Tolstoy and the Moral Instructions of Death

Dennis Sansom

Philosophy and Literature, Volume 28, Number 2, October 2004, pp. 417-429
(Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.2004.0036

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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/175076

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 Dennis Sansom 417

TOLSTOY AND THE MORAL INSTRUCTIONS OF DEATH

by Dennis Sansom

M oments before Ivan Ilych dies he asks himself, What is the

right thing? After 45 years of life, 17 years of marriage, five
children (three who had died), and a successful legal career, he does
not know how to answer the question, and the reason why he does not
know how to answer the question reveals the theme of the novella. Two
millennia earlier, Socrates had said, the unexamined life is not worth
living, and this is exactly what Ivans life has amounted to. When it
comes time for him to reflect upon the meaning of life as he
approaches his untimely death, he does not have the emotional
resources and even existential vocabulary to do so. It is not until
something outside of himself happens to him, as he lies dying in great
pain that he can begin to see an answer to the question. The answer
comes in the form of empathy for anothers suffering, in particular his
schoolboy son Vasya. He realizes the value of his life only by actually
caring for another. Compassion for others, the desire and ability to bear
and feel others suffering and their solitude, ironically fortifies Ivan to
face his own demise. A transfer of the existential ordeal of anothers
destiny into our own self-consciousness, into our own self-value, be-
comes the foundation upon which moral relationships are built.
Tolstoy wrote The Death of Ivan Ilych in 1886 when he was 57. He had
already written and experienced the public fame of the two great
novels, War and Peace, and Anna Karenina, and he had already under-
gone his equally famous conversion, the change from an aristocratic
and elitist life to a radically more vocationally and economically simple

Philosophy and Literature, 2004, 28: 417429

418 Philosophy and Literature

life, primarily through identification with the peasants. He became

austere in his habits, giving up his wealth, expensive clothes and house
(though his wife and children continued to live in the family mansion,
whereas he lived on the family farm, Yasnaya Polyana, and worked with
the peasants), alcohol and tobacco, private property, any attachment to
social institutions (including the church which he thought was too
entangled with the oppressive institutions of society), and any interest
in social class and approval. In fact, after his conversion, Tolstoy tried
to eliminate any influence of social conventions on his life. To him,
conventions serve the interest of class oppression. Even art was part of
this stultifying influence. As long as art was judged according to beauty
or traditions, it perpetuated the exploitive dominance of the rich and
powerful. He favored folk art, because to him it at least conveyed
emotions, not just conventions of social class.1
Tolstoy was critical of the convention of marriage. For years he
fought with his wife, Sonya, over his new lifestyle, belittling her but
never totally rejecting her for not adopting his draconian practices. He
left the care of his twelve children to her, and when Alexis at four years
of age died (the fourth child to die) just before he finished The Death of
Ivan Ilych, he grieved, but not as much as Sonya. In his last days he ran
away more from her than for taking off on a spiritual pilgrimage. He
felt their continual fighting made him ill. In fact, he forbade her after
she had found him from seeing him as he lay dying in his makeshift
bedroom at the Astapovo railway station.
Though Tolstoy was an idealist about the prospects of spiritual purity,
as seen in his last full-length novel, The Resurrection, and he felt the only
hope for a spiritual Kingdom on earth was in living out fully and
literally Jesus Sermon on the Mount, his greatest contributions to
understanding human nature comes from his analysis of human
weakness and error. In The Death of Ivan Ilych human weakness and error
are the same problemthat is, the unexamined life. After opening the
novella describing his friends and familys reactions to Ivans death in
section one, Tolstoy prefaces the telling of Ivans life with this revealing
comment, Ivan Ilychs life had been most simple and most ordinary
and therefore most terrible. It was most terrible because it was shallow,
without serious examination of the tenuousness of securing confidence
and hope in ones worth before the unpredictability and pain of the
course of ones life. The telling of Ivans life up to his last weeks of life
is a simple story, and Tolstoy does not show much ambivalence and
ambiguity in it. Frankly, there is not much to it. He follows in his
 Dennis Sansom 419

fathers footsteps, gets married, obtains promotions, buys and decorates

his dream house. The only deep emotions he deals with are envy and
vindictiveness towards more successful colleagues and resentment
towards his wife for wanting him to care more for the family. He had
climbed the social ladder and felt in control of his life. In fact the
primary value in Ivans life, before his literal fall from a ladder while
showing the upholsterer how he wanted the drapes exactly hung, was
control. Just before his injury becomes life threatening, Tolstoy sums up
Ivans life, So they lived, and all went well, without change, and life
flowed pleasantly.
For a life to flow pleasantly, all threats have to be either avoided or
overcome. The threats to a pleasant life are those that take away
control. They undermine our ability to make and reach successful
goals. Only if we are in control of our careers, mates, children, and
bodies can we live a predictable and powerful life. Chaos is always the
biggest threat to such a life. It can be losing a job, an illness, or a
disruptive home life. But the biggest threat is the chaos that comes
from facing and being transparent about the internal and irresolvable
conflicts of frustrated loves and self-acceptance, and that comes from
realizing there is something absolutely inscrutable about human free-
dom, and that comes from accepting there are no metaphysical
guarantees that the future will always be better than the present. The
assumed defense against chaos is more control of relationships, job,
environment, emotions, and future. The way Ivan tries to gain control
in his life and the terror he feels when he knows he cannot keep it
reveal the moral lessons to learn from the realization that if it is true to
say Socrates is a person; all persons are mortal; therefore, Socrates is
mortal, then it is also existentially true to say, all persons suffer and
die; I am a person; therefore I will suffer and die. Ivan knows the
logical truth of the first syllogism but never faces the existential truth of
the second syllogism. His fall from the ladder is a fall into the truth of
the existential syllogism. He loses control of his health, then his career,
then his family (except his son), and finally his life. In this fall he has no
emotional and moral resources to integrate who he had been when
life flowed pleasantly with who he is now, facing his inconsolable pain
and imminent death. Sadly, he never learned the truth of the motto
inscribed on his graduation portmanteau, respice finem.
What kind of ethic and set of values had Ivan lived by, which
prevented him from facing the existential truth? What manner of
judging human life had Ivan adopted to get ahead but which failed him
420 Philosophy and Literature

when forced by his meaningless and untimely death to ask, What is the
right thing? On several occasions Tolstoy describes Ivans life as aloof
from others affairs and pain. As an examining magistrate in a provin-
cial town Ivan took up an attitude of rather dignified aloofness towards
the provincial authorities, but picked out the best circle of legal
gentleness and wealthy gentry living in the town and assumed a tone of
slight dissatisfaction with the government, of moderate liberalism, and
of enlightened citizenship. And when his wife, Praskovya Fdorovna,
grows irritable at his indifference to her and the childrens needs, he
becomes aloof to her (as she to him). His aim was to free himself more
and more from those unpleasantnesses and to give them a semblance of
harmlessness and propriety. By being aloof he takes more control in
his life, and the particular ethical reasoning he adopts to gain this
control is a calculus of his preferences. He plans his career, marriage,
and dream home according to his preferences and when they are met,
life flowed pleasantly for Ivan. Nothing is seen as having inherent
goodness and value (not even his children). Everything is amendable to
a quantification of desires. To apply this ethic Ivan has to remain aloof,
that is, abstract from the intangibles, unpredictable, and mysterious
elements of his family members, clients, strangers, and coworkers. To
make the best and most desirous choices, Ivan has to abstract who
people are to him from who they are in their own moral dilemmas and
emotional conflicts. The world becomes a stage on which he is the only
real actor, and a shallow one at that, because Ivan has to remain abstract
from his own emotional insecurities and worries about death, which he
does by following conventions without having real convictions for the
emotions and life ordeals of the people in them. On the outside Ivan is
a man of social significancea professional career with a good salary
(he got a substantial raise just before his fall), a beautiful wife and
children, and an upscale house. These conventions are tangible forms
of what he assumes can meet and satisfy his preferences for a successful
and pleasant life.
There is a socially functional difference between an institution and a
convention. For a society to sustain itself and provide a stable and
manageable life, it must have institutions. These are not merely the
ways people group together, but they are the public embodiments of an
explicit or implicit rational purpose for the societys particular identity.
They provide people ways to contribute to the overall social goals,
without which the citizens would have to remake daily societys identity
 Dennis Sansom 421

and through which they contribute to social causes bigger than their
individual desires.
But the concept of convention carries a more restrictive definition. A
convention becomes its own goal. It is its own justification, and
consequently defines which desires people should seek. Social conven-
tions have a logic to themselves. They pretend to give stability and
manageability to life by conforming people to an accepted sense of
what a meaningful and happy life ought to be. They help gain more
control over the ambiguous and threatening aspects of living within
society and with the effort to preserve some relationships and values
into the future. If we define rationality as public persuasion and the
right ordering of ideas, then conventions help make life more ratio-
nally predictable, because their desires should be everyones desires.
With them we hope to convince others and ourselves that we are living
pleasant and successful lives and that such a life ought to be our moral
goal. They present a collective wisdom of how a human life ought to be
calculated. They offer a chance at control.
Yet, for Tolstoy this way of living a meaningful life is illusory. We
cannot fully control our lives, especially in face of death and the
mystery of human free will. To live according to social conventions is to
pretend to be in control of life and death issues, of the deepest
passions, and of the unpredictability of other people. A conventional
life is a shallow and wrongheaded life.2 Ivan lives successfully according
to the accepted conventions, but he is also living superficially according
to the momentous concerns of life, which he cannot in fact control by
his profession, card playing with friends, and even marriage.
When Ivan mysteriously develops a bad taste in his mouth he begins
to realize his ethic of control does not work anymore. He faces his
mortality and realizes the failure of constructing a life on preferences
and abstract relationships. In his unremitting pain, he personally knows
that there is a large dimension of life he cannot controlthat is, the
future. The failure of the ethic of preferential calculus is epitomized in
Ivans reaction to peoples reactions to his illness, especially the medical
experts, because the conventions, which he had relied upon to live a
pleasant life, now fail him one by one.
When the doctor first sees Ivan, he put on just the same air towards
him as he himself put on towards an accused person. The doctor acts
in an official air, as though he is in absolute control of the situation, and
treats Ivan as a body without a soul. Ivan becomes bitter to the abstract
422 Philosophy and Literature

manner with which the doctors treat him. They never talk about him,
about his unity of soul and body. Though Ivan has ignored his own
existential syllogism, he knows that his illness is not just about his body.
Because it is excruciatingly painful and fatal, it attacks his basic identity.
His sense of self is eroded, and this sense involves both his body and
self-consciousness as one suffering and moving towards death. The
unity of body and soul refers to the experience of identity, which
continues through the passing of time, and this experience is never
neatly divided between body and soul. Its inherently both.
But Ivans doctors only talk about his floating kidney, and to him it
is an offense because such an approach violates his most private and
basic possessionhis identity as body and soul. The celebrity doctor
is called in as an expert in healing, but he can do no better than
abstract the problem from Ivans life and is deaf to the only real
question Ivan has, is his case serious or not? What bothers him the
most is that no one understands him. It is not just his kidneys hurting.
He is dying as a human being. His illness is not just a malfunctioning
organ, but a poison which penetrated more and more deeply into his
whole being. His kidney might be damaged, but it is not what is sick.
Ivan is sick; his whole being is threatened by what he and the doctors
cannot control. This loss of control exposes the weakness of his former
ethic of preferential calculus to handle the intransigent existential
syllogism.
In the history of fiction there probably has not been a more acerb
critique of medical practice than The Death of Ivan Ilych. For Tolstoy the
medical profession exhibits three vices: officiousness, the pretense of
control through social conventionalism, and the abstract treatment of
people. As Tolstoy tells the story, he sarcastically emphasizes the entry of
the celebrity doctor, as though his status assures healing. The doctor
assumes command of the situation, and even when it is clear he cannot
do anything for Ivan, he acts as though he is still in control. The oddity
is that his pretense of doctoring Ivan seems to give relief to everyone
but Ivan. It is as though once a celebrity doctor is called into a
situation, then everyone can relax because a specialist is addressing
what lay people cannot handle. But he never looks into Ivans eyes or
emotional state. His concentration upon Ivans kidney is like a surgical
knife upon Ivan. It cuts him but does not heal him.
Moreover, in the novella medicine is no better than other occupa-
tions and conventions. Law, Ivans profession, is just as irrelevant to
answer the basic question of What is the right thing? when he is faced
 Dennis Sansom 423

with the existential syllogism. Marriage suffers the same critique.

Tolstoy was often critical of marriage as a convention, himself suffering
and contributing to a frustrated marriage in which he felt misunder-
stood and hopelessly trapped. What is common among the conventions
(medical, legal, ecclesiastical institutions, and marriage) is that they
pretend to make life meaningful by giving ways to control life. As long
as control over life and the various threats of chaos is the paramount
concern, then we need conventions to provide ways to maximize our
preferences and desires. We cannot live everyday, trying to recreate our
lives according to calculated decisions for happiness and the prefer-
ences that lead to it. We have to rely on effective patterns, which are
amenable to our personal calculations for a successful life. They work
and have worked for others because they do give a measure of control,
but this level of control comes at a cost to human identity. To want a life
of control, there is a loss of individual identity. That is, Ivan is a lawyer,
a husband, and a father. The titles themselves are abstract from his most
unique identity eventually exposed in his existential syllogism and in
the threat of his death. Ivan tries to treat his death as an abstract entity,
speaking of it objectively in the third person. But he reaches the point
where the only way he can face the issue is to admit he is dying, not just
his kidney and not just Socrates. He has to face himself, and the social
conventions cannot help him accept his painful mortality because their
logic has to do with the realization of preferences enunciated and
chosen by someone who is in control of life.
An ethic of utilitarian calculations works only for those who have
enough power to choose which social conventions to adopt. The
calculation of desires does not occur in a social vacuum. Desires are
presented within what works and is available in society. A person does
not just choose a desire separate from the social network which makes
the desire gratifying and which assures the success of choosing it. A
social apparatus has to offer and materialize these choices. Conventions
associated with work, entertainment, and marriage provide this. If this
is the case, it also follows that those who have the most access and
control over societys conventions are those who can most likely define,
choose for, and reap the benefits of living a life of maximized desires.
The ability to gratify the kinds of desires embodied in social conven-
tions is proportional to the social power one has.
In consequence a life guided by utilitarian calculus is thus abstract
from the individuality of others and oneself. Utilitarianism cannot
make an ethical choice about what cannot be measured by preference
424 Philosophy and Literature

for a person, value, an institution, and the self. It can only choose what
it can hope to control by its measurements of preference. It cannot
inform us how to live ethically when we cannot make calculated choices
based on our preferences. When faced with the existential syllogism,
utilitarianism and the social conventions, which are needed to enable
utilitarianism to work, are mute, because the moral vocabulary of the
question of our death is untranslatable into a preferential calculus.
Accord to Robert N. Wilson, Tolstoy shows that Ivans life, though
simple and ordinary, was truly terrible because he had no sense of the
tragic dimension of life. We cannot maneuver life to avoid what cannot
be controlled. Failure and inexplicable suffering happen whether one
has done the right things or not, and Ivan had not educated himself
into the tragic element of human life.3 Nothing can be measured or
controlled when Socratess death is no longer an abstraction but
becomes our death. Before the mystery of our death as individuals, the
choice is not how to act in ways so that we can control our death and the
question of the meaning of life, but the choice is whether there is a
reality to which we can find our real value as individuals and which is
not nullified by the existential syllogism.4
As Ivan is dying, only two people have a positive contribution to his
sense of personhoodhis servant and son. Gerasim, his peasant
servant, is not afraid or put off by his illness, as is everyone else. In fact,
to alleviate the pain, Gerasim allows Ivan to rest his legs on his
shoulders as he sits and talks with Ivan. True to Tolstoys conviction that
the Russian peasant knows more about real life than the landed
aristocracy does, it is instructive that the peasant servant helps Ivan
more than the medical experts. Gerasim has nothing to lose because he
owns nothing. He does not have to protect his possessions, career,
reputation, or even health in touching and caring for Ivan. He is not
afraid of Ivan or his illness. But the doctors, other colleagues, and even
his wife and daughter are afraid of his illness because they have a lot to
lose. The doctors can lose their reputation and expertise if they cannot
cure him; his colleagues could possibly lose their health if they get too
close (though some of them would actually gain his vacated job); his
wife and daughter will lose his income and social status. So, they are
afraid. People fear what they cannot control, and what they cannot
control they make abstract from their insecurities, and to overcome the
frustrations of their insecurities they try to live conventional lives
designed to maximize their preferences. Fear drives the way the
doctors, friends, and family relate to the infectious Ivan. As he
 Dennis Sansom 425

screams in pain his last three days, the doctors, friends, and family are
making all sorts of calculations. But Gerasim has nothing with which
and for which to calculate. He meets Ivan honestly and transparently,
unafraid, and, because he has nothing to lose, he gives real palliative
care to Ivan.
The other person is Vasya, his young son. Not much is said of Vasya
until the very end, when he comes up and kisses his dying fathers hand.
He does not say anything. It is significant that Tolstoy gives an answer to
Ivan crisis in terms of a kiss from Vasya rather than a theodicy. Ivans
suffering has driven him beyond any acceptance of a rational explana-
tion of his untimely death and needless suffering. Any attempt to
integrate his suffering into a divine plan which either sorts out peoples
destinies by justice or cosmic necessity would have been irrelevant. Even
if such an explanation were logically successful in showing that Ivan is
reaping what he had sown or that God needs his pain and demise to
contribute to a bigger plan of cosmic harmony, Ivan could not have
identified with such a theodicy. It would have been an abstraction from
his life in pain and would have been more fitting to his previous life and
to his former acquaintances. A life engineered by control and aimed at
flowing pleasantly by a preferential calculus yearns for a theodicy that
explains suffering and premature deaths into a scheme, which is
understandable and consistent with our present life. If all of our lives,
even the most disagreeable and unpleasant, fit in a grand scheme that
is rational and predictable, then we can manage the less than total
aspects of our lives according to a rational adjudication, which makes
our lives predictable and consistent. A preferential calculus serves that
end well, and naturally follows from a theodicy which assures us that all
of our lives, even the horrible and disrupting, are under the control of
a divine, calculating scheme. It follows that if we can control our lives,
then we know the divine is in control of our lives.
Such a theodicy is abstract from the real issue of serious human
suffering. Just as Ivan rejects his doctors because they do not talk about
his personhood, only his floating kidney, he would reject any grand
scheme theodicy for the same reasonit does not deal with humans,
only necessary premises in necessary logical syllogism. What Ivan needs
in the moment when his illness is taking away his life is an affirmation
of his personhood, of the unity of his soul and body, of an integration
of his life into a narrative whole which he can recognize as consistent
with his existential syllogism. This is what he gets from Vasyas kiss. Far
more is said about the sister than the brother. She is beautiful, smart,
426 Philosophy and Literature

and finally wins the favor of a suitable beau. She is giddy with
excitement when he proposes marriage just days before her father dies.
But when Ivan faces his death, she is another faceless person in his life.
Vasya has an emotional depth we do not know about until the last
scene. He kisses the hand that no one else wants to touch.
In Russian Orthodoxy kissing has a sacramental quality. Priests are
kissed; icons are kissed; worshipers greet each other with a holy kiss. In
Dostoevskys great novels we see the power of kissing to bring reconcili-
ation. In Crime and Punishment after Raskolnikov confesses his terrible
and wicked murders to the fragile but Christ-like figure Sonya, she tells
him that in order to start his process of redemption he must go to the
Haymarket Square in St. Petersburg and throw himself down on the
earth and kiss the earth in each of the four directions, for he had
maligned the earth with his crime. In The Brothers Karamozov a kiss plays
an important role in two places. In Ivans imaginative and confusing
parable of the Grand Inquisitor he has Jesus, who had been inveighed
upon and prosecuted by the Inquisitor himself, kissing the lifeless,
cruel, and deeply insecure prosecutor rather than defending himself.
Christs real mission is epitomized in a kiss rather than a theodicy. And
in the powerful scene when the near omniscient and omni-benevolent
Father Zosima dies and leaves a troubling odor of decay behind, the
sensitive and intuitive Aloysha is thrown into an existential crisis of
faith, and instead of looking for a theodicy, he throws himself onto the
earth, wetting it with his tears and fervently kissing it, for he had at last
learned to take in all of the world into his heart.
For Tolstoy, as for Dostoevsky, a kiss unites the body and soul.
Tolstoys description of what happens to Ivan after the kiss is unantici-
pated. He sees a light rather than only darkness. He feels a joy rather
than pain. Vasya with his kiss had done something for him that the
doctors and social conventions could not do for him. In taking pity
upon his son, Ivans life becomes integrated in the compassion of the
moment both from Vasya to his father and from Ivan to his son. Jeremy
Conway believes at this moment in Ivans life he becomes thoughtful in
a two-fold sensereflective of his own soul, not just his physical pain,
and empathetic towards the pain of Vasya.5 Ivans thoughtlessness about
his own soul, his own deep psychological conflicts and conflicted drives,
prevents him from being thoughtful to others. His attempt to live a life
indicative of realized preferences and of self-control also does not
prepare him to recognize and respond authentically and sincerely to
others pain and anxiety. It is only when he comes to himself honestly
 Dennis Sansom 427

that he comes to others as a person also in need of salvation from the

inevitable and unconquerable illnesses of life. When he finally empties
himself of the meaningless false images of human purpose, he then
sees how to respond honestly and with integrity to his destiny.6 By
admitting he is not in control of his destiny can Ivan really love his son,
and, by extension, others as well, as a unique individual with his own
desperate need to unite body and soul, to learn to live without a father,
and to find self-worth in the midst of his existential syllogism.
Though Tolstoy does not insert traditional, orthodox symbols or
language into Ivans conversion experience, the religious message is
suggested. James Olney thinks Tolstoy depicts Ivans deathbed conver-
sion as a mystical intuition of the meaning of life.7 Ivans move from
self-pity to compassion is not just a move from isolation due to pain
towards his son, Vasya. It is a move from an egocentric universe to a
holistic view of life. Vasyas kiss opens the world, the meaning of life, to
Ivan. In that tender meeting of body (the lips) and soul (Vasyas pain
and love for his father) Ivan glimpses what connects his present
suffering with all of his life, both past and future. Compassion for
others provides a chance to integrate a persons past to his future and
which unites his with the soul of others. It is not until we become
reflective, examining our own existential syllogism that we can empa-
thize with the existential syllogism of others. Through empathy we
recognize the individuality and concreteness of others. They are not
abstract from us; they become part of our self-understanding and
prehension of ourselves. In transforming our thoughtlessness into
thoughtfulness of others, we gain an ability to empathize with others,
and the more we empathize, the more we can affirm and experience
the unity of body, soul, and life in the face of the existential syllogism.
This transformation of self-understanding through compassion towards
others is the vision of light, the experience of the mystical unity Ivan
feels just seconds before he dies. What is the right thing? For Ivan, it
is compassion, because it is only by compassion, not control through a
preferential utilitarianism, that we can see the light, see people as
individuals, and see the unity of people in a love that transcends the
existential syllogisms.
John Donnelly mistakenly contends that Tolstoy is offering an ethic
only a saint or socially privileged person can live out. He argues that for
there to be a moral obligation there must first be the capability to fulfill
it. Ivans religious conversion into a mystical unity is not possible for
everyone. Though the saint or hero may have such a conversion,
428 Philosophy and Literature

ordinary people do not because they are not equipped, and thus should
not be expected to be like Ivan.8 Yet, Donnelly misses Tolstoys real
point. Ivan is not prepared or equipped for his conversion. In fact, the
point is Ivan is not ready for it at all. His unexamined life is his problem.
He lives a shallow life and hence cannot integrate his life when
threatened with chaos. Integration happens only after receiving and
giving compassion. The prerequisite for moral conversion is not found
in either esoteric religious sentiments or social privilege. It is found in
transforming thoughtlessness about oneself and others into the exam-
ined life and thoughtfulness (that is, compassion) towards others. As
long as Ivan is under the sway of his calculus of preferences, he cannot
make that transformation. It occurs when he knows he has to be treated
as a person, united in soul and body, and when he knows he can truly
care for the pain of another. Ivan dies a happy person because in his
compassionate opening towards his sons suffering, he experiences
what Algis Valiunas says is the books theme, the ordinary irradiated by
the majestic, the incomprehensible, the godly.9
Tolstoy is the challenger of societys officialdom, including physicians,
and conventionalism. As he sees it, they are not based on compassion
but on abstractions and control. It is only by losing oneself in compas-
sion, as Ivan comes to do, that one can really examine oneself and also
identify with others.

Samford University, Birmingham, Alabama

1. For a good discussion of Tolstoys view of art see Rimvyda Silbajoris, Tolstoys
Aesthetics and His Art (Columbus: Slavica Publishing, 1990), chap. 4, What is Art?
2. See David S. Danaher, Tolstoys Use of Light and Dark Imagery in the Death of Ivan
Illc, The Slavic and East European Journal 39 (1995): 22740; with Danaher, Tolstoy uses
dark images (i.e., the black box and black hole as indicators of the false life, and
references to light as indication of the move toward truth (e.g., the light in the black
bag).
3. Robert N. Wilson, The Case of Ivan Ilyitch, Aging and Society 15 (1995): 11524.
4. According to Kathleen Parthe, Tolstoy uses the feminine for death, ona, not the
available neuter, ono, so to personalize death. Ivan lived terribly because he did not
acknowledge the inevitability of death and its dissipation of life: The Metamorphosis of
Death in Tolstoy, Language and Style 18 (1985): 20514.
 Dennis Sansom 429
5. Jeremy Conway, Transforming Stories: The Death of Ivan Ilych, The Rebirth of a
Reflective Life, Philosophy in the Contemporary World 1 (1994): 14.
6. See Luiz Fernando Valente, Variations on the Kenotic Hero: Tolstoys Ivan Ilych
and Guimaraes Rosas Augusto Matraga, Symposium 45 (1991).
7. James Olney, Experience, Metaphor, and Meaning: The Death of Ivan Ilych, Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 31 (1972): 109, 111.
8. Language, Metaphysics, and Death, ed. John Donnelly (New York: Fordham University
Press, 1978), pp. 11630.
9. Algis Valiunas, Tolstoy and the Pursuit of Happiness, Commentary ( June 1989): 41.