Reading part of the Book Club. First Tolstoy book that I'm reading 😬 ### Background Leo Tolstoy wrote *The Death of Ivan Ilych* in 1886, a period when he himself was wrestling with questions of mortality, meaning, and the authenticity of life. By then, Tolstoy was already a literary giant, but he was haunted by the emptiness he saw in the rituals and ambitions of Russian high society. Tolstoy’s Russia was a place of rigid social hierarchies and formalities, where appearances mattered more than substance. The upper classes, to which Ivan Ilych belongs, lived lives that were outwardly comfortable but inwardly hollow. Historical footnote: beginning in 18th century, under  Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, who admired French Enlightenment ideas and sought to modernize Russia along Western European lines. French became the language of the Russian aristocracy, and French art, literature, and manners were widely imitated. The "Code of 1864" was a major legal reform enacted under Tsar Alexander II, aiming to make the Russian judiciary more transparent, fair, and independent. The book examines the society, as well as death: the only thing that is guaranteed to us all. In that sense it's a macabre and fictional version of [[When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi]]. ### Plotline Ivan Ilych is a judge, a husband, a father. He does what is expected of him, not out of passion or conviction, but because it is what people do. > Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible. He had been a member of the Court of Justice, and died at the age of forty-five. The story begins with Ivan’s colleagues learning of his death. Their reactions are telling: they think first of the promotions his passing will bring, then of the inconvenience of attending his funeral. At the funeral, they work hard to not confront their own mortality: > the customary reflection at once occurred to him that this had happened to Ivan Ilych and not to him, and that it should not and could not happen to him, and that to think that it could would be yielding to depressing which he ought not to do Then we're moved to the story of Ivan's pre-illness life. He's a regular social climber. People are the same -- as in Google in 2015, so in Russia of 19th century: > He was expecting to be offered the post of presiding judge in a University town, but Happe somehow came to the front and obtained the appointment instead. Ivan Ilych became irritable, reproached Happe, and quarreled both him and with his immediate superiors – who became colder to him and again passed him over when other appointments were made Ivan’s illness comes suddenly, a pain in his side that refuses to go away. At first, he tries to ignore it, to carry on as before. But the pain grows, and with it, a creeping sense of dread. Doctors are consulted, diagnoses are made, but nothing helps. Ivan is forced to confront the reality that he is dying, and that his life -- so carefully constructed -- offers him no comfort. As Ivan’s condition worsens, the world around him becomes increasingly alien. His family is impatient and resentful; his colleagues are indifferent. Only his servant, Gerasim, shows genuine compassion. Gerasim’s simple kindness -- holding Ivan’s legs to ease his pain, listening without judgment -- stands in stark contrast to the coldness of everyone else. In his final days, Ivan is tormented by the thought that he has not lived as he should have. He asks himself, “What if my whole life has been wrong?” It is a question that echoes through the novella, and through the lives of all who read it. ### Lessons #### The highest prior: we are always alive One's own death is an impossibility for a human. It's interesting to think about it from [[Predictive Processing]] / [[Active Inference]] perspective. Our most confident Bayesian prior is that "I'm alive". We've never perceived a world in which we're not alive, so death is inconceivable to the brain. Conveniently it means the strongest possible endeavoring to maintaining that state -- staying alive. We see it in much less nerdy and much more profoundly stated by Tolstoy, through the mouth of Ivan Ilych: > When I am not, what will there be? There will be nothing. Then where shall I be when I am no more? The death of others is *very* conceivable, but his own isn't > he syllogism he had learnt from Kiesewetter’s Logic: “Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal,” had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. That Caius – man in the abstract – was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others Ilych notices it himself: > It’s all the same to them, but they will die too! Fools! I first, and they later, but it will be the same for them. And now they are merry... the beasts!” #### The deception Susan Sontag wrote in "illness as metaphor": > “Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place Especially for terminal illness though, [[The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddharta Mukherjee(annotated)]] there's something deeper to illness -- it might actually be a one-way ticket. When medicine is not so advanced, Ilych lives in two worlds at the same time: * This is an illness that will pass with the right treatment. * This is a terminal illness. Ilych oscillates between the two, though more and more he skews towards the latter. He comes to the final realization only towards his last days: > He suffered ever the same unceasing agonies and in his loneliness pondered always on the same insoluble question: "What is this? Can it be that it is Death?" And the inner voice answered: "Yes, it is Death". But much much earlier, he is annoyed by the fact that all of the surrounding people ignored the second possibility completely: > What tormented Ivan Ilych most was the deception, the lie, which for some reason they all accepted, that he was not dying but was simply ill, and he only need keep quiet and undergo a treatment and then something very good would result. I've seen this referred as "the polite lie". Ilych himself also took part of this charade: > Ivan Ilych wanted to weep, wanted to be petted and cried over, and then his colleague Shebek would come, and instead of weeping and being petted, Ivan Ilych would assume a serious, severe, and profound air, and by force of habit would express his opinion on a decision of the Court of Cassation and would stubbornly insist on that view. #### Illness and death as an inconvenience It *is* much more convenient to blame an ill person for not taking his medicine, doing the right treatment, being stubborn, or whatever else. The opposite would mean that it could happen to us, which would violate the highest prior. > Praskovya Fedorovna’s attitude to Ivan Ilych’s illness, as she expressed it both to others and to him, was that it was his own fault and was another of the annoyances he caused her It made me think of all the illnesses in the family, and though not at the extent of Ilych's family, and definitely not explicitly, but surely there was *a little bit* of blaming the sick: "oh, he/she needs to take care of herself better". > "You see he doesn't listen to me and doesn't take his medicine at the proper time. And above all he lies in a position that is no doubt bad for him — with his legs up." > She described how he made Gerasim hold his legs up. > The doctor smiled with a contemptuous affability that said: "What's to be done? These sick people do have foolish fancies of that kind, but we must forgive them." Sounds very real. #### Status and wisdom The character of Gerasim is interesting. Among all the social climbers who are terribly avoidant of the concept of death, only Gerasim (the simple, peasant servant) is there to console him: > Once when Ivan Ilych was sending him away he even said straight out: “We shall all of us die, so why should I grudge a little trouble?” – expressing the fact that he did not think his work burdensome, because he was doing it for a dying man and hoped someone would do the same for him when his time came. Gerasim doesn't tell the polite lie, perhaps *because* his status is not so high that he perceives himself above death. Medical professionals apparently took quite a bit from this book. [Caring for Ivan Ilych](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/40694332_Caring_for_Ivan_Ilyich) says: > Gerasim’s avoidance of the polite lie is only part of what allows him to connect so profoundly to Ivan Ilyich. Interestingly, Gerasim is a more effective caretaker because of his extraordinarily low social status. Russian peasants were emancipated only 25 years before the novella’s publication. They remained separated from a middle class that was culturally more Western European than Slavic. Tolstoy illustrates this gap by describing Gerasim’s “Russian peasant costume” and unschooled manner. As a peasant, Gerasim accepts death as natural. He would not understand the middle class refusal to acknowledge death. Moreover, Gerasim, unlike the others who care for Ivan Illyich, has time. He has no social engagements like Ivan Ilyich’s friends, or opera tickets like Ivan Ilyich’s wife, or appointments like his physicians. Gerasim is successful because his status enables him to spend more conflict-free time with Ivan Ilyich. Sadly, both rank and restriction of time are as limiting to today’s caretakers as they were in Tolstoy’s time. ### What was Ilych's Illness? I was curious about that throughout the reading. So I [worked with ChatGPT](https://chatgpt.com/share/68387f62-f4b4-8004-8a92-b88e5293ae21 ) to figure it out. It diagnosed it as **Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma**: > Deep persistent flank pain, dysgeusia, rapid cachexia, inexorable downhill six‑month course, typical confusion of 19th‑century physicians (kidney vs. appendix) when faced with retro‑peritoneal tumour. Supported by multiple modern clinical readings. This might be a modern phenomenon. In an "atomized society", the room for the elderly is gone. ### Summary The book is a meditation on death on the level of [[When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi]] or [[The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddharta Mukherjee(annotated)]], a window into the late 19th century and a good first reading of Tolstoy. All in 150 pages -- great read! #published 2025-05-29