“There will be no me, so what will there be? There will be nothing. So where will I be, when there’s no me? Can this be death? No, I don’t want it.” He jumped up, wanted to light a candle, felt around with trembling hands, dropped the candle and candlestick on the floor, and fell back on the pillow again. “What for? It makes no difference,” he said to himself, gazing wide-eyed into the darkness. “Death. Yes, death. And none of them knows, or wants to know, or feels pity. They’re playing.” (He heard through the door the distant roll of a voice and ritornello.) “It makes no difference to them, but they’ll also die. Fools. For me sooner, for them later; but it will be the same for them. Yet they make merry. Brutes!” He was choking with anger. And he felt tormentingly, unbearably oppressed. It just can’t be that everyone has always been condemned to this terrible fear. He sat up.
“Something’s not right. I must calm down; I must think it over from the beginning.” And so he began to think it over. “Yes, the beginning of the illness. I bumped my side, and then I was just the same, that day and the next; it ached a little, then more, then doctors, then dejection, anguish, doctors again; and I was coming closer and closer to the abyss. Losing strength. Closer and closer. And here I am wasted away, there’s no light in my eyes. It’s death, yet I think about my appendix. I think about repairing my appendix, yet it’s death. Can it be death?” Again terror came over him, he gasped for breath, bent down, began searching for the matches, leaned his elbow on the night table. It hindered him and hurt him, he became angry with it, vexedly leaned still harder, and the night table fell over. In despair, suffocating, he fell on his back, expecting death at once.
The guests were just leaving. Praskovya Fyodorovna was seeing them off. She heard something fall and came in.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. I tipped it over by accident.”
She went out and came back with a candle. He was lying there, breathing heavily and very rapidly, like a man who has run a mile, looking at her with a fixed gaze.
“What’s the matter, Jean?”
“Nothing. I tipped it over.” (“No use talking. She won’t understand,” he thought.)
In fact she did not understand. She picked up the night table, lit the candle, and left hastily: she had to see off a lady guest.
When she returned, he was lying on his back in the same way, looking up.
“What is it, are you worse?”
“Yes.”
She shook her head and sat down.
“You know, Jean, I think we ought to invite Leshchetitsky to the house.”
This meant inviting the famous doctor and not minding the cost. He smiled venomously and said: “No.” She sat for a while, went over, and kissed him on the forehead.
He hated her with all the forces of his soul while she was kissing him, and had a hard time not pushing her away.
“Good night. God grant you fall asleep.”
“Yes.”
VI
IVAN ILYICH SAW that he was dying, and he was in continual despair.
In the depths of his soul Ivan Ilyich knew that he was dying, but not only was he not accustomed to it, he simply did not, he could not possibly understand it.
The example of a syllogism he had studied in Kiesewetter’s logic9—Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal—had seemed to him all his life to be correct only in relation to Caius, but by no means to himself. For the man Caius, man in general, it was perfectly correct; but he was not Caius and not man in general, he had always been quite, quite separate from all other beings; he was Vanya, with mamá, with papá, with Mitya and Volodya, with toys, the coachman, with a nanny, then with Katenka, with all the joys, griefs, and delights of childhood, boyhood, youth. Was it for Caius, the smell of the striped leather ball that Vanya had loved so much? Was it Caius who had kissed his mother’s hand like that, and was it for Caius that the silk folds of his mother’s dress had rustled like that? Was it he who had mutinied against bad food in law school? Was it Caius who had been in love like that? Was it Caius who could conduct a court session like that?
And Caius is indeed mortal, and it’s right that he die, but for me, Vanya, Ivan Ilyich, with all my feelings and thoughts—for me it’s another matter. And it cannot be that I should die. It would be too terrible.
So it felt to him.
“If I was to die like Caius, I would have known it, my inner voice would have told me so, but there was nothing of the sort in me; and I and all my friends understood that things were quite otherwise than with Caius. And now look!” he said to himself. “It can’t be. It can’t be, but it is. How can it be? How can I understand it?”
And he could not understand and tried to drive this thought away as false, incorrect, morbid, and to dislodge it with other correct, healthy thoughts. But this thought, not only a thought but as if a reality, came back again and stood before him.
And he called up a series of other thoughts in place of this thought, in hopes of finding support in them. He tried to go back to his former ways of thinking, which had screened him formerly from the thought of death. But—strange thing—all that had formerly screened, hidden, wiped out the consciousness of death now could no longer produce that effect. Lately Ivan Ilyich had spent most of his time in these attempts to restore the former ways of feeling that had screened him from death. He would say to himself: “I’ll busy myself with work—why, I used to live by it.” And he would go to court, driving away all doubts; he would get into conversation with colleagues and sit down, by old habit absentmindedly, pensively glancing around at the crowd and placing his two emaciated arms on the armrests of the oaken chair, leaning over as usual to a colleague, drawing a brief towards him, exchanging whispers, and then, suddenly raising his eyes and sitting up straight, would pronounce certain words and begin the proceedings. But suddenly in the midst of it the pain in his side, paying no attention to the stage the proceedings had reached, would begin its own gnawing work. Ivan Ilyich sensed it, drove the thought of it away, but it would go on, and it would come and stand directly in front of him and look at him, and he would be dumbstruck, the light would go out in his eyes, and he would again begin asking himself: “Can it alone be true?” And his colleagues and subordinates would be surprised and upset to see that he, such a brilliant and subtle judge, was confused, was making mistakes. He would rouse himself, try to come to his senses, and somehow bring the session to an end and return home with the sad awareness that his work in court could no longer, as before, conceal from him what he wanted concealed; that by his work in court he could not rid himself of it. And what was worst of all was that it drew him to itself not so that he would do something, but only so that he should look it straight in the eye, look at it and, doing nothing, suffer inexpressibly.
And to save himself from this state, Ivan Ilyich looked for consolation, for other screens, and other screens appeared and for a short time seemed to save him, but at once they were again not so much destroyed as made transparent, as if it penetrated everything and there was no screening it out.