Death of Ivan Ilych , livre ebook
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2018
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87
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2018
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Publié par
Date de parution
01 janvier 2018
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9781847492388
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
1 Mo
Publié par
Date de parution
01 janvier 2018
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9781847492388
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
1 Mo
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
and
The Devil
Leo Tolstoy
Translated by Hugh Aplin
ALMA CLASSICS
Alma Classics an imprint of alma books ltd 3 Castle Yard Richmond Surrey TW 10 6TF United Kingdom www.almaclassics.com
The Death of Ivan Ilyich first published in Russian as Smert’ Ivana Il’icha in 1886
The Devil first published in Russian as D’iavol in 1911
This translation first published by Hesperus Press Ltd in 2005
This revised translation first published by Alma Classics Ltd (previously Oneworld Classics Ltd) in 2011
This new edition first published by Alma Classics in 2013. Repr. 2016.
Translation and notes © Hugh Aplin, 2005, 2011
Background material © Alma Classics Ltd
Cover image © Getty Images
Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
isbn : 978-1-84749-363-7
All the pictures in this volume are reprinted with permission or pre sumed to be in the public domain. Every effort has been made to ascertain and acknowledge their copyright status, but should there have been any unwitting oversight on our part, we would be happy to rectify the error in subsequent printings.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.
Contents
Introduction
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
The Devil
Notes
Extra Material
Leo Tolstoy’s Life
Leo Tolstoy’s Works
Select Bibliography
Appendix
Introduction
Leo Tolstoy was in his early forties – just a little younger than the eponymous Ivan Ilyich at the time of his death – when he set off from his home at Yasnaya Polyana for the distant province of Penza, where he hoped to negotiate the advantageous purchase of an estate he had seen advertised for sale in the press. He was in good health, enjoying life in the bosom of a growing family, and, with War and Peace recently completed, was firmly ensconced in his professional sphere as one of Russia’s greatest writers. Nonetheless, as Ivan Ilyich discovers in the work of fiction, “in the midst of life we are in death”, and as Tolstoy approached the town of Arzamas, he began himself to experience unexpected intimations of mortality in an uncomfortably vivid way. He gave some indication of what had happened to him in a letter sent to his wife from Saransk on 4th September 1869. “For two days now,” he wrote, “I’ve been tormented with anxiety. The day before yesterday I spent the night at Arzamas, and something extraordinary happened to me. It was two o’clock in the morning, I was terribly tired, I wanted to go to sleep and I felt perfectly well. But suddenly I was overcome by despair, fear and terror, the like of which I have never experienced before. I’ll tell you the details of this feeling later: but I’ve never experienced such an agonizing feeling before and may God preserve anyone else from experiencing it.” ( Tolstoy’s Letters , selected, edited and translated by R.F. Christian, Athlone Press, London 1978.) The concern Tolstoy expresses here for others is undoubtedly praiseworthy, yet in a sense completely misplaced, for what he had suffered was the abrupt realization of his own inevitable demise, something which has been identified as the very phenomenon that above all sets mankind apart from other animals. Thus his experience, albeit for him on this occasion unusually acute and painful, was in fact an inescapable, universally human one. And it was this universality that he expressed so strikingly in The Death of Ivan Ilyich , one of his greatest shorter works, composed at a period of his life when the theme of death was central to his writing. It can come as no surprise, then, that at about the same time in the mid-1880s he returned to the night in Arzamas through the medium of another story, never completed and consequently published only after the author’s death, entitled The Notes of a Madman .
We do not know what details of his traumatic “feeling” Tolstoy eventually gave to his wife, but the following extracts from the tale show how he intended to present the event to readers of his fiction. We begin with the narrator and his servant already approaching Arzamas in a post-chaise:
Night came on, we kept driving. We started to doze. I dozed off, but suddenly woke up. I’d become afraid for some reason. And, as is often the case, I woke up frightened, excited, like when it doesn’t seem you’ll ever get to sleep. “Why am I on this journey? Where am I going?” suddenly came into my head. It wasn’t that I disliked the idea of buying an estate cheaply, but it suddenly presented itself to me that there was no reason why I needed to travel all this distance and that I was going to die here in a strange place. And I began to feel dreadful.
They stop for the night at the post station in Arzamas where the narrator’s mood is not lifted by anything in his surroundings, least of all by the room he is given – small, square and whitewashed. He manages, nonetheless, to doze off once more, but only to wake up in the middle of the night:
I was again just as aroused as in the carriage. I sensed there was no possibility whatsoever of getting to sleep. Why have I broken my journey here? Where am I taking myself? What am I running away from and where am I running to? I’m running away from something terrible and I can’t escape. I’m always with myself, and it’s I that am a torment to myself. Here he is, me, I’m here, all of me. Neither the estate in Penza nor any other will add anything to me or take anything away. And it’s I, I that am hateful to myself, unbearable, a torment to myself. I want to fall asleep, into oblivion, and I can’t. I can’t get away from myself. I went out into the corridor, […] thinking to get away from what was tormenting me. But it followed me out and cast a shadow on everything. I was just as terrified, even more so. “What is all this nonsense,” I said to myself. “Why am I in anguish, what am I afraid of?” – “Me,” the voice of death inaudibly replied. “I’m here.” It made my flesh creep. Yes, death. It was going to come, here it was, but it ought not to have been. If my death really had been imminent, I could not have experienced what I was experiencing, then I would have been afraid. But now I was not afraid, rather I could see, feel, that death was approaching, and at the same time I felt that it ought not to be. My whole being felt the need for, the right to, life, and at the same time death taking place. And this internal rift was horrible. I tried to shake off this horror. I found a brass candlestick with a burnt-down candle and lit it. The red light of the candle and its size, a little smaller than the candlestick, all said the same thing. There is nothing in life, but there is death, yet it ought not to be. I tried to think about what interested me: the purchase, my wife – not only was there nothing cheerful, it all became nothing. Everything was overshadowed by horror for my life that was perishing.
Attempts to alleviate the situation through prayer are to no avail, and the narrator is obliged to wake everyone and continue the journey at once. “But I felt,” he concludes, “that something new had settled on my soul and poisoned the whole of my former life.”
Of course this is a fictionalized account of a biographical fact, but the great significance for Tolstoy of impressions of the kind described here is clear: his writings of the 1880s are in large part a response to the problems of life and death posed by this dramatic moment so many years before. In The Notes of a Madman the narrator subsequently has another terrifying experience in a coffin-like hotel room in Moscow that leads him to question God about the meaning of life, and then, when no reply is forthcoming, to reject Him entirely. Yet neither Tolstoy, nor his fictional characters were twentieth-century existentialists, no matter how many features they might seem to have in common with them, and the problem of making sense of life and death finds a recognizably nineteenth-century resolution in Tolstoy’s hands.
Knowledge of death, perhaps following long periods of doubt and struggle, can eventually lead for Tolstoy to the attainment of an advanced level of humanity that is characterized by the discovery of a capacity for unselfish love. Ivan Ilyich is drawn to the servant Gerasim thanks precisely to the latter’s readiness to treat his sick master with respect, honesty and sincere, self-denying pity. This attitude is sharply contrasted with the hypocrisy, insincerity and selfishness of Ivan Ilyich’s family, friends and associates – and of Ivan Ilyich himself. Finally, however, in part through his son – another “innocent”, if only for the time being – the dying man comes to sense the pain he has caused and to feel, instead of self-pity, selfless pity for his family.
Unselfish love of this kind can, of course, be set in stark contrast to the utterly selfish lust that Tolstoy came to see in human sexuality, and which comprised the other major theme of his fiction of the 1880s, represented here by The Devil . In this story the main character, Irtenyev, another very ordinary man, fails to free himself from his bestial urges, and thus brings about the tragic outcomes described in each of the two alternative endings. Irtenyev is in many respects a worthy figure, broadly honest, increasingly committed to a useful role in society, fond of his family, but he is the victim of a need for selfish sexual gratification which undermines all his merits. Less extreme in its views on sex than Tol
