The Death of Ivan Ilych Supplemental Study Guide

The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy

The purpose of this supplemental study guide is to provide you additional guidance in reading Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan llyich. The television program and Living Literature Study Guide offer an excellent analysis of the novella. In the introduction to Tolstoy in The Norton Anthology of World, you encounter some of the same ideas on pages 1420 - 1421. My supplementary material focuses on the work as an example of the fiction of realism. This emphasis lets me contrast some of the artistic goals of the times of Tolstoy's story with the times of Goethe's play Faust.. The television program presented Faust as an example of Romanticism. However, Professor Lynch has already discussed realism with his students in a presentation of two works not included in our course, Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. Therefore, he only alludes to the concept in our program on Ivan llyich.

I don't want the discussion of realism to lessen the importance of the excellent ideas about the story presented by Professor Lynch and his students, or to replace the overview of its ideas and techniques in your text. You can read the work well without seeing its historical place in Western literature. Still, I want to follow up on features important to the course's goals, and to add some of what our shortened version of the television programs omits. You can read the World Literature’s discussion of realism on pages 1071-79 if you want further amplification, and I have consulted their presentation myself in preparing this material.

Realism: Mid-nineteenth century literary realism reacts against some of the Romantic tendencies that have become stale by this time. Its goal, in a fairly common phrasing, ls to present the truth of contemporary life and manners faithfully, to represent life as it is seen and heard, accurately and objectively. The reality of realistic fiction is primarily external. It represents what ordinary people see and experience themselves. As Dr. Lynch says, the name Ivan llyich is like John Doe in English, a name to suggest an everyman (everyperson?). Tolstoy doesn't want to romanticize death in his fiction, even if his central character has a marvelous revelation near the story's end. There's death as it is -- a final two hours of horrible pain and screaming after Ivan's revelation. Note what the text says about Tolstoy's fiction: "The detail, as always in Tolstoy, is superbly concrete and realistic: he does not shy away from the smell of disease, the physical necessity of using a chamber pot, or the sound of screaming" (1011).

The realists wanted a mirror to external reality. The Romantics concerned themselves more with the internal reality imagination can create. They wanted "reality" too, just a different one. The Romantics also wanted outstanding heroes, great strivers like Faust not an apparently successful middle class judge whose goals didn't extend beyond his stylish, proper house. Perhaps it's telling that Romantics were often enthusiastic about the rising career of Napoleon of France, while Tolstoy suggested in his sweeping novel War and Peace that Napoleon was just a product of his times, not an unusual genius at all.

You can probably see that the Romantics' enthusiasm for the individual and his or her subjective reality is replaced by the realist's interest in a more objective reality. Needless to say, this point can be over-stressed since all writers must involve themselves with the emotional lives of their characters.

While the Romantics used the legends of the past and set many of their works in a glorified past (Faust, set in medieval Germany, uses a medieval legend as its plot), the realists wanted to portray contemporary society. One tendency in that presentation was to see middle class life as most representative of the contemporary world. Your anthology notes the common idea that the middle class was becoming increasingly important in the nineteenth century, and they received artistic attentions as well.

Here is a good time to make a point about Tolstoy himself and to suggest that the useful generalizations I'm making cannot hope to explain all of a particular writer's goals. Tolstoy the realist also shared ideas with the Romantics before him. The Romantics portrayed the peasant classes as often superior to the middle classes. The peasants were closer to nature and real life, and often more insightful than their richer countrymen. Tolstoy grew up adoring writers like Rousseau who championed these beliefs, and his presentation of Gerasim in lvan Ilyich illustrates this faith. I find Gerasim a far more winning character than the peasants and village people presented by Goethe in Faust.

Questions to ask yourself as you read the novella. These are not paper topics.

1. How does the novella illustrate mid-nineteenth century literary realism?. Contrast the realism with the Romanticism of Faust What does it mean to say that the treatment of Gerasim is romantic?
2. What role do (van's wife, daughter and son play in the work? The son is certainly the most sympathetic of the three. Does the story indicate that his nature makes him better, or do we have evidence that it's Tolstoy's attitude toward childhood that makes the boy sympathetic at this time in his life?
3. What do the professors on the program mean when they say that the ending is Christian on one level, but that it can be seen as non-Christian as well? Do the students on the programs seem more inclined to see the ending as Christian than the professors?

Last Updated: January 7, 2008