“Andreyich! Hey, Andreyich!’ Nikita carefully calls his master, already guessing the truth and trying to straighten his back.
But Andreyich doesn’t answer, and his belly and legs are as solid, cold, and heavy as iron weights.
“He must have died. Heaven be with him!” Nikita thinks.
He turns his head, clears away the snow in front of him with his hand, and opens his eyes. It is light; the same wind is humming in the shafts, the same snow is pouring down, with only this difference, that instead of lashing against the sides of the sledge, it is silently burying horse and sledge deeper and deeper, and not a movement or breath from the horse can be heard anymore. “He must have frozen to death, too,” thinks Nikita. And indeed the hooves knocking against the sledge that woke Nikita were the frozen Mukhorty’s death throes, his last attempt to keep on his feet.
“O God, O heavenly father, you must be calling me too,” Nikita says to himself. “Thy will be done. But it is hard. Oh well, you can’t die twice, and you can’t avoid dying once. Only let it come quickly . . .” And he hides his hands again, shutting his eyes, and loses consciousness, quite convinced that now he is well and truly dying.
It wasn’t till noon that day that peasants with spades dug out Vassili Andreyich and Nikita, just five hundred meters from the road and a kilometer from the village.
The snow had completely covered the sledge, but the shafts and kerchief above it could still be seen. Mukhorty stood up to his belly in snow, his tackle and sacking falling off his back. He was quite white. His dead head was pressed close against his stony throat. His nostrils had frozen over with icicles; his eyes were frosted over as if with tears. In one night he had grown so thin, nothing seemed left of him but skin and bone. Vassili Andreyich had hardened into a frozen carcass, his legs spread wide. So they dragged him, straddled as he was, off Nikita. His bulging, hawklike eyes were frozen, and his open mouth under his clipped mustache was filled with snow.
Nikita was still alive, though freezing. When they woke him, he was sure he had died and what was happening to him now was not going on in this world but the next. The shouts of the peasants, digging him out and tumbling the dead body of Vassili Andreyich off him, surprised him at first. Did peasants in the other world have the same bodies as here and shout the same things? When he understood he was still here, in our world, he was more disappointed than pleased, especially when he realized that the toes of both his feet were frostbitten.
Nikita lay in hospital over two months. Three toes were amputated, but the rest healed, so he could go on working. He lived for another twenty years—first as a laborer, and then, in old age, as a watchman. He only died this year, at home with an icon at his head and a lit wax candle in his hands. Before his death he asked forgiveness of his old lady, and forgave her for the cooper. He said good-bye to his son and his grandchildren, and died, genuinely glad that his death freed his son and daughter-in-law from another mouth to feed. He was glad, too, that he was leaving this life, of which he was heartily tired, for that other life, which, with every year and every hour, had become more and more comprehensible and desirable to him.
Endnotes
*Chekhov’s first volume of short stories was also published in 1886.
*Tolstoy sewed his own boots and writes with authority.
†Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, IV.ii.152.
Notes
THE DEATH OF IVAN ILYICH
1. eight hundred rubles: In 1886, when this story was written, one ruble was worth the equivalent of about one dollar now. However, since incomes were considerably smaller at that time, such a raise would have been a proportionately larger percentage increase than today.
2. law school: The Imperial School of Jurisprudence was founded in Petersburg in 1835 as a private school where members of the hereditary nobility trained for legal and administrative careers.
3. deacon: literally, a church reader; a lay member who combined the functions of clerk, chorister, and reader.
4. impure look: Judging by the account given in Tolstoy’s autobiographical A Confession, he is thinking of the awakened sexuality of adolescence.
5. Privy Councillor: third in the Table of Ranks established by Peter the Great in 1722. Holders of the top four grades were entitled to hereditary nobility.
6. le phénix de la famille: (French) “the family phoenix,” or pride of the family.
7. Scharmer’s . . . respice finem . . . Donon’s: Scharmer was a fashionable tailor, and Donon’s was a high-class restaurant, in Petersburg. The conventional Latin tag on Ivan Ilyich’s watch chain will acquire ironic resonance. It means “Consider your end.”
8. Old Believers: schismatics or dissenters of various sects, who rejected Patriarch Nikon’s reforms in the mid-seventeenth century.
9. bon enfant: (French) “a good boy.”
10. il faut que jeunesse se passe: (French) “Youth must have its fling.”
11. examining magistrate: In 1860 the preliminary investigation of criminal cases was transferred from the police to the new, legal post of examining magistrate.
12. comme il faut: (French) “as it should be,” proper.
13. reformed Code of 1864: The serfs were emancipated in 1861. This major reform was followed by the new judicial code of November 20, 1864. The judiciary was made independent of the administration. Chambers of Justice were set up in several large towns. A jury system was introduced. The new post of Justice of the Peace was created to deal with minor cases. Court proceedings were made public, with the litigants and their representatives in attendance and able to make oral representations. Previously, court proceedings had been conducted in camera, in the absence of the defendant and other interested parties, and with all material presented in written form (thus excluding the majority of Russia’s population, which was illiterate).
14. de gaîté de cœur: (French) out of sheer willfulness.
15. His oldest daughter was already sixteen: A trivial error. Editors point out contradictions in Tolstoy’s chronology. She should be ten—but Tolstoy overlooked six years, from 1874 to 1880.
16. seventeen years: The same error. Tolstoy has accounted for only eleven years of Ivan Ilyich’s married life.
17. Empress Maria’s institutions: charitable institutions and schools for young gentlewomen, founded by the dowager empress Maria Feodorovna in the reign of Tsar Alexander I.
18. Apart from its importance for Russia, the predicted reshuffle: Tolstoyan irony. Piotr Ivanovich, Ivan Simyonovich, Piotr Petrovich, and Zakhar Ivanovich—as their names suggest—are all nobodies jostling on the stairs of promotion and demotion.
19. his sister and her husband: commonly and erroneously corrected to Ivan Ilyich’s brother-in-law (Praskovya Feodorovna’s brother) and his wife, with whom they were staying in the country. But the Russian text states specifically Ivan Ilyich’s sister and her husband. She and her husband, Baron Greff, another civil servant, lived in Petersburg and were presumably inviting Ivan Ilyich to join them without his family while he settled into his prestigious new post.
20. étagère: a decorative set of shelves for knickknacks, a whatnot.
21. Pasha and Lizanka: Ivan Ilyich’s softened good humor is evident in his use of diminutives for his wife, Praskovya, and daughter, Elizaveta.
22. “Bear My Burden”: a charitable society patronized by the Empress.
23. vint: A variety of whist, vint, or Siberian whist, was introduced in Russia in 1870 and became very popular. It was normally played by a party of four. More players had to take turns sitting out.
24. floating kidney, chronic catarrh, or a disease of the blind gut: Floating kidney and chronic catarrh—modish diagnoses of the time—are both nonsensical, as Tolstoy was well aware. He uses these faintly absurd medical terms with a strong tone of irony. A disease of the blind gut is what we would now call appendicitis.
25. he forgets the trumps: So does Tolstoy. He has forgotten that Ivan Ilyich’s partner declared “No trumps.”
/> 26. Jean: French for Ivan. It was an affected refinement among upper-class women to substitute French for Russian names.
27. Kiesewetter’s logic: J. G. Kiesewetter (1766–1819) published a textbook of logic widely used in Russian schools, in a Russian translation.
28. Vanya . . . Mitya and Volodya . . . Katenka: Diminutives for “Ivan” as a child; his brothers, Dmitri and Vladimir, and his sister, Ekaterina.
29. établissement: Fancy French for “arrangement.”
30. rubakha: the traditional high-collared Russian peasant shirt.
31. Vassili Ivanovich . . . has gone . . . Praskovya Feodorovna gave orders: In the Russian, Piotr uses the third person plural for both verbs—a servant’s courtesy to the gentry he serves, in strong contrast to the intimate tone that has developed between Ivan Ilyich and Gerasim. Tolstoy has forgotten that he called Ivan Ilyich’s son Volodya (diminutive of Vladimir). Later he gets Petrishev’s patronymic wrong.
32. Sarah Bernhardt: Sarah Bernhardt (1844 –1923), the famous French actress, toured Russia during the winter of 1881–82.
33. à la Capoul: Hair parted down the middle with two curls falling on either side of the forehead—a style named after the French tenor Victor Capoul (1839–1924).
34. Adrienne Lecouvreur: An eighteenth-century actress whose life was dramatized in a play of 1849, written by A. E. Scribe and E. G. Legouvé. The lead was one of Sarah Bernhardt’s most celebrated roles.
35. it’s time to go: Tolstoy’s italics. In this context, “glancing at her watch, a gift from her father” evokes Ivan Ilyich’s own watch and medallion, with the motto “respice finem.” Liza is as incapable of foreseeing her own end as her father was—even with her father dying in front of her.
36. The court is in session! . . . the judge is coming: Tolstoy is turning a pun the translation cannot reproduce exactly. In Russian “sud idyot,” the usher’s cry, means “the court is in session.” But sud also means “trial,” “judges,” “bench,” “judgment,” “verdict.” Tolstoy then twice repeats the usher’s phrase, but reverses it to “idyot sud ” so implying in fluid progression that the court is in session; the judge is coming; judgment is coming.
37. nyanya: nurse, nanny.
38. “not the right thing”: In the Russian, ne to literally means “not it.” The phrase spans a range of tones, from what is socially improper to what is morally wrong. Throughout the next two paragraphs Tolstoy repeats the same phrase, to mark Ivan Ilyich’s gradual realization that what he thought socially acceptable was morally wrong. The done thing is not the right thing.
MASTER AND MAN
1. the seventies . . . the winter festival of St. Nicholas: 1870s; now December 19 (New Style).
2. merchant of the Second Guild: Merchants were classed in guilds, according to their trade and size of capital.
3. ten thousand rubles: For a modern equivalent, see note 1 to “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” Later, Tolstoy changes its value. See note 17 below.
4. added to them two thousand three hundred rubles from the church funds: hardly honest practice on Vassili Andreyich’s part.
5. Mukhorty: literally, the term for a bay horse dappled with gold.
6. Women! There’s no contradicting them!: Literally, “She sticks to you like a wet leaf in the bathhouse” (in a sauna Russians used to beat themselves with birch twigs).
7. Felt-soled valenki: Valenki are felt boots—normal Russian winter wear in those days, and very good in dry snow, but not wet conditions. Tolstoy distinguishes between Vassili Andreyich’s felt boots, which are covered with leather at the bottom, to protect against the wet, and Nikita’s, which are not, just as he later distinguishes between the master’s two fur-lined greatcoats and Nikita’s torn sheepskin jacket and thin kaftan. See also note 16.
8. Brekhunov never cheated anyone: Vassili Andreyich is speaking of himself in the third person. Significantly, “Brekhunov” means “braggart.”
9. H. Bergen’s 1904 translation, which appears to derive from an alternative and probably earlier text, continues: “Sometimes it seemed as if they were going down hill, sometimes as if they were ascending. Sometimes it seemed as if they were standing still, and that the snow-covered fields were moving past them.” See p. 88, where the same idea recurs.
10. printificated in Pullson: Osip Paulson (1825–1898) was a compiler of primary school manuals. Petrushka is quoting from his primer, with some errors in his Russian.
11. five holdings: land allocated to the peasants for their use, after the Edict of Emancipation in 1861. Practices differed from region to region, but it is possible that this family’s size (with five adult males) entitled it to five holdings.
12. younger brother: In the Russian, Tolstoy contradicts himself here, saying that this son is the eldest, whereas earlier he had said the second son was in charge of the homestead. This seems the better of the two alternatives, since it would also be a cause of dissension if the younger brother was in charge of the household because the older brother was in Moscow.
13. Children . . . on top of the oven: In a normal Russian peasant dwelling the large brick Dutch oven was the best place to sleep, being very warm. A high wide bunk running along the wall under the ceiling was the other sleeping place in the single, communal room.
14. poem from Paulson: Petrushka is mangling the first four lines of a well-known poem by Pushkin.
15. hame strap: The hames are two curved pieces of iron or wood forming the collar of a dray horse, to which the traces are attached. They are locked together like a pair of pincers. In a storm like this, once undone it would be very difficult to buckle them together again.
16. covered himself with the ticking: Just as Nikita is far less warmly dressed than Vassili Andreyich, so now he takes care of himself last. Mukhorty is covered with sacking, but Nikita wraps himself in the coarsest cloth of all, the ticking made of woven birch bark.
17. thirty sazhen . . . to each desyatina: One sazhen was 2.13 meters. One desyatin was 2.7 acres. The Goriachkin forest was 56 desyatinas—about 160 acres—and worth about 12,500 rubles. Vassili Andreyich proposes to pay an advance of 3,000 rubles (of which 2,300 are “borrowed” from church funds in his care) and 8,000 in total. The total price is thus a little short of the money Ivan Ilyich was so glad to get on taking up his final job (5,000 rubles annual salary and 3,500 rubles in moving expenses). The real value of the woodland is equivalent to two and a half years’ salary for Ivan Ilyich.
18. H. Bergen’s translation continues: “If it were God’s will that he should wake up alive in this world, that he should continue to do the work of a servant as in former days, always taking care of other people’s horses, and carting other men’s rye to the mill, that he should again from time to time take to drinking, and afterwards solemnly vow never to touch another drop, that he should give all his earnings to his wife and her cooper as he used to do, and be kept long waiting for that same old pittance—well, God’s will be done.
“But if God were to command him to awaken in another world, where everything would be new and joyous, as once, in his early boyhood, the caresses of his mother, the games with other children, the meadows, woods, the sleigh rides in winter were new and joyous to him in this world, and if he were to begin an entirely new life there, quite different from the life he had been living here—well, God’s will be done. Nikita now became wholly unconscious.”
19. candles . . . put back in their chest: another bit of cheating. Vassili Andreyich didn’t leave the worshippers’ candles burning after the service but took them back for resale, as new.
READING GROUP GUIDE
1.
“The Death of Ivan Ilyich” and “Master and Man” are both stories about dying well or badly. How does Tolstoy think death should be faced? What makes dying difficult?
2.
Read Tolstoy’s other stories about death, like “The Snowstorm,” “Three Deaths,” “Memoirs of a Madman,” “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” and “What Men Live
By.” Do his attitudes to death change as he comes closer to his own death?
3.
E. M. Forster believed that birth and death present the novelist with insuperable difficulties. “We only know of them by report. Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural. Certain people pretend to tell us what birth and death are like . . . but it is all from the outside.” Is Tolstoy’s presentation of the experience of death “all from the outside”? Is it convincing?
4.
Other writers have tried to describe dying from the inside: Giuseppe di Lampedusa, for instance, in Chapter 7 of The Leopard; William Golding in Pincher Martin and the last chapter of Darkness Visible; Ian McEwan in Part 2 of Atonement. There are many poems by Emily Dickinson, like “I heard a fly buzz when I died” or “Because I could not stop for death,” that describe the subjective experience of death. How well do these authors compare with Tolstoy? What are they trying to tell us about death? Can you think of any other writers who attempt the difficult task of describing death from inside?
5.
John Keats said, “We hate poetry that has a palpable design on us, and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket.” Tolstoy’s stories could be called examples of affective literature—they want to persuade us into a particular attitude to both life and death. Do we hate him for his palpable design on us, or do we accede? If we do accede, why? How has he persuaded us?