Chertkov was also highly efficient. On Tolstoy’s advice, he organized a publishing house called ‘Intermediary’, specializing in cheap editions for the masses. The bulk of its output consisted of popular stories, tales and essays written, edited or recommended by Tolstoy. The rendering of folk tales and composing moral and religious parables for ‘Intermediary’ allowed Tolstoy to satisfy a need for artistic creativity without compromising his renunciation of literature. Some of these stories, such as What Men Live By or How Much Land Does a Man Need?, show that his literary genius had not left him.
Still Tolstoy aspired to produce a work for the educated reader that would be both as psychologically convincing and profound as Anna Karenina, and as dry and didactically unambiguous as his Primer. He achieved this synthesis in The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Tolstoy felt that he had to apologize for this endeavour, as he wrote to Chertkov, ‘I promised to finish this for my wife to include in her new edition, but this article only relates to our circle in its form . . . in content it relates to everyone’ (Ls, II, p. 383). Sofia found the story ‘a bit morbid, but very good’ (CW, XXVI, p. 681), and eagerly included it in the twelfth volume of Tolstoy’s collected works. She still hoped that her husband would return to literature and that this would save their family.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a painfully naturalistic depiction of the agonies of a high-ranking official dying from cancer. Contemporary doctors admired the precision with which Ivan Ilyich’s symptoms were described and were able to diagnose not only the nature of the illness, but the exact location of the tumour and the phases of its progress. Of course, depicting the physiology of dying was not the true focus of Tolstoy’s attention. He was writing about the most important problem he had ever encountered.
The ‘Arzamas horror’ that afflicted Tolstoy in 1869 had taught him that the presence of death can render life meaningless. A successful career, an outwardly functional family life, refined tastes and a dignified lifestyle had made Ivan Ilyich proud of himself, but on his deathbed he has no significant memories to sustain him. His illness starts from a bruise he gets arranging fashionable furniture in his apartment. At the end of his life he feels completely alienated from his wife, children, friends and colleagues, and no one, except his servant, really sympathizes with his demise and tries in earnest to understand his needs and alleviate his pain.
The final turn of the narrative, however, brings Ivan Ilyich closer to Prince Andrei than to Anna Karenina. Pity for his schoolboy son, who bursts into tears and kisses his hand, and for his wife, who stands nearby with tears in her eyes, opens the way for him to feel universal love that melts both the fear of death and death itself. Instead of sucking meaning out of life, death retrospectively endows it with a higher purpose.
Suddenly it grew clear to him that what had been oppressing him, and would not leave him, was all dropping away at once, from two sides, from ten sides, from all sides. He was sorry for them, he must act so as not to hurt them: release them and free himself from these sufferings. ‘How good and how simple’, he thought.
‘And the pain?’ he asked himself. ‘What has become of it? Well then, where are you, pain?’ He turned his attention to it. ‘Yes here it is. Well, what of it? Let it be.’
And death . . . Where is it?
He looked for his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. ‘Where is it? What death?’ There was no fear, because there was no death.
In place of death, there was light. (TSF, p. 128)
In 1886, when Tolstoy was finishing The Death of Ivan Ilyich, he hurt his leg trying to help an old peasant woman, which led to a nearly lethal case of septicaemia. A long and painful recovery inspired the treatise On Life, in which Tolstoy supplemented his social and moral teachings with a general philosophy of life and death that brought together his belief in Nature and Reason, his interpretation of the Gospels and interest in Eastern religions and philosophy. The initial title of the essay was On Life and Death, but then Tolstoy cut the second noun, saying ‘There is no death’ (SAT-Ds, I, p. 123).
According to this treatise, any individual existence is just a tiny particle of general life, and individual death is a necessary and liberating reunion with the whole. The only manifestation of general life available to humans is love, which can never be limited to one’s kin and has nothing to do with the egotism and possessive instinct inherent in erotic infatuation, but unites the individual with humankind and thus with God. While universal love brings light and makes death blissful, sexual desire is akin to murder. In Anna Karenina Tolstoy compared Vronsky kissing Anna’s body after their first lovemaking with a murderer striking an already dead victim with a knife.
The year after the publication of The Death of Ivan Ilyich Tolstoy started writing The Kreutzer Sonata, on which he worked until 1889. In that year he also wrote a draft of a story now known as The Devil. Both stories involved murders carried out or planned by men who were disappointed in their marriages. The basic facts behind each story came from real criminal cases, but Tolstoy processed them through his personal experience and imbued them with his own moral goals. Pozdnyshev, the main character of The Kreutzer Sonata, kills his wife out of jealousy; Irteniev in The Devil murders his former lover because, striving to keep his marriage chaste, he is unable to overcome his sexual obsession. In the first version of The Kreutzer Sonata Pozdnyshev was considering suicide as a possible outcome. As The Devil remained unpublished in Tolstoy’s lifetime, the author did not have to choose between the two variants of the ending he drafted: in one alternative, instead of murdering his lover, Irteniev kills himself.
Tolstoy believed that the tragedies were caused by the sexual licence of young men before marriage, which had taught them to expect the same gratification of carnal desires from their family life. Irteniev’s disaffection with his marriage finds its realization in the spell his former partner still holds over him; Pozdnyshev’s manifests itself in hatred towards his wife and maniacal jealousy. Both male characters remain faithful to their wives, but the cost is insanity that drives them to murder or suicide. As he was writing The Kreutzer Sonata, Tolstoy told his daughter and his niece: ‘There are no bad maidens, and there are no happy marriages.’
He was thinking, of course, of his own family history. The romance between Irteniev and a peasant woman, Stepanida, in The Devil strikingly resembles the relationship between Tolstoy and Aksinya Bazykina. In The Kreutzer Sonata the autobiographical context is less evident, but also present. Pozdnyshev’s wife, after the delivery of her fifth child, submits herself to medical sterilization and starts looking to gratify her need for love. This finally draws her to adultery. Tolstoy’s wife was considering the same type of contraceptive measures having given birth to her fifth child. In a way, Tolstoy was retrospectively imagining what could have happened had he not forbidden her to take such preventive actions.