The Last Breath of Ivan Ilyich

“The Death of Ivan Ilyich”, by Leo Tolstoy, is a textbook example of an author presenting social commentary about his status quo. In the story, a petty, ambitious judge falls ill to a mysterious disease that leaves him increasingly miserable and helpless. As the thin façade that is Ivan Ilyich’s life begins to crumble around him, he begins to notice the vanity and phoniness of the people surrounding him. Through the third-person narrator’s critical tone and unflattering portrayal of the key characters, the reader realizes that the material and superficial benefits of Ivan’s socially-gratifying life have all amounted to nothing in the end.
In the beginning of the story, it is hard feel any sympathy for Ivan. The reader asks himself what such a man must be like to elicit such an unsympathetic reaction to his death from close friends and family members: “[Ivan’s] face was handsomer and above all more dignified than when he was alive ( ¶ 28). They are self-absorbed, and seem to always think only of their own discomfort or inconvenience: “the more intimate of Ivan Ilych;s acquaintances, his so-called friends, could not help thinking also that they would now have to fulfill the very tiresome demans of propriety by attending the funeral service and paying a visit of condolence to the widow”(18) Throughout the funeral service Peter Ivanovich, Ivan’s closest “friend”, can only think of the bridge game later that night and his own discomfort at the social norms surrounding a funeral. By portraying his friends and family’s reactions to Ivan’s death, Tolstoy asks the reader a poignant question: What kind of society and/or person would inspire such a superficial lifestyle?
The other important defining point in the novel is Ivan’s realization of the shallowness and hopelessness of his former life. At first, he denies it to himself: “And whenever the thought occurred to him, as it often did, that it all resulted from his not having lived as he ought to have done, he at once recalled the correctness of his whole life and dismissed so strange an idea”(305). It is only when he begins to question himself that he realizes the bad aspects of his life; the memories that had seemed so pleasant now appear to him as distant and forlorn.
Throughout the novel, Tolstoy paints an unflattering portrait of the upper crust of the nineteenth-century Russian society and those who aspire to be in it. As he describes Ivan’s bourgeois home: “In reality it was just what is usually seen in the houses of people of moderate means who want to appear rich, and therefore succeed only in resembling others like themselves”(100). As Ivan realizes the mistakes he has made and the skin-deep, petty life he has led, it is already too late; apparently, Tolstoy thinks greed is punishable by death. In one man’s death, Tolstoy is teaching the reader how to live, and in one man’s greed, Tolstoy leaves the question of humility. Sometimes what isn’t said and what isn’t done is what’s important.(512)