The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a story for the older reader. One might go so far as to suggest that local authorities should give ‘seniors’ a copy free with their euphemistically named ‘Freedom Pass’ as a reminder of the longest journey they will ever take. Boris’s memento mori.
Perversely, because it is short and by a writer whose name is better known than his work is read, The Death of Ivan Ilyich routinely appears on ‘Great Books’ courses for the young — to whom the story manifestly does not speak, since the young know they will never die.
The narrative opens with the announcement of the death of a senior public prosecutor, Ivan Ilyich, to his assembled colleagues. Their faces are properly grave on receiving the sad news. But privately
the first thought of each of the gentlemen meeting in the room was of the significance the death might have for the promotion of the members themselves or their friends.
After a vivid description of the corpse the narrative proceeds as a jaundiced obituary, beginning: ‘Ivan Ilyich’s past life had been very simple and ordinary and very awful.’ He was a child of the time — a careerist and wholly happy in the groove that history had carved out for him. He was professionally lucky because, with the abolition of serfdom, ‘new men were needed’. Ivan Ilyich is just such a new man. Life is good. As an investigating magistrate in the provinces he meets his future wife, Praskovya.
She ‘was from a good noble family, was not bad-looking and had a bit of money’, and so he marries her. It starts well but continues less well: ‘Married life, with its conjugal caresses, new furniture, new china and new linen, were very pleasant until his wife’s pregnancy’.
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