Leo Tolstoy

At first, Sofia was well disposed to Chertkov – at least he was not a ‘dark one’. This mild sympathy, however, soon turned into suspicious resentment and later into intense hatred. She had finally found the most appropriate object for her jealousy. She blamed Chertkov for her estrangement from her husband, even though she knew well enough that her family life had already reached breaking point before Chertkov made an appearance. Several months before Lev’s death, Sofia discovered in his diary for 1851 an entry in which he confessed that he had always loved men more than women. She openly accused her 82-year-old husband of having homosexual relations with Chertkov.

This accusation, based on a statement written nearly sixty years earlier, in which the diarist himself expressed a ‘terrible aversion’ towards homosexuality, was utterly irrational. Yet in a perverse way Sofia was perhaps on to something. The handsome, aristocratic, self-confident Chertkov matched a masculine ideal so successfully described in Tolstoy’s great novels. Vladimir could play Prince Andrei to the somewhat Bezukhovian Lev, never sure of himself, hesitant and prone to scorching self-introspection. Traumatized by the alienation of his elder sons, Tolstoy saw in Chertkov his true spiritual son and heir. At the same time, notwithstanding the difference in age, Chertkov assumed from the very beginning the role of the paternal figure Tolstoy had lacked in his teenage years. The teacher could always confess to his pupil the most intimate movements of his heart, his doubts and fears and be certain to receive clear and definite answers.

Chertkov was also highly efficient. On Tolstoy’s advice, he organized a publishing house called ‘Intermediary’, specializing in cheap editions for the masses. The bulk of its output consisted of popular stories, tales and essays written, edited or recommended by Tolstoy. The rendering of folk tales and composing moral and religious parables for ‘Intermediary’ allowed Tolstoy to satisfy a need for artistic creativity without compromising his renunciation of literature. Some of these stories, such as What Men Live By or How Much Land Does a Man Need?, show that his literary genius had not left him.

Still Tolstoy aspired to produce a work for the educated reader that would be both as psychologically convincing and profound as Anna Karenina, and as dry and didactically unambiguous as his Primer. He achieved this synthesis in The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Tolstoy felt that he had to apologize for this endeavour, as he wrote to Chertkov, ‘I promised to finish this for my wife to include in her new edition, but this article only relates to our circle in its form . . . in content it relates to everyone’ (Ls, II, p. 383). Sofia found the story ‘a bit morbid, but very good’ (CW, XXVI, p. 681), and eagerly included it in the twelfth volume of Tolstoy’s collected works. She still hoped that her husband would return to literature and that this would save their family.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a painfully naturalistic depiction of the agonies of a high-ranking official dying from cancer. Contemporary doctors admired the precision with which Ivan Ilyich’s symptoms were described and were able to diagnose not only the nature of the illness, but the exact location of the tumour and the phases of its progress. Of course, depicting the physiology of dying was not the true focus of Tolstoy’s attention. He was writing about the most important problem he had ever encountered.

The ‘Arzamas horror’ that afflicted Tolstoy in 1869 had taught him that the presence of death can render life meaningless. A successful career, an outwardly functional family life, refined tastes and a dignified lifestyle had made Ivan Ilyich proud of himself, but on his deathbed he has no significant memories to sustain him. His illness starts from a bruise he gets arranging fashionable furniture in his apartment. At the end of his life he feels completely alienated from his wife, children, friends and colleagues, and no one, except his servant, really sympathizes with his demise and tries in earnest to understand his needs and alleviate his pain.

The final turn of the narrative, however, brings Ivan Ilyich closer to Prince Andrei than to Anna Karenina. Pity for his schoolboy son, who bursts into tears and kisses his hand, and for his wife, who stands nearby with tears in her eyes, opens the way for him to feel universal love that melts both the fear of death and death itself. Instead of sucking meaning out of life, death retrospectively endows it with a higher purpose.