On Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilicht

Few natural phenomena are as monstrous and frightening as the death from a terminal cancer. It is difficult to imagine a more painful, slow and distressful way of ceasing to be. The target member or organ swells into a volcano of pus; the nerves, overwhelmed by a blaze of pain signals that incessantly climb them, spit legions of sharp impulses in the brain, involving it in a storm of pain, dissolving consciousness itself in agony; the fever march over the muscles drowning the skin in sweat (the shirts of the patient will need to be continuously exchanged, as one after another they soak in smelly water); the stomach, revolted in acidity, is assaulted by constant nausea ; the esophagus is burned by jets of constant vomiting; the lungs, as if crushed by invisible hands, are possessed by an overwhelming air hunger, but can not breath it, even though surrounded by the element. The mouth of the patient is always invaded by a bad taste, by a disgusting flavor. No position ever brings comfort, as pain is eternal, insatiable: the dying man lies on his back, but the pains will keep punishing him without forgiveness; he turns to the right (with the help of nurses), and after feel a little relieved, is again invaded by the torment that will only hide himself sometimes, but that shall never go away; the patient once more turns his body, now to the left, and there it is the pain one more time, gnawing slowly, but always, never satiated. As a hot and hungry rat, the tumor gnaws the bowels of the sick, in a lonely fight: there is no one with who to share that suffering, for no one would understand it. Inside the body, in the flesh, within the soul, is this terrible fever mouse, the tumor, death, and its hunger will never leave, but continue to feed itself, without noise, without any rest, without ever offering forgiveness.

The mouse is here, everybody knows, the doctors can see it through test, through the X-rays; it is exposed for all eyes, and yet it is not possible to pull it out, to dissolve it, to extirpate it from the sick body: it has become an appendage of its victim. Morphine, in principle, gagged the biting mouth of the rat, dissolved the pinching and stabbing pain; with time, however, nothing will be able to contain the suffering. No position in bed brings comfort; no thought caresses the suffering and desperate mind; shouts and screams of pain do not produce any relief in leaving the throat. While the patient dissolves into unspeakable torments, his hospital room is filled with a putrid smell; everyone who enters the room, getting the flurries in the nauseated nostrils, know that death is there, sitting on the patient's bed, contemplating him. The food of the sick patient is nothing more than mere rice and mashed potatoes, which are swallowed with much pain and difficulty. Bathing, urinating and defecating are no longer normal physiological facts, but torment and shame (the patient can no longer relieves himself alone, but relies on adjutant ward, which include the complete abandonment of all dignity). The relatives await death without any tiny flame of hope (in fact, though ashamed to admit it, crave it, because they themselves want to go back to the living world, leaving the terrible atmosphere of the universe of the dead); they do not even speak to the dying man about a battle against the disease, asking him to get excited and do not despair, because they know that even for him the end is not a secret. Death is not the greatest of all torments: suffering has taken its place, has put is crown.

Here is the subject of the story of Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilicht. The book narrates, in a rapid flow of events, the life of his main character, narrates, also, in surgical details, the whole process of his illness and death. Death was never portrayed so horribly, horribly in being so lucidly, precisely and scientifically described. Tolstoy examines death as if dissecting a body, referring to every sinew, every nerve, every vein, every bone, to each muscle. Death is a creature that the writer puts on his desk, rummaging through its bowels with a coldness at the same time admirable and terrible.

The tale is also extremely beautiful. There is no place for romantic ideas about death, for poetic words and thoughts sanitized with colored inks. With accuracy and precision of a geometer, Tolstoy builds a wonderfully pure, crystalline and clear narrative about one of the greatest horrors known to human beings: our one finitude. In order to do a full autopsy on the creature, the novelist chooses a painful, agonizing, and especially slow way of dying, and with it curses his main character. Thus, his study can accommodate the entire development of the consciousness of the dying: from the first symptoms, through the increasing of pain, by the boiling of the initial fears and concerns, through the first scary ideas about a possibility of death, until reaching the stage where death is already a certainty, where the dying person must accept its destiny and realize that soon will be its time to sleep and dive into the abyss of the unknown. The beauty achieved by Leo Tolstoy is derived in great part to his fanatical preoccupation with details, with accuracy; as mentioned before, one has the impression that a coroner is producing a necropsy report, and the corpse which is now itself being dissected is death itself, in all its details.

The whole journey into nothingness is approached with an almost unbearable clarity: Tolstoy casts a very strong light on the subject, to be able to discern every detail, every little appendages and organs of its anatomy. Nothing escapes him: the bad taste in the mouth of Ivan Ilicht, the night sweats; the pain, gnawing in his internal tissues, sucking all his forces, licking his organs; the fear and denial of Ivan Ilicht and pity and final relief of his relatives; the repressed desire of the dying man for love (and, more importantly, his shame of yearning for caresses and strokes); the difficulty in meeting the most basic functions such as defecation; the lack of hope for Ivan and his sudden and pathetic faith in a resumption of health improvement occurred only a few hours before death; the weight on the chest that feels upon Ivan few days before he died ... Everything is analyzed, nothing is abandoned. This is one of the greatest qualities of Tolstoy's genius: his absorption of details, of each tiny body hair of the body of experience. Nothing will go unnoticed: He knows all environments, from a prostitute simple room to the large hall of the palace of the Kzar; he knows people clothes: the suits, the dresses, the pajamas; he knows all the physical sensations, in all its minimum characteristics; he knows (and have already felt - for that see his diaries) all the mental moods of mankind, such as envy, hatred, love, lust; he knows every thought that, if we wanted to write, we would find it ideal to tell, but we would not remember to quote (when we read him we always feel that what it is said is exactly what needed to be said).

It is a man who had seen much, who has lived many experiences and (more important) knew when and how to bring each one of them to the work he was writing. Such details and sensations, because they are experienced by each of us, being read, hit us (because we have already feel that that now we read), as if it were exactly the perfect thought and phrase for the situation. To bring, however, such feelings and thoughts in the exact right moment and form in a narrative is a skill of genius, something extremely difficult to obtain. For that, thak you, mister Leo Tolstoy.