To Redemption In Leo Tolstoy's The Death Of Ivan Ilyich
The Road to Redemption: in Tolstoy’s ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Leo Tolstoy is considered Russia’s greatest novelist and one of its most influential moral philosophers. Born to the family of russian provincial nobility and profoundly influenced by changes of society in Western Europe, he was a big supporter of abolition of serfdom in 1861 who believed that a true Christian could find lasting happiness by striving for inner self-perfection. If War and Peace was influenced by Romanticism, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, that came 20 years later, is clearly written in the Realist tradition. The novel tells a story of a man by the name Ivan Ilyich Golovin who comes to realize he has lived “a most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible …show more content…
Ivan Ilyich realizes that he has become the enemy of the thing he previously treasured most: cheerful living, in accordance with the standards of propriety, without disturbances or too much thought. Ivan Ilyich attempts to cure himself with the power of positive thinking, but he soon realizes that mortality is not a problem that can be overcome with mind. Because he is facing death, Ivan Ilych 's perception of life is altered. His despairing question, "What 's the use?" is not the only result of his struggle with mortality. He also sees hypocrisy and stupidity more clearly. Schwartz irritates him the most with “his jocularity, vivacity, and savoir-faire, which reminded him of what he himself had been ten years ago” (1350). And he finally realizes that “his life was poisoned” and it spread to other people around him, and “penetrated more and more deeply into his whole being” (1350). As Ivan Ilyich considers the accident that started his illness, he cannot believe the irony, the terrible contrast between his superficial old world and the new cold truth facing him: “It really is so! I lost my life over that curtain as I might have done when storming a fort. Is that possible? How terrible and how stupid. It can 't be true! It can 't, but it is '"(1355). He no longer denied the fact that he was
Leo Tolstoy is considered Russia’s greatest novelist and one of its most influential moral philosophers. Born to the family of russian provincial nobility and profoundly influenced by changes of society in Western Europe, he was a big supporter of abolition of serfdom in 1861 who believed that a true Christian could find lasting happiness by striving for inner self-perfection. If War and Peace was influenced by Romanticism, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, that came 20 years later, is clearly written in the Realist tradition. The novel tells a story of a man by the name Ivan Ilyich Golovin who comes to realize he has lived “a most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible …show more content…
Ivan Ilyich realizes that he has become the enemy of the thing he previously treasured most: cheerful living, in accordance with the standards of propriety, without disturbances or too much thought. Ivan Ilyich attempts to cure himself with the power of positive thinking, but he soon realizes that mortality is not a problem that can be overcome with mind. Because he is facing death, Ivan Ilych 's perception of life is altered. His despairing question, "What 's the use?" is not the only result of his struggle with mortality. He also sees hypocrisy and stupidity more clearly. Schwartz irritates him the most with “his jocularity, vivacity, and savoir-faire, which reminded him of what he himself had been ten years ago” (1350). And he finally realizes that “his life was poisoned” and it spread to other people around him, and “penetrated more and more deeply into his whole being” (1350). As Ivan Ilyich considers the accident that started his illness, he cannot believe the irony, the terrible contrast between his superficial old world and the new cold truth facing him: “It really is so! I lost my life over that curtain as I might have done when storming a fort. Is that possible? How terrible and how stupid. It can 't be true! It can 't, but it is '"(1355). He no longer denied the fact that he was