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

“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.

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

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

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

What to Gaius was the striped leather ball that little Vanya had loved so much? What did Gaius have to do with him kissing his mother’s hand, and had Gaius ever heard the silken rustle of his mother’s dress? Had he rioted over the pirogies at the law school? Had this Gaius ever fallen in love? And could Gaius ever preside over a courtroom the way

muzhik

And so, trying to save himself from this state, Ivan Ilych looked for consolation, for other screens to block It out, and there were other screens that for a short time spared him, but they would always not so much collapse as prove transparent, as though It shone through everything and nothing could obscure It.

He would call the footman, either his daughter or his wife might come to help; but everything would be all right, because he wasn’t thinking about It; It was nowhere to be seen. But whenever he moved things by himself his wife would say, “Calm down, let people help you, you’ll hurt yourself again,” and all at once It would shine through his