Who Is to Empty Your Chamber Pot?

 

Who Is To Empty Your Chamber Pot?

The young English writer Desmond MacCarthy came on a visit to the Tolstoy estate of Yasnaya Polyana. Upon his arrival the old man took him aside: “One thing you have to know. You must empty your own chamber pot. Asking the servants to do this is demeaning.” A few minutes later Tolstoy’s wife, Sofia Andreevna took him aside: “One thing of utmost importance. I must ask you, most strictly, not to empty your own chamber pot. We pay our lazy servants to work!” When nature called Mr. MacCarthy ended up sneaking off into the woods.

[excerpted from the book by U.R. Bowie, Here We Be. Where Be We?]

A Few Thoughts About Nots

 

 

The Not Things

In the Time of the Great Plague of 2020 many critics of our government are critical not of what has been done, but of what should have been done and was not. “For what was there none cared a jot; but all were wroth with what was not.”

Our leader, Bozo the Clown should have seen it coming, should have done something to stop the plague. But Bozo did nothing. “Why blame me,” says Bozo. “Name me one President in American history who ever saw a plague coming.”

 Bozo’s response to Covid-19: “It is what it is.”

 “Nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition.”

Monty Python

 

Meeting Not to Drink

Hoping to please the old man when they once met, the young writer Ivan Bunin told Tolstoy, “The sobriety societies are doing great things these days.” The old man snorted. “You mean when people get together not to drink? There’s something fake and unnatural about that. When people get together they naturally are going to drink. Getting together not to drink won’t do.”

                                             Ivan Bunin, The Liberation of Tolstoy

 

Thoughts for the Pro Lifers and Pro Choicers: If You Are Not, Are You Not Unhappy?

In Anna Karenina Dolly and Anna discuss the issue of contraception. Anna says, “What is reason given to me for if I am not to use it to avoid bringing unhappy creatures into the world? . . . I should always feel I had wronged these unhappy children . . . If they are not [if they don’t exist], at any rate they are not unhappy.” The original reads, “Если их нет, то они не несчастны по крайней мере, а если они несчастны, то я одна в этом виновата.” Literally: “If they are not, then they are at least not unhappy, but if they are unhappy, then I alone am to blame for that.”

 

Non-Events With Consequences

You use contraceptives. Your lovely baby girl—little Rachel with the curly ringlets and bright blue eyes—is never born. Consequently, you are lonely, sad, disillusioned with life. Meanwhile, Rachel is not unhappy, because she is not.

You miss an important phone call. The bell on the phone downstairs does not ring anymore. It started doing it (not) just this week.

In Anna Karenina Sergei Ivanovich wants to propose to Varenka and she wants him to. But they each are of two minds about this. Something deep inside each of them does not want the proposal to happen. In a scene in which they are out together gathering mushrooms, Sergei almost proposes, then does not. It almost happens, then does not. Later “the grownups sat by the balcony and talked as though nothing had happened, though they all, especially Sergei Ivanovich and Varenka, were very well aware that there had happened an event which, though negative, was of very great importance.” Or to put it in other words: a non-event of great importance had not happened.

[excerpted from the book by U.R. Bowie: Here We Be. Where Be We?]

Translation of Poem by Ivan Bunin, Иван Бунин, "Не видно птиц…" BIRDLESS

                           Illustration to the Bunin Poem, "Birdless," by Gennadi Novozhilov

 

 

Иван Бунин

(1870-1953)

Не видно птиц…

Не видно птиц. Покорно чахнет
Лес, опустевший и больной.
Грибы сошли, но крепко пахнет
В оврагах сыростью грибной.

Глушь стала ниже и светлее,
В кустах свалялася трава,
И, под дождем осенним тлея,
Чернеет тёмная листва.

А в поле ветер. День холодный
Угрюм и свеж — и целый день
Скитаюсь я в степи свободной,
Вдали от сел и деревень.

И, убаюкан шагом конным,
С отрадной грустью внемлю я,
Как ветер звоном однотонным,
Гудит-поет в стволы ружья.

1889 г.

d

Literal Translation

No birds can be seen. Meekly languishes

The forest, now deserted and sick.

The mushrooms are gone, but in the ravines

There is the stringent smell of fungal dampness.

 

The wilds now grow lower and brighter,

Grass has piled up under bushes,

And rotting beneath the autumn rain,

Lies the darkness of leaves.

 

It’s windy in the fields. The day is cold

Morose and crisp—and all day long

I wander in the open steppeland,

Far from villages and hamlets.

 

And lulled by the footfalls of my horse,

With exultant gloom I hearken to

The sounds of the wind as it blows on monotonous,

Whines and sings in the barrels of my gun.

 

d

 

Literary Translation/Adaptation by U.R. Bowie

 

Birdless

 

No birds in sight. Meek in its languishing

Lies the bleak forest, bare, vacant and ill.

Mushrooms are gone, but the air reeks of anguish in

Fungal damp smells that are stringent and shrill.

 

The wilds have a look that is lower and brighter,

Grass bent and crushed piles up under bush,

Beneath the fall rain under skies ever lighter,

Leaves on the rot lie in darkening blush.

 

Cold is the day and windblown is the landscape,

Damp is the air playing sullen refrains,

All day I ride through the steppe’s weary dreamscape,

Far from the settlements, heart unrestrained.  

 

Lulled by the footfalls of equine stark prosody,  

Rapt in my sadness, I heed the wind’s long

Whines of implacable callous monotony;

In my shotgun’s barrels they drone their drear song.

 

d

Translator’s Note

 

Bunin was only nineteen years old when he wrote this poem. Published in the journal “God’s World,” St. Petersburg, Oct., 1898, it attracted notice. In his reminiscences of Tolstoy, Maksim Gorky describes one “morose, autumn day” in the rain when he and Lev Tolstoy went out for a walk in the birch forest. He describes Tolstoy “jumping over ditches and puddles like a young man, shaking drops of rainwater off branches onto his head, and marvelously relating how Shenshin [the poet Fet, landowner neighbor of Tolstoy] explained Schopenhauer to him in that very birch grove.

 “Lovingly stroking the dampish, silken trunks of the birches with a tender hand,” Tolstoy said, ’Somewhere I recently read these lines’ [third and fourth lines of the first stanza of Bunin’s poem]:

Грибы сошли, но крепко пахнет

В оврагах сыростью грибной.

‘That’s really good, and really true,’ said Tolstoy.”

 [cited from Gorky’s Collected Works in the nine-volume collection of Bunin (1965): I, 527]

                                   Bunin's Shotgun on Display at the Bunin Museum in Elets

Notes on Tolstoy's WAR AND PEACE Loose Ends Not Tied Up

 

War and Peace: Loose Ends Not Tied Up

Tolstoy tacks an epilogue onto his long work of art. The second part of the epilogue is devoted entirely to his philosophical speculations on history, so we have a chance to say good-bye to the characters only in the first part. The action is set in 1819-1820. The major characters who make a final appearance consist of two families, the Bezukhovs and the Rostovs. Pierre Bezuhov has married Natasha Rostova, and Nikolai Rostov has married Princess Marya Bolkonskaja. Both families have resumed a settled family life after the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars. Old Count Rostov has died, and his wife, who never recovered from the death of her beloved son Petya, is senescent.

 While Pierre remains a dreamer, always hoping for some better liberal future for Mother Russia, Nikolai has become a conservative, devoted to tsar and crown, uncomfortable with the idea of change. Both women, Natasha and Marya, are devoted to their husbands and children, of which there are many. Natasha seems to have lost her most attractive trait, her vivaciousness and youthful spark. Now dowdy and matronly, she is absorbed entirely in Kinder and Kuche, has no intellectual interests, which has made for much chagrin and even consternation among modern feminist readers of War and Peace. Then again, Tolstoy seems to have been born to offend the modern woman of the West.

 Huge as his novel is, you would think that Tolstoy would find space in his epilogue to tell us what happened to some of the minor, but for all that, highly delineated characters. The feral Dolokhov we last see in the scene describing the death in battle of Petya. What happened to him after that? Who knows? Tolstoy? Maybe not even Tolstoy. Then again, wouldn’t it be nice to know how Berg and his wife Vera are doing in 1820, and what about Boris Drubetskoi, his elbows-out pushy mother and his wife Julie?

 Tolstoy gives special short shrift to Prince Vassily Kuragin and his family. Is the obnoxious Ippolit still alive? Don’t know. We do know that Hélène has passed conveniently away (so that Pierre will be free at the end to have Natasha). One brief mention is made, that Anatole is dead, but we don’t know exactly how or where. Last we have seen of him he is having a leg amputated in a field hospital at the Battle of Borodino, while Prince Andrei looks on. Although he has the distinction of being in the very first scene of the book, Prince Vassily is never even allowed a scene of grieving—over his dead daughter and dead son(s). Writers of books like some of their characters better than others, and in War and Peace it is never in doubt which of his characters Tolstoy likes, and which he despises (Dolokhov, the Kuragins).

Simon Karlinsky, and Russian Writers, on THE DOWNSIDE OF DOSTOEVSKY: ДОСТОЕВЩИНА

Simon Karlinsky, and Russian Writers, on The Downside of Dostoevsky

Despite my admiration for Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (FMD) as a psychologist and philosopher, there are things I do not appreciate about his fiction. Far from all Russian writers accept Dostoevsky’s greatness. Well-known figures such as Chekhov, Bunin, Tsvetaeva and Nabokov are often contemptuous in their disdain of FMD.

For a thorough account of objections to Dostoevsky’s writings, a good place to start is the article by Simon Karlinsky, “Dostoevsky as Rorschach Test” [originally published in "The New York Times," June 13, 1971; reprinted in The Norton Critical Edition of Crime and Punishment, p. 629-36]. Here are a few quotations from that article.

“All accepted standards of literary criticism and textual analysis tend to break down when applied to Dostoevsky. His prose has always been a magnet for the kind of reader (and commentator) who does not give a hoot about the art of literature, who mistrusts sober observation of reality, and who primarily looks for a reflection of his own self and for a possible vehicle of self-expression in every book he reads.”

Often “neither his biography, nor his general views are familiar to those who modishly bandy his name about. Someone ought to translate the set of disgustingly chauvinistic, jingoist and anti-Semitic poems (yes, poems) that Dostoevsky wrote in the late 1850s, urging that Russia conquer other countries, calling down God’s blessing on Russian conquests and denouncing the Jews as leeches who torture Russia; copies of these poems should be handed out to all the starry-eyed champions of the progressive, revolutionary Dostoevsky. Of course, a simple reading of The Possessed [The Devils] and of The Diary of a Writer might also help.”

“There somehow has to be room for a more balanced appraisal that takes into full cognizance Dostoevsky’s obscurantist, reactionary ideology, the excessively nagging and hysterical tone of his narrators, the cheap and flashy effects with which he stages some of his dramatic confrontations, and the occasional but undeniable sloppiness of his plots and of his Russian style.”

“One of the best kept secrets in Western criticism is that Dostoevsky does not happen to be everyone’s cup of tea. Many intelligent, compassionate, sensitive people find his overheated universe of stormy passions, gratuitous cruelty, tormented children and hysterical women definitely uncongenial.”

“Russian dictionaries list a common noun, derived from the writer’s name, достоевщина (dostoevshchina), which is a derogatory term describing an undesirable mode of behavior. A person guilty of dostoevshchina is being deliberately difficult, hysterical or perverse. Another possible meaning of this word is excessive and morbid preoccupation with one’s own psychological processes. The word, incidentally, is part of the normal Russian vocabulary.”

“Tolstoy tried to reread The Brothers Karamazov in 1910, the year of his death. ‘I’ve started reading it,’ he wrote to one of his correspondents, ‘but I cannot conquer my revulsion for its lack of artistic quality, its frivolity, posturings and wrong-headed attitude toward important matters.’”

“First reading Dostoevsky at age twenty-nine, Anton Chekhov wrote to his publisher Suvorin: ‘It’s all right but much too long and lacking in modesty. Too pretentious.’ In Chekhov’s stories and personal letters, the name of Dostoevsky usually occurs in passages condemning some high-strung, hysterical or hypocritical female.”

During his lifetime Vladimir Nabokov qualified Dostoevsky as “a cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar,” “a prophet, a claptrap journalist, and a slapdash comedian,” and “a much overrated sentimental and Gothic novelist.”

But “it was none other than Nabokov who in Lolita gave the world a full-scale treatment of a subject around which Dostoevsky circled like a cat around a saucer of hot milk in novel after novel, only to recoil from it in horror.” Pedophilia.

Pithy Maxims on the Subject of Merde, Plus Apocryphal Citations (Flaubert, Tolstoy, Nabokov)

PITHY MAXIMS ON THE SUBJECT OF MERDE AND APOCRYPHAL CITATIONS: FLAUBERT, TOLSTOY, NABOKOV

In a recent letter to the London Review of Books (May 10, 2018), Galen Strawson, of the University of Texas, cites what he calls “a deeply characteristic comment from Flaubert’s letters”:

“De quelque côté qu’on pose les pieds on marche sur la merde” (from a letter to Louise Colet, Saturday, midnight, Croisset, 29-30 January 1853).

The editors of LRB translate this as follows: “However carefully you tread, you end up with shit on your shoes.” A variant translation: “Whichever way you direct your feet, you can’t help stepping in shit.”

This recalls a statement attributed to Lev Tolstoy: “Life is a tartine de merde [shit sandwich], which we all are obliged to eat, slowly.”

Checking this out online, I have found loads of citations on the subject of “shit sandwiches.” Take this one, for example: “Life is a shit sandwich, but the more bread you have the less shit you eat” (Anon.). I suspect that the image of the shit sandwich we eat is not of recent provenance.

On a French website I also have found, in a slightly different variant, the maxim attributed to Tolstoy: “La vie, c’est une tartine de merde et il faut que tu manges une bouchée tous les jours.” Translation: “Life is a shit sandwich, and you have to eat a mouthful every day.”

Then I started searching online for the original quote by Tolstoy and could not find it anywhere. Even when doing a search in Russian I was inevitably directed back to where I had heard the citation in the first place: Vladimir Nabokov’s collection of interviews, Strong Opinions.

Question: Tolstoy said, so they say [my emphasis; note that casual “so they say,” URB] that life was a tartine de merde, which one was obliged to eat slowly. Do you agree?

Nabokov’s answer: I’ve never heard that story. The old boy was sometimes rather disgusting, wasn’t he? My own life is fresh bread with country butter and Alpine honey. (Strong Opinions, p. 152).

This comes from an interview with James Mossman, who submitted 58 questions to Nabokov on Sept. 8, 1969, for Review, BBC-2 (Oct. 4). Nabokov answered about 40 of the questions and put together a typescript of questions and answers. On Oct. 23, 1969, The Listener published this, but only in part (see Strong Opinions, p. 141).

Nabokov, who did not like doing live interviews—because of his tendency to hem and haw when speaking “off the Nabocuff”—had a policy of asking interviewers to submit written questions. Some he would choose not to answer, others he would revise before answering. At times he even made up his own questions and then answered them.

Note the clear attribution of Flaubert’s quote above. Galen Strawson tells us precisely when and where Gustave Flaubert wrote his maxim on merde. There can be no doubt that the great writer said this. On the other hand, it is much in doubt that Tolstoy actually made his statement on the shit sandwich that is life. Even if you search through the complete works of Tolstoy, published in Soviet times, you are highly unlikely to find that quote. Soviet publishers could be prudish, so even if he said it, you probably won’t find it there.

Did Tolstoy actually make the statement? I may be wrong, but probably not. Despite his assertion, “I’ve never heard that story,” it could well be that Nabokov himself made it up. Since I’ve retired from teaching Russian literature I have not kept up with Nabokov scholarship. Maybe serious Nabokovian scholars have already lucubrated over this business and have found the answer. Tolstoyan scholars could also be of help.

d

On another issue that I’ve wondered about. Among others, Nabokov has insisted that the main male protagonist of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is Lyovin (Лёвин), not Levin (Левин). You cannot tell by the way the name is spelled in Russian, as it is common practice to use the Cyrillic letter ‘e’ without the diacritical mark even when it is pronounced ‘yo.’

 I have run across a citation from Tolstoy himself, something with slightly anti-Semitic overtones: “Да не Левин, а Лёвин. Левин, это зубной врач в Бердичеве (It’s not Levin, it’s Lyovin; Levin is a dentist in Berdichev).” The implication here is that Levin (or Levine) is clearly a Jewish name, and Tolstoy’s man of the landed gentry is of the Russian noble class. But then, I have my doubts that Tolstoy ever really made that statement. 

At any rate, most Russians you meet will tell you that the character is Levin, not Lyovin. Of all the translations of Anna Karenina into English, I’ve never seen a translator who opted for Lyovin.

Notes on Tolstoy's "Death of Ivan Ilyich" The Aesthetics GREAT SCENES THREE: "If it's time to go, it's time to go."

The Aesthetics. Great Scenes Three: If it’s time to go it’s time to go.

On the way to the theater, Ivan Ilyich’s family drops by the sickbed of the dying man:

“After dinner, at seven o’clock, Praskovya Fyodorovna came into his room in evening dress, her full bosom drawn up tightly by her corset, and with traces of powder on her face. She had reminded him in the morning that they were going to the theater. Sarah Bernhardt had come to town, and at his insistence they had reserved a box. He had forgotten about this and was offended by the sight of her elaborate attire. But he concealed his indignation when he recalled that he himself had urged them to reserve a box and go . . .

[P.F. comes in looking “self-satisfied but somehow guilty.” Purely pro forma, she asks him how he is feeling, “not because she wanted to find out anything; she knew there was nothing to find out.” She explains that she has to go to the theater with the others, although “she would much prefer to sit at home with him.” Then she asks if the others can come in.

‘Oh, and Fyodor Petrovich (the fiancé) would like to come in. May he? And Liza?

‘All right.’

His daughter came in all decked out in a gown that left much of her young body exposed, the body, which was the cause of so much agony for him. And she was making a show of the flesh. Strong, healthy, and obviously in love, she was impatient with illness, suffering and death, which interfered with her happiness.

Fyodor Petrovich came in as well, in evening dress, his hair curled à la Capoul, a stiff white collar encircling his long, sinewy neck, an enormous white shirtfront over his chest, narrow black trousers hugging his strong thighs, a white glove drawn tightly over one hand, an opera hat clasped in the other.

Behind him the schoolboy son crept in unnoticed, wearing a new uniform, poor fellow, with gloves on and those awful dark circles under his eyes, whose meaning Ivan Ilyich understood. He had always felt sorry for his son. Now he found the boy’s frightened, pitying look terrible to behold. It seemed to Ivan Ilyich that, except for Gerasim, Vasya was the only one who understood and pitied him.

They all sat down and asked again how he was feeling. Next came silence. Liza asked her mother about the opera glasses. This led to an argument between mother and daughter over who had mislaid them. This made for unpleasantness.

Fyodor Petrovich asked Ivan Ilyich if he had ever seen Sarah Bernhardt. At first Ivan Ilyich did not understand the question, but then he said, ‘No. Have you seen her?’

‘Yes,  in Adrienne Lecouvreur.’

Praskovya Fyodorovna said she had been particularly good in something or other. Her daughter disagreed. They started a conversation about the charm and naturalness of her acting—the exact same conversation that people always have on that subject.

In the middle of the conversation Fyodor Petrovich glanced at Ivan Ilyich and stopped talking. The others also looked at him and stopped talking. Ivan Ilyich was staring straight ahead with glittering eyes, obviously indignant with them. The situation had to be rectified, but there was no way to rectify it. The silence somehow had to be broken. No one ventured to break it, and they all began fearing that the lie dictated by propriety would suddenly be exposed and the truth become clear to all. Liza was the first to speak. She broke the silence. She wanted to conceal what they all were feeling, but her tongue betrayed her.

‘Well, if it’s time to go, it’s time to go (Однако, если ехать, то пора),” she said, glancing at her watch, a present from her father. And smiling at her young man in a significant but barely perceptible way, about something between only the two of them, she stood up, rustling her dress.

They all got up, said goodbye, and left.”

d

This whole scene is typically wonderful Tolstoy writing about the social concourse of human beings. He has such a keen feel for the little unsaid things that go on between people, the hypocrisy, the pretending, the way people lie to each other on a daily basis. Here the main feeling is constraint. The relatives do not really want to be here, at the bedside of a dying man—even though that man is a very close relative. Nobody knows what to say in the face of death, and they all attempt to talk around the issue. Mother and daughter take refuge in bickering. The fiancé tries to ask a question relevant to his own life, but no longer relevant in the world of the dying.

Then suddenly they panic in the face of the dying man’s silence, even his indignation. Panic almost overwhelms them as they all look for a way to maintain the decorous lie. Nobody can think what to say, and then Liza, the daughter, commits what later has come to be known as a Freudian slip. Inadvertently, some neuron in her brain blurts out what is on the mind of them all. If Ivan Ilyich is going (dying), then it’s high time he be on his way.

The Russian has an impersonal expression here, with no subject expressed. A literal translation would be, “Well then, if to go, then it’s time.” This is especially appropriate, since no subject (we, or you) is expressed, but a double meaning comes through: (1) If it’s time for us to go to the theater, we better be off (2) If it’s time for you, Ivan Ilyich, to go, then get going. Most translators into English of the story have something like, “Well, if we’re going, we best be off,” which is not that bad but which does not encompass the issue the way an impersonal expression does.

Maybe the most strikingly creative thing about this whole scene is that Liza is not apparently aware of what she has blurted out. Neither, apparently, are any of the others. But we the readers are aware. We wonder if Ivan Ilyich is. When they all leave for the theater he feels a sense of relief: the lie isn’t there any more; it went out the door with them.

Notes on Tolstoy's "Death of Ivan Ilyich" The Aesthetics GREAT SCENES TWO: THE PERFIDIOUS POUF

The Aesthetics. Great Scene Two: The Perfidious Pouf

Pyotr Ivanovich, a kind of alter ego of Ivan Ilyich, attends the funeral. He has hopes of escaping before the ceremony, going off to play cards with another colleague of the deceased, the playful Shvartz, but does not get away in time. He is collared by the widow, Praskovya Fyodorovna.

“’I know that you were a true friend to Ivan Ilyich,’ she said, then looked at him, awaiting the proper response to such words.

Pyotr Ivanovich knew that just as back then [when viewing the corpse] he had to cross himself, now he had to press her hand, sigh, and say, ‘Believe me!’ So that is what he did. And having done that, he felt as if the desired result was achieved: he was touched and so was she.

'Come, before it begins in there, I must have a talk with you,’ said the widow. ‘Give me your arm.’

He gave her his arm and they proceeded toward the inner rooms, past Shvartz, who threw Pyotr Ivanovich a wink of regret. His playful look was saying, ‘So much for your card game. Don’t take offense if we find another player. Maybe you can make a fifth later, when you get away.’

Pyotr Ivanovich sighed even more deeply and plaintively, and Praskovya Fyodorovna squeezed his hand gratefully. On entering her drawing room, decorated in pink cretonne and lit with a dim lamp, they sat down beside a table: she on a sofa, P. I. on a low pouf with broken springs that shifted under his weight. P.F. wanted to warn him to take a seat on a different chair, but decided not to, feeling that such a warning was not in keeping with her present situation.

As he sat down on the pouf P.I. recalled how, in decorating the room, Ivan Ilyich had asked his advice about this pink cretonne with the green leaves. The entire room was crammed with furniture and knick-knacks, and as the widow stepped past the table to take her seat on the sofa, she entangled the black lace of her black shawl in a bit of carving. P.I. rose slightly to untangle it, and as he did so the springs of the pouf, freed of pressure, started lurching about and pushing up at him.

The widow began disentangling the lace herself and P.I. sat down again, suppressing the rebellious pouf beneath him. But the widow did not quite manage getting the lace untangled, and P.I. got up once more, and once again the pouf rose in rebellion, even emitted a twang. When all that was done she took out a clean cambric handkerchief and began to weep. The episode with the lace and the battle with the pouf had put a damper on P.I.’s spirits, and he now sat scowling.”

[It soon becomes apparent that the widow has financial matters on her mind, and wants the advice of P.I. on how to proceed—three paragraphs omitted here]

'But there is a matter I wish to discuss with you.’

P.I. bowed his head in response, taking care not to allow the springs of the pouf, which immediately grew restive, to have their way.

‘He suffered terribly the last few days.’

‘Really badly?’ asked P.I.

‘Oh, it was hideous! He screamed incessantly; not for minutes, but for hours on end. He screamed for three straight days without pausing for breath. It was unbearable. I don’t know how I bore up through it all. You could hear him three rooms away. Oh, what I’ve been through!’

                                                                              

  . . . . . . . . . . .

Despite a distasteful awareness of his own hypocrisy as well as hers, P.I. was overcome with horror as he thought of the sufferings of someone he had known so well, first as a carefree boy, then as a schoolmate, later as a grown man, his colleague. Once again he saw that forehead [of the corpse], that nose pressing down on the upper lip, and fear for himself took possession of him.

‘Three days of hideous suffering and death. Why, the same thing could happen to me at any time now,’ he thought and for a moment was panic-stricken. But at once, himself not knowing how, he was rescued by the customary reflection that all this had happened to Ivan Ilyich, and not to him, that it could not and should not happen to him. . .”

d

Most translators render the Russian word пуф as “ottoman,” but the puffy, insubstantial sound of the word is important here, so I insist on “pouf” in English. Just as the morality by which Pyotr Ivanovich lives, the morality of his class and society, has dubious foundations, so P.I. is in a shaky situation as he sits on the pouf. 

Every time he shifts his position the pouf—emblematic of the petty bourgeois respectability and materialism by which Ivan Ilyich lived his life (and by which P.I. does as well)—rebels, asserting its own identity. As if to say, “I may be an inanimate object, but I too have certain rights; after all, Ivan Ilyich thought things like me—chairs, curtains, pink cretonne décor with green leaves—were important, more important than human relationships or higher spiritual values.”

Each time P.I. moves the pouf gives him a tweak on the backside, and he is more and more perturbed with every tweak of the pouf. Of course, Tolstoy is using the pouf as his instrument for poking and prodding at the character, for suggesting to him that his life is based on trivial and shaky endeavors, but the character, of course, does not heed the message.

In line with Tolstoy’s blatant assertion that a life based on acquisition of material objects is wasted, certain objects, such as the pouf, play a major role in the action. Another such object is the window knob, which strikes Ivan Ilyich on the left side as he falls and wounds him fatally—that innocent bruise develops later into the cancer.

Related to this device of personification of inanimate objects, while not exactly the same, is the device personifying the inner organs of Ivan Ilyich, which, after his illness begins, he sees as rebelling against him. Constantly mentioned are his “floating kidney (блуждающая почка)” and his “blind gut (слепая кишка, or caecum),” the large blind pouch forming the beginning of the large intestine. 

These personified organs are out of Ivan Ilyich’s control, and at one point, in Chapter Five, he tries looking inwardly and commanding them to work the way they should. As if to say, “Stop wandering about in a blind daze, blind gut; stop all that illegal floating, floating kidney. Start behaving like healthy organs again, because if you don’t you’re going to kill me, and yourselves in the bargain.”

This is another of Tolstoy’s amazingly insightful looks into the way people react to illness, the way a sick person begins to feel that he is losing control of the one thing that really belongs to him, his body, composed of a plethora of organs, all working in concert to maintain his life.

Notes to Tolstoy's "Death of Ivan Ilyich" AESTHETICS OF THE STORY, GREAT SCENES ONE: The Doctor's Visit

The Aesthetic Beauty of “Ivan Ilyich” Great Scenes One: The Doctor’s Visit

“The Death of Ivan Ilyich” is said to have been the last work of literature read by the French writer Guy de Maupassant, who supposedly remarked after reading it, “I realize now that all I have done was to no purpose and that my ten volumes of fiction are worthless.”

The famous art critic and historian V.V. Stasov (1824-1906) responded to the story in a letter to Tolstoy: “In my whole life I’ve never read anything to compare with it. Nowhere in any other national literature, nowhere on earth is there such a work of genius . . . . . And I said to myself, Here, at last, is real art, real life and truth.” Is “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” really that great? Yes. It is.

What makes for greatness in a work of art, what is the purpose of art? Great art brings you the kind of aesthetic pleasure that you get, say, near the end of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, when the soloist singers put something together in musical notes that sounds sublime. One of the great paradoxes about art is that at its best it can light up the aesthetic centers of your brain, make you feel, warm, elevated aesthetically even while presenting some rather unpleasant truths about life. Even in a story about wasting away and dying of cancer. Anthony Burgess once wrote of the great paradox of literary art, where “the denial of human joy is made through language that is itself a joy.”

There are several scenes in “Ivan Ilyich” that are my favorites, scenes that light up the aesthetic pleasure centers in my brain. One such scene is that presenting the Caius syllogism (already discussed in a previous blog posting). Another is the following:

“The same thing again and again. One moment a spark of hope gleams, the next a sea of despair rages; and always the pain, the pain, always the anguish, the same thing going on and on. . . . . . . One hour, then another pass this way. Then there is a ring in the entryway. Could it be the doctor? It is indeed the doctor—fresh, hearty, meaty, cheerful, and with a look on his face that seems to say, ‘Now, now, you’ve had yourself a little scare, but we’re going to fix everything up right away.’ The doctor knows that this expression is not appropriate here, but he has put it on his face once and for all and can’t take it off—like a man who has donned a frockcoat in the morning to make a round of social calls.

The doctor rubs his hands together briskly, reassuringly. ‘I’m chilled. There’s a good hard frost out there. Just give me a minute to warm up,’ he says in a tone implying that you need only wait a moment, for him to get warmed up, then he’ll set everything right.

‘Well, now, how are you?’

Ivan Ilyich senses that the doctor wants to say, ‘How goes it, then?’ but even he knows this won’t do, and so he says, ‘What kind of night did you have?’

Ivan Ilyich looks at the doctor in a questioning way, as if to ask, ‘Won’t you ever be ashamed of your lying?’ but the doctor does not wish to understand such a question.

So Ivan Ilyich says, ‘Terrible. Just like all the others. The pain never leaves me, never subsides. If only something could be done!’

‘Yes, you sick people do like to carry on that way. Well, now I seem to have warmed up. Even Praskovya Fyodorovna, exacting as she is, even she could not find fault with my temperature. Well, now I can say hello.’ And the doctor shakes his hand.

Then, dispensing with all the playfulness, the doctor assumes a serious air and begins to examine the patient; taking his pulse, his temperature; he starts all his tapping, his auscultations.

Ivan Ilyich knows for certain, beyond any doubt, that this is all nonsense, sheer deception, but when the doctor gets down on his knees, bends over him, placing his ear higher, then lower, and with the gravest expression on his face goes through all sorts of gymnastic contortions, Ivan Ilyich is taken in by it, just as he used to be taken in by the speeches of lawyers, even though he knew perfectly well that they were lying and why they were lying.

[At this point Praskovya Fyodorovna comes in, kisses her husband, then begins colluding with the doctor in the pretending]

Ivan Ilyich looks at her, taking her full measure, and resents her for the whiteness, plumpness, and cleanliness of her arms and neck, the luster of her hair, and the spark of vitality that gleams in her eyes. He hates her with every fiber of his soul and being. At her touch he is forced to suffer from an agonizing well of hatred that surges up in him.

Her attitude toward him and his illness is the same as ever. Just as the doctor had adopted a certain attitude toward his patients, which he could not change, so she had adopted an attitude toward him: that he was not doing as he should and was himself to blame, and she could only reproach him tenderly for this. She could no longer change his attitude.

‘He just doesn’t listen, you know. He doesn’t take his medicine on time. And worst of all, he lies in a position that is surely bad for him—with his legs up.’

And she told how he made Gerasim hold his legs.

The doctor smiled disdainfully, indulgently, as if to say, ‘What can you do? Patients sometimes get the silliest of notions into their heads, but we have to forgive them.’”

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There is so much that is telling and good about this scene. The formal and condescending attitude that the doctor puts on for his patients, donning it like a frockcoat in the morning. The way that Ivan’s wife puts on the same front, ganging up with the doctor against the patient. That attitude, steeped in mendacity, is exactly the same one that Ivan himself once adapted for dealing with defendants in court.

In modern hospitals many nurses and doctors don the same attitude, putting on the vestments of condescension and jocularity when dealing with patients. These vestments shield them emotionally from the horrors of suffering and death, but, simultaneously, they dehumanize the patient, demean his dignity, and put him in the position of a child being scolded by adults.

Tolstoy is wonderful in the way he understands such human games, and the way he portrays them in his art.

Notes on Tolstoy's "Death of Ivan Ilyich" PROBLEMS WITH THE PREACHING (ONE)

Problems with the Preaching (1)

Over the 150 years that people have been reading “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” what probably has bothered most about the story is the morally edifying tone. As if Tolstoy were shouting out not only to those of the Russian upper classes of the 1880s—Ivan Ilyich, his colleagues, his family, all of aristocratic and bureaucratic Russia—but also to anyone else within listening distance, including a multitude of readers in countries all over the world: “Repent!”

Of course, nobody in the story hears the shouts, and one reason the story is effective is that no one in the story is listening. None of the characters stops and says, “Well, yes, I’m leading a dull bourgeois existence, just as Ivan Ilyich did, and if I don’t change my ways soon, when I’m dead and gone my life will count for nothing.” But what if we could take a survey of all readers of the story over the past 150 years. How many of them would have taken heed of the shouting? I suspect very few. Didactic writing, I suspect, only very infrequently brings about the changes in the moral fabric of humanity that the didactic writer hopes for.

Tolstoy is hoping for the impossible. Not only does he aim at making people transform their lives, become more moral; he also wants us to look our own death in the face, and practically no one wants to do that (see discussion in previous blog notes). One thing that this story does is make your side hurt. My side always hurts when I read about the pain in Ivan Ilyich’s floating kidney. Fortunately, the side stops hurting when I put down the book. But after countless readings of this story over the years, it still never makes me want to embrace rectitude and live a better life.

Then again, there is the degree of moral corruption in most of the characters. The people in “Ivan Ilyich” are bad, bad people, terrible hypocrites, totally selfish egotists. One of Tolstoy’s strong points as a writer is his ability to delve into mundane human acts of hypocrisy. We look at the way, say, that Ivan Ilyich’s wife, Praskovya Fyodorovna, behaves at the funeral, in her interactions with Pyotr Ivanovich. The way she weeps as if insincerely, the way she is largely concerned with financial matters that will play upon her future. We think, Yes, that is human nature. It’s despicable, of course, but people do behave like that. Even in the scene when she finds herself wishing her husband’s death, wishing herself rid of him, we think, Well, yes. Not many writers have the daring to speak of such things, but Tolstoy is right. People do have that kind of thoughts. The pure hatred that is exchanged between husband and wife at several points in the story, is that what marriage is like? Unfortunately, sometimes it is, and the creative artist in Tolstoy brilliantly portrays that sad truth.

But are people really as bad as they are shown to be in this story? On our deathbed is this what we have to look forward to on the part of our family and friends? Total abandonment? Maybe so, but, then again, maybe not. Praskovya Fyodorovna is a despicable person, is so portrayed throughout the whole story, but readers may hope to find a better, nicer wife. They must be out there somewhere, such wives. Seldom in life, one hopes, do we come upon characters as rebarbative as Praskovya Fyodorovna.

The only positive character in the story is the peasant servant Gerasim. Not only here, but also in many other works Tolstoy holds up peasant morality, the peasant’s simple, wholesome attitude toward life as exemplary. But in so doing he consistently downplays another aspect of the Russian peasant mentality—the propensity, throughout Russian history, to engage in merciless bloody violence. For that side of the peasant, read the stories of Isaak Babel.

For a better balance between good and bad characters, Tolstoy could have chosen to feature Ivan Ilyich’s schoolboy son in more scenes. The boy obviously loves his father, he could be another positive character, but he is featured in only two brief appearances. And each time he appears the moral preacher Tolstoy cannot resist throwing in a disapproving, and totally gratuitous insinuation about the evils of masturbation.

In a word, Tolstoy’s negative views of humanity sometimes verge on hyperbole. At times the writer, methinks, doth protest too much.

Notes to Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" THE DIDACTICISM AND THE STRUCTURE

The Didactic and the Structure

Lev Tolstoy is a didactic writer. His works often preach a moral message. By the time he wrote “Ivan Ilich” (1886) he had undergone a deep religious crisis that changed his attitude toward art and life. He condemned some of his best works out of hand. He considered his Anna Karenina—which many literary critics rate the best novel ever written in all of world literature—nothing but a piece of trash.

In the last third of his long life he became a kind of preacher, writing philosophical tracts and essays on how to live a morally upright life. He certainly intends “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” to deliver a message to his reader: “You are living useless immoral lives; change while you still have time.” The emphasis on didacticism does a bit of damage to the aesthetics of the work, and it is largely due to Tolstoy’s amazing literary talent that “Ivan Ilyich” remains a creative triumph.

The very structure of the story lends itself to the moral message. The title tells us upfront that the main character dies, so that we know how the story comes out even before we begin reading it. Then the action begins backwards chronologically: on the first page the death is reported. After the funeral, in a flashback technique, Ivan Ilyich is brought back to life, only to spend the rest of the story dying.

Only near the end do we realize the supreme irony of this story: that when Ivan dies on the final page his death is really a kind of birth, a spiritual rebirth. The long, agonizing death by cancer has been a preparation for this entry into a new spiritual life. On the other hand, practically his whole previous life, everything antecedent to his illness, was a kind of living death, no life at all, but just fakery, a pretend life.

This inside-out perspective, then, is reflected in the structure of the story. It begins with a death, returns to describe a useless life or living death, progresses to the climax of this living death—the scene where Ivan Ilyich, who is engaged in what Tolstoy sees as a frivolous bourgeois pursuit (hanging curtains and prettifying his new apartment) falls and bruises his kidney, the first step on his passage to death by (apparently) cancer of the kidney—then shows the gradual progression of painfully dying, which leads to new life.

Furthermore, this pattern seems to repeat itself in endless cycles. The early scenes, describing the reactions of Ivan Ilyich’s colleagues in the court of law to his death, are structured as if to show the ghost of the former, unredeemed Ivan Ilyich returning to live out the same vile life all over again. His colleagues are his alter egos, and their reaction to news of his death is exactly the same as his reaction would have been, had one of them died before him: concern with trivial court matters; thoughts of promotion and higher salaries (“Maybe my brother-in-law can get the vacated position.”); smug satisfaction in the death of another (“Ah, great; it was him and not me.”).

Pyotr Ivanovich is almost a twin of Ivan Ilyich—same education, same job, same aspirations, same attitudes toward life, and with the same favorite diversion: playing cards. When he attends the funeral in the early pages of the story it is as if a character were attending his own funeral in advance, and, of course, refusing to acknowledge that the corpse lying there with reproach on its dead face is almost exactly he himself.

The didactic point, of course, in all of this paralleling of characters, is obvious. Everyone in Ivan Ilyich’s society is living a morally stagnant life, a dead life, but the agonizing death of a colleague who had lived just the same life does not prompt them to reevaluate their morals. On the contrary, they avoid facing the issue and go off to play cards, Ivan Ilyich’s favorite pastime and favorite way of avoiding looking at life’s unpleasant facts. 

Like Shvartz—another double/colleague of Ivan Ilyich, who shows up to pay his respects but sneaks out to play cards, skipping the funeral service—they wink as if to say, “Ivan Ilyich has done a really dumb thing; but you and me, we’re not about to screw up the way he did.” The Russian here is “Глупо распорядился Иван Ильич; то ли дело мы с вами.”