The Death of Ivan Ilych (The Art of the Novella)

So of course, Gaius could be mortal, and it was right for him to die, but for me, little Vanya, for Ivan Ilych, with all my thoughts and emotions—for me it’s a different story. It can’t possibly be that I have to die. That would be too horrible.

Apart from the curiosity it gave them about the changes in office it might occasion, the very fact of the death of a close acquaintance awoke as ever in each of them a familiar gladness: it’s he who’s dead, not me.

Ivan Ilych had been a colleague to all of the assembled men, and they had all liked him. He’d been ill for weeks with a disease said incurable. His post had been kept open for him, but rumors had swirled that in the event of his death Alekseyev might replace him, and either Vinnikov or Shtabel might then rise to replace Alekseyev. And so it was tha

“In his last days he suffered terribly.” “Did he?” Pyotr Ivanovich asked. “Oh, it was awful! For the last few hours—not minutes, mind you, but hours—he cried out constantly. For days he shouted in anguish. It was intolerable. I do not even understand how I withstood it. You could hear him three doors down. Oh, what I’ve been through!”

And so they began living in their new home, which they realized, as one always does, after getting good and cozy, was just one room too small; and they grew accustomed to the new salary, which was inadequate by just a little, maybe five hundred rubles; still, life was very good.

How it happened is impossible to say—because it happened step by step, imperceptibly—but in the third month of Ivan Ilych’s illness his wife, and daughter, and his son also, the servants, his acquaintances, his doctors, and, most of all, he himself, came to realize that all the interest other people had in him was based solely on the fact that he w

comme il faut,

And what was worst of all was that It was demanding his attention not to get him to do anything, but just so that he would look at It, look It right in the face, look at It and, without doing a thing, suffer inexpressible torment.

Still, the results were charming, and not just to him—everyone said so. In fact it was all exactly what you so often see among people who are not quite rich but want to seem as though they are, and so end up resembling only each other: damasks, ebony, flowers, carpets, and bronzes. Dark and shining—everything that people of a certain class use to r