Natalie Feng

Among all literary subjects, death has always been the heaviest, deepest, and most unavoidable ultimate theme. Yet before Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, the writing of death in Western literature had long been trapped in two fixed patterns, never truly approaching the lived experience of ordinary human life.

The first was religious writing about death. Throughout the long Middle Ages and the early modern period, literature often sanctified death, treating physical death as a holy process of the soul’s liberation, its journey to heaven, and the cleansing of sin. In this kind of narrative, death contains no pain, no fear, and no emptiness. It is a warm return, a sacred rebirth.

This kind of writing dissolves all the cruelty of death. It covers the instinctive terror that ordinary people feel when facing the end with the radiance of so-called faith. It may seem lofty and transcendent, but in fact it is extremely detached from reality. What it depicts is divine death, not human death.

The second pattern was dramatic writing about death, which is also the literary mode most familiar to the public. All deaths must be attached to dramatic plots, must serve conflict, and must create emotional intensity. Whether it is martyrdom in love and hatred, tragic downfall under the weight of fate, or heroic sacrifice for a noble cause, death in literary works is always paved with foreshadowing, climax, meaning, memorable scenes, intensity, rise and fall, and a complete narrative closure. But in the real world, the lives of the vast majority of people are plain and uneventful. The deaths of the vast majority of people have no drama, no tragedy, no audience, no commemoration. They are only the silent decay of the body, a slow and simmering conclusion to life.

In The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a novel of fewer than ten thousand words, Tolstoy completely overturns the death-writing formula that had lasted for thousands of years. He casts aside sacred filters, theatrical conflict, and tragic embellishment, and chooses instead the sharpest and most realistic pen of realism to write the life and death of an ordinary, mediocre, and utterly common man.

In other words, the reason this work became a milestone in literary history lies in the fact that it carried out a thorough literary revolution: past literature wrote about special deaths, while Tolstoy insisted on writing about ordinary death. Others wrote of artistically processed tragedy; he wrote of the real ending of millions of ordinary lives.

The protagonist, Ivan Ilyich, is a man with no heroic aura at all. He is an ordinary person, a typical middle-class official in nineteenth-century Russian society, and also a condensed image of countless ordinary people across ancient and modern times, in China and abroad, who live within their duties and drift with the current. His life contains no hardship, no rebellion, no grand ideal, and no heinous wrongdoing. All his life, he moves steadily along the path already approved by society.

In youth he studies diligently, only to secure a respectable and stable job. In adulthood he enters official life, acts prudently and smoothly, observes his place, and rises step by step in the legal profession, establishing a firm footing in the middle class. After marriage, he manages his family, maintains his marriage, and raises his children according to the rules. In daily life, he carefully cultivates social connections, maintains a respectable image, and becomes, in everyone’s eyes, a proper, decent, and successful normal person. Throughout his life, he is modest with others, responsible at work, obedient to rules, never evil, and fully aligned with the worldly definition of a good and successful person. His whole life principle is to be sociable, proper, stable, not inferior to others, and to play all the roles society assigns him, never deviating from the life track recognized by the masses.

Corresponding to this is his undramatic and uneventful death. There is no accident, no sudden critical illness, and no twist of fate. Only a chronic illness of unclear cause quietly entangles him.

At first, it is merely a mild hidden physical pain: not painful, not itchy, not affecting normal life at all. Like everyone else, he unconsciously treats it as an ordinary minor illness, believing that rest for a few days will eventually cure it. But the illness does not disappear. Instead, it worsens day by day, slowly changing from occasional discomfort into continuous pain, from a localized bodily difficulty into a systemic decline. He grows thinner by the day, suffers insomnia through the night, loses his appetite, and his body is gradually consumed, penetrated, and crushed by pain. There is no violent rupture, no heart-stopping emergency, only day after day of pain, helplessness, torment, and loneliness, until at last he quietly passes away in exhaustion and struggle.

This, in fact, is the most real form of death for ordinary people: plain, long, grinding, and silent. We are used to the separations of life and death in film and television, and we always assume that death is sudden, dramatic, and full of ritual. But real life and death are often silent. For the vast majority of people, life ends in ordinariness, runs on quietly, grows old quietly, and finally is slowly swallowed by an unnamed illness, departing silently, unnoticed and unremembered.

Tolstoy’s greatest achievement is that he dared to face this extreme plainness directly, dared to write this truth that no one willingly admits. In other literary works, readers are merely spectators of death, watching the tragedies of others after the fact. But Ivan Ilyich’s death can make every reader become a participant and see, with terrifying clarity, the possible shape of one’s own future. This direct sense of truth and empathy that strikes at the essence of life is a height that all dramatic literary works can never reach.

At this point, if the extreme realism of the story forms the skeleton of the whole work, then its layered, precise, and subtle psychological description is the spiritual core of this century-old classic.

In this short novel, Tolstoy uses an almost psychological, documentary-like touch to record the complete inner transformation of an ordinary person from illness to death: from self-deception, anger, resentment, and loneliness, to ultimate awakening, calmness, and reconciliation. Every layer of mental change is truly piercing, deeply human, and precisely reproduces all the instinctive responses of a person facing death. There is no literary exaggeration, no deliberate fabrication.

In the early stage of illness, the most instinctive human reaction is avoidance and self-deception. Ivan lives smoothly and steadily all his life, and has long assumed that birth, aging, illness, and death are the fate of other people, unrelated to his own rule-abiding and serious life. When discomfort first appears in his body, he is almost unwilling to imagine the worst. He deliberately avoids the ultimate subject of death and constantly reassures himself that it is only a minor illness, one that will quickly heal as long as he cooperates with treatment. He repeatedly visits doctors, takes medicine faithfully, and pins his hope on physicians and drugs. In essence, this is not simply a search for survival, but an unwillingness to break the image of a peaceful and complete life he has constructed for himself. He is unwilling to admit that he is the same as ordinary people: ultimately fragile, ultimately aging, and ultimately mortal. More truly, this self-deception is not the obsession of an individual alone, but a collective human escape. His wife, children, colleagues, and friends all silently avoid the subject of life and death. On the surface they offer polite concern; inwardly they deliberately ignore the descent of death. Everyone uses that perfunctory concern and deliberate avoidance to preserve a false stability. This is the common disease of all people: we spend our whole lives busy scheming, chasing vanity, and sinking into the ordinary world, but we never dare to look directly at the end. We use daily noise to numb ourselves and lucky thinking to keep death far away, forever unrelated to ourselves.

As the illness continues to worsen, the medicine completely loses its effect, the body’s pain becomes constant, and the false stability is utterly shattered. Ivan’s state of mind collapses completely, shifting from initial self-deception into extreme anger, grievance, and resentment. Countless days and nights of severe pain drive him into deep confusion and questioning. He spends his whole life peacefully following rules, working diligently and responsibly, treating others generously, never doing evil, never offending anyone, and never making any mistakes. Why, then, must he bear such endless illness and ruin? This ordinary person’s grievance and resentment toward suffering is the truest and most universal human state of mind.

People have a fixed assumption: those who are kind, proper, and practical should be treated gently by life. Yet life and death have never distinguished between good and evil, character, or right and wrong. They descend upon everyone with absolute fairness and cruelty. They will not show mercy simply because one is kind, nor will they grant special forgiveness because one is decent and outstanding.

More piercing than physical pain is the complete exposure of human coldness and the collapse of interpersonal relationships. The life that once seemed respectable, warm, and complete is stripped of all disguise in the face of illness.

When healthy and respectable, when his public image is still bright, his family is harmonious, relatives are close, and colleagues are respectful. Everyone surrounds him, maintaining the illusion of warmth. But when he lies ill in bed, loses value, and declines day by day, everyone’s true attitude is fully exposed. His wife’s concern is mostly perfunctory, filled inwardly with irritation and disgust. She only feels that his illness has dragged down her family life and ruined the original respectable days. His young children feel fear, deliberately distance themselves, and avoid him, showing almost no sincere compassion. Formerly close colleagues and friends do not truly care about his life or death. What they care about is only the vacancy left by his position, the resources freed up by his absence, and the private calculation of their own gains and losses.

At this moment, Ivan sees through the essence of worldly relationships. The respectable connections, friendly manners, and smooth social life he painstakingly managed all his life were never based on so-called sincerity and warmth. They depended entirely on status, power, value, and face. Once external brightness fades and value disappears, all warmth becomes foam, all social ties disperse, and in the end only he remains alone, bearing all pain and despair, with no one sharing, no one accompanying, and no one saving him. Extreme loneliness becomes the heaviest and sharpest torment before his death.

When death finally approaches and he can no longer escape or hide, extreme fear utterly envelops his body. Yet it also forces him to open his life for the first time, and indeed the only time, to true self-examination and spiritual awakening.

In the restless agony and endless darkness of day and night, worldly fame, status, respectability, and wealth all lose meaning. All external points of support become zero. He finally leaps out of the world’s standards of judgment and begins to face his truest self and life. Looking back on his life, he finally sees through its absurdity and emptiness. From childhood to adulthood, every choice, every effort, every persistence was never from the heart or from passion, but was made to cater to the world, please others, and adapt to rules. Studying was for a decent future; career was for stability and dignity; marriage was to complete the adult life process; social life was to accumulate resources; struggle was to gain others’ recognition. All his life, he skillfully played the roles society required: the judge needed by the court, the husband and father needed by the family, the respectable friend needed by his circle. He perfectly completed every role assigned by the world and became an unquestionable success in the eyes of others, but he alone had never truly been himself.

He lived a whole life that appeared smooth, respectable, and polished, but in reality, from beginning to end, he had been living passively, living with the current, performing life. He followed the steps of the masses, obeyed social rules, catered to the gaze of others, exhausted half his life pursuing success as defined by others, and spent his entire life running around, entangled, and consumed. In the end, he became a hollow person with no self, no passion, and no soul.

This is also the most realistic core of the entire work. It reflects the life condition of countless modern people. Most of us spend our lives growing up on time, going to school on time, working on time, forming families on time, aging on time, drifting along standardized life tracks, chasing wealth, status, respectability, and social approval, becoming obsessed with comparison, internal friction, and conformity. We live our whole lives in other people’s judgments, and have never seriously listened to our own hearts or truly lived a single day for ourselves.

A life that seems stable and complete is in fact full of blindness and emptiness. A life that seems busy and substantial is in fact hollow, void, and colorless.

At the final moment of life, Ivan completes a complete spiritual transformation and reconciliation.

After long pain, struggle, reflection, and review, he finally lets go of all resentment, fear, and obsession. He no longer resents the unfairness of fate, no longer compares himself to the indifference of others, no longer resists the descent of death. He finally sees through the emptiness of worldly prosperity.

At last he understands that all the things people exhaust their lives fighting for, competing over, and chasing are not worth a single coin in the face of life and death. All respectability, fame, status, and social ties are smoke that flickers for an instant, unable to be carried away, unable to stay, and meaningless. After breaking free from a lifetime of worldly shackles and obsessive restraints, his heart finally returns to peace. He calmly accepts the end of life and walks toward death with ultimate clarity and serenity.

This awakening contains no religious sacred ascension, no triumphant self-comfort. It is simply an ordinary person seeing through the truth of life and reaching ultimate clarity after breaking the illusion of life. This truth is simple and profound, striking directly at the depths of every person’s soul.

It is precisely this profound reflection on life that allows the work to thoroughly transcend the category of ordinary tragic stories, rising from one individual’s experience of death into the ultimate question about the survival predicament of all human beings.

Ordinary works on death only bring readers brief sadness and fear, making people dread death and pity the fate of others. But under Tolstoy’s pen, the true value of Ivan Ilyich’s death is that it allows us to reflect on life through death, asking every person to respect the end while also reconsidering the present life.

Tolstoy does not deliberately criticize the times, attack society, or accuse human nature. Instead, with the most restrained touch, he exposes the most common spiritual predicament of humankind:

Most people spend their whole lives immersed in worldly vanity, blindly following the crowd, catering to the outside world, overdrawing themselves, using their entire lifetime to perform perfection, pretend respectability, and chase emptiness. Only at the end of life do they realize with alarm that half a lifetime of restless struggle has all been empty. They have never truly lived as themselves, lived with value, or lived with meaning. Death is no longer merely the end of life; it is an absolutely fair and incomparably clear mirror, illuminating the falseness of all life, the blindness of life, and the desolation of the soul.

What supports the work’s status as top-tier literature is also Tolstoy’s singular and restrained narrative art.

The whole novel is almost narrated in zero degree, extremely controlled, without sensationalism, crying, lyricism, or deliberately created tragedy. The author always observes with a calm, objective, and neutral gaze, plainly and directly recording the protagonist’s bodily changes, psychological fluctuations, daily suffering, the coldness of those around him, and the emptiness of human nature. The whole work carries no subjective emotion, does not guide the reader to be moved, does not deliberately manufacture tears, and does not forcibly elevate the theme. The plainer and more restrained the writing, the more powerfully it shakes the heart. Works that deliberately exaggerate grief and create conflict force emotion upon the reader, producing only passive emotion and brief sympathy. But Tolstoy’s cold writing allows readers to understand the truth by themselves, reflect on their own, and awaken inwardly. This inward shock and clarity is far more lasting and profound than deliberate emotional manipulation.

Moreover, the novel’s sharply reversed structure at the opening is a stroke of genius. It raises the overall pattern and philosophical depth of the entire work. Traditional death narratives usually proceed from life to death, step by step, with death as the final ending of the story. But this novel begins directly after Ivan’s death, opening with the scene of his funeral. Colleagues secretly calculate the vacancy left by his position and the possibility of promotion. Friends offer bright, false condolences. His wife pretends to grieve while in fact worrying about her own future life. Everyone harbors their own concerns, responds hypocritically, and no one truly regrets or grieves for this recently departed life.

From the beginning, readers already know the ending. Looking back with a sense of predetermined fate at Ivan’s cautious, conformist, falsely respectable, and hollow life, they can instantly see through the essence of human life:

Everyone’s busyness, calculation, comparison, management, and pretense will eventually be reduced to zero before death. All worldly prosperity is only transient; all human obsessions ultimately become emptiness.

This unique narrative structure gives the whole work a thick sense of fate and transparent philosophical reflection, allowing the life-and-death story of an ordinary person to possess a grand structure overlooking the entire condition of human existence.

But it must also be said that this work has never been nihilistic literature. Behind its cruel truth, it also gives everyone the most precious revelation about life. Precisely because death is absolutely fair and the end will inevitably arrive, we should all the more leap out of worldly blindness, break free from the gaze of others, lay down meaningless comparison, stop exhausting ourselves for the sake of appearances, and no longer consume ourselves for false fame. We should treat every day seriously, follow our hearts, live truthfully, live as ourselves, and live with value.

A hundred years pass; times continue to change; worldly lifestyles, standards of success, and social rules keep shifting. Yet the spiritual predicament of ordinary people has never changed. We are still used to following the current, still clinging to others’ evaluations, still sinking into worldly vanity, treating wealth, status, and external glamour as the only measures of a successful life.

Many people are pushed onto a standardized road from childhood: study hard, work hard, chase rank and income, spend their whole lives comparing themselves with those around them, act cautiously in relationships, compromise constantly to maintain a seemingly perfect life in the eyes of others, and keep pretending. We always feel there is still a long time to squander. We always assume that old age and death are still far away from us. So we pour all our energy into chasing worldly goals and slowly forget what we truly love, abandon our innermost thoughts, and day by day become more and more like Ivan Ilyich.

In modern society especially, the pace is faster, temptations are greater, and every kind of comparison between people is more direct. The internet magnifies worldly standards of success. Other people’s lives, identities, and wealth are constantly displayed before our eyes, producing endless anxiety and restlessness. Many people overdraw themselves in order to chase a so-called upper-class life, force themselves to socialize in order to maintain superficial connections and respectability, and continue stubbornly playing the role of calm respectability while clearly exhausted and unhappy inside. Everyone fears falling behind and being looked down upon, so they unconsciously join this endless race, rarely stopping to ask themselves: Is this really the life I want? How much joy from the heart can everything I now possess truly bring me? Just like Ivan in the novel, he spends his whole life building a seemingly solid framework for living, but when illness keeps arriving and death finally approaches, the entire mansion of meaning collapses, leaving only endless emptiness and regret.

This is not a denial of effort or struggle, but a reminder to everyone: the meaning of struggle has never been to become what others expect, but to become one’s own complete life.

Death is the end that no one can escape. It is like a ruler, weighing the weight of every life. It will not show mercy because one owns more wealth, nor will it open an exception because one occupies a higher position. This extreme fairness is precisely the most powerful dissolution of all worldly obsession.

When we understand Ivan’s life, we understand that those momentary victories, brief reputations, and outward brilliance are only passing clouds in the long river of life. Rather than exhaust all our strength catering to the outside world, lose ourselves in comparison, and pretend respectability, it is better to learn to reconcile with ourselves, accept ordinary life, protect our inner passion, treat every meal seriously, accompany the people around us with care, persist in doing what we love, and calmly face the rise and fall of life without being consumed by social anxiety or led astray by worldly gossip. Such a life may not shine brilliantly in the eyes of others, but when it reaches its end, it may arrive with inner calm and no regret.

One could say that Tolstoy wrote this story not to exaggerate the terror of death, nor to proclaim that life is inherently empty, but to awaken everyone sleeping inside worldly illusions through the life and death of an ordinary person.

He tears off the false outer garment of life and lets us see clearly the cost of blindness and pretense. At the same time, he points a direction for our future:

First, we must recognize our own ordinariness.

We must give up illusion and return to reality. We must understand that the length of individual life is ultimately limited, but the depth of life is entirely determined by ourselves. And as external labels, identities, and positions disappear with the approach of life’s end, only true experience, a sincere heart, and choices without regret can truly remain.