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

appointment. Thanks to this personnel change Ivan Ilych was unexpectedly appointed to a spot in his old ministry two ranks above his former colleagues, with a salary of five thousand rubles plus thirty-five hundred for relocation expenses. His animus against his enemies and the ministry shrank and vanished; Ivan Ilych was completely happy. Ivan Ily

“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!”

The thought of such suffering in someone he’d known so well, first as a carefree little boy, then in school, and later as an adult and colleague, suddenly filled Pyotr Ivanovich with horror, despite even this woman’s affectation, as well as his own, which it was unpleasant to notice. All at once he couldn’t shake the image of that forehead, the nos

“Have a cigarette, please,” she said to him in a voice at once magnanimous and decimated, and turned back to Sokolov and the question of the price of the grave.

position was far from normal. To save money that summer he filed for a leave of absence and went with Praskovya Fedorovna to stay with her brother in the country. In the country with no professional life, Ivan Ilych felt for the first time not just ennui but a deep, intolerable melancholy, an existential boredom that convinced him life was impossib

muzhik

From then on Ivan Ilych would sometimes call for Gerasim and have him hold his legs up on his shoulders, and he liked talking with him. Gerasim did this easily and willingly, and with a kindness that moved Ivan Ilych. Health, strength, vitality in all other people offended him; but somehow Gerasim’s strength and vitality were not burdensome, they w

Everyone sees what a hard time he is having, and they tell him, “We can stop, if you’re tired. You need to rest up.” Rest up? No, he’s not tired in the least, they’ll finish the rubber. Everyone is gloomy and silent. Ivan Ilych feels that he has cast upon them a gloom he cannot get to dissipate. They eat supper and go their separate ways, and Ivan

He had been nobody’s toady, neither as a boy nor later in adulthood, but from the youngest age he had been drawn, as a bird to the air, toward people in the upper echelons of society, adopting their affect