainly not to him. There was Caesar the man, and man in general, and it was fair enough for them, but he wasn’t Caesar the man and he wasn’t man in general, he had always been a special being, totally different from all others, he had been Vanya with his mama and his papa, […] with all the delights, sorrows and rapture of childhood, boyhood and youth. Did Caesar have anything to do with the smell of that little striped leather ball that Vanya had loved so much? Was it Caesar who had kissed his mother’s hand like that, and was it for Caesar that the silken folds of his mother’s dress had rustled the way they did?

But then suddenly there it was, the pain in his side, irrespective of where they had got to in the proceedings, and it was beginning to gnaw at him. Ivan Ilyich focused on it, drove the thought of it away, but it continued to make itself felt. It kept coming back, facing him and looking at him, while he sat there rigid, the fire went out of his eyes and he began to wonder whether It was the only truth. And his colleagues and subordinates looked on in distress, amazed that he, a man of such brilliant and subtle judgement, was getting confused and making mistakes.

He could see that the awful, terrible act of his dying had been reduced by those around him to the level of an unpleasant incident, something rather indecent (as if they were dealing with someone who had come into the drawing-room and let off a bad smell), and this was done by exploiting the very sense of ‘decency’ that he had been observing all his life. He could see that no one had any pity for him because no one had the slightest desire to understand his situation.

He waited only for Gerasim to go out into the next room, and then he could restrain himself no longer: he burst into tears like a child. He was weeping because of his own helpless state, and his loneliness, and other people’s cruelty, and God’s cruelty, and God’s non-existence.

‘Why hast Thou done all of this? Why hast Thou brought me to this point? Why oh why dost Thou torture me like this?...’

He was not expecting any answers; he was weeping because there were not and could not be any answers.

But what was strange was that all the best times of his happy life no longer seemed anything like what they had been before. Nothing did—except the first recollections of his childhood. There, in his childhood, there was something truly happy that he could have lived with if it returned. But the person living out that happiness no longer existed; it was like remembering someone quite different.

At the point where he, today’s Ivan Ilyich, began to emerge, all the pleasures that had seemed so real melted away now before his eyes and turned into something trivial and often disgusting.

‘What is this? Can it really be death?’ And an inner voice would reply, ‘Yes, that’s what it is.’ ‘What is this torture for?’ And the voice would reply, ‘It’s just there. It’s not for anything.’ Above and beyond this there was nothing.

It occurred to him that what had once seemed a total impossibility—that he had not lived his life as he should have done—might actually be true. It occurred to him that the slight stirrings of doubt he had experienced about what was considered good by those in the highest positions, slight stirrings that he had immediately repudiated—that these misgivings might have been true and everything else might have been wrong. His career, the ordering of his life, his family, the things that preoccupied people in society and at work—all of this might have been wrong. He made an attempt at defending these things for himself. And suddenly he sensed the feebleness of what he was defending. There was nothing to defend.

‘Yes, I’m hurting them,’ he thought. ‘They feel sorry for me, but they’ll be all right when I’m dead.’ He wanted to tell them this, but he wasn’t strong enough to get the words out. ‘Anyway…no good talking. Must do something.’ He looked at his wife, motioned to their son and said: ‘Take him away…sorry for him… and you…’ He tried to say, ‘Forgive me,’ but it came out as, ‘For goodness…’ Too weak to correct himself, he waved his hand knowing that he who needed to would understand.