And again right there, along with this course of recollection, another course of recollection was going on in his soul—of how his illness had grown and worsened. The further back it went, the more life there was. There was more goodness in life, and more of life itself. The two merged together. “As my torment kept getting worse and worse, so the whole of life got worse and worse,” he thought. There was one bright spot back there, at the beginning of life, and then it became ever darker and darker, ever quicker and quicker. “In inverse proportion to the square of the distance from death,” thought Ivan Ilyich. And this image of a stone plunging down with increasing speed sank into his soul. Life, a series of ever-increasing sufferings, races faster and faster towards its end, the most dreadful suffering. “I’m racing …” He would give a start, rouse himself, want to resist; but he already knew that it was impossible to resist, and again, with eyes weary from looking, but unable not to look at what was before him, he gazed at the back of the sofa and waited—waited for that dreadful fall, impact, and destruction. “It’s impossible to resist,” he said to himself. “But at least to understand what for? Even that is impossible. It would be possible to explain it, if I were to say to myself that I have not lived as one ought. But that cannot possibly be acknowledged,” he said to himself, recalling all the legitimacy, regularity, and decency of his life. “To admit that is quite impossible,” he said to himself, his lips smiling, as if there were someone to see that smile and be deceived by it. “There’s no explanation! Torment, death … What for?”
XI
SO TWO WEEKS WENT BY. During those weeks an event desired by Ivan Ilyich and his wife took place: Petrishchev made a formal proposal. This took place in the evening. The next day Praskovya Fyodorovna came to her husband’s room, pondering how to announce Fyodor Petrovich’s proposal to him, but the previous night a new change for the worse had occurred in Ivan Ilyich. Praskovya Fyodorovna found him on the same sofa, but in a new position. He was lying on his back, moaning, and staring straight in front of him with a fixed gaze.
She started talking about medicines. He shifted his gaze to her. She did not finish what she had begun: such spite, precisely against her, was expressed in that gaze.
“For Christ’s sake, let me die in peace,” he said.
She was going to leave, but just then their daughter came in and went over to greet him. He looked at his daughter in the same way as at his wife, and to her questions about his health said drily to her that he would soon free them all of himself. They both fell silent, sat for a while, and left.
“What fault is it of ours?” Liza said to her mother. “As if we did anything! I feel sorry for papa, but why torment us?”
The doctor came at the usual time. Ivan Ilyich answered “Yes” and “No,” without taking his spiteful gaze from him, and in the end said:
“You know you can’t help at all, so leave off.”
“We can ease your suffering,” said the doctor.
“Even that you can’t do. Leave off.”
The doctor came out to the drawing room and informed Praskovya Fyodorovna that things were very bad and that the only remedy was opium to ease his sufferings, which must be terrible.
The doctor said that his physical sufferings were terrible, and that was true; but more terrible than his physical sufferings were his moral sufferings, and these were his chief torment.
His moral sufferings consisted in the fact that, looking at Gerasim’s sleepy, good-natured, high-cheekboned face that night, it had suddenly occurred to him: And what if my whole life, my conscious life, has indeed been “not right”?
It occurred to him that what had formerly appeared completely impossible to him, that he had not lived his life as he should have, might be true. It occurred to him that those barely noticeable impulses he had felt to fight against what highly placed people considered good, barely noticeable impulses which he had immediately driven away—that they might have been the real thing, and all the rest might have been not right. His work, and his living conditions, and his family, and these social and professional interests—all might have been not right. He tried to defend it all to himself. And he suddenly felt all the weakness of what he was defending. And there was nothing to defend.
“But if that’s so,” he said to himself, “and I am quitting this life with the consciousness that I have ruined everything that was given me, and it is impossible to rectify it, what then?” He lay on his back and started going over his whole life in a totally new way. In the morning, when he saw the footman, then his wife, then his daughter, then the doctor—their every movement, their every word confirmed the terrible truth revealed to him that night. In them he saw himself, all that he had lived by, and saw clearly that it was all not right, that it was all a terrible, vast deception concealing both life and death. This consciousness increased his physical sufferings tenfold. He moaned, and thrashed, and tore at his clothes. It seemed to be choking and crushing him. And for that he hated them.
He was given a large dose of opium and became oblivious; but at dinnertime the same thing began again. He drove everyone away and thrashed from side to side.
His wife came to him and said:
“Jean, darling, do this for me” (for me?). “It can’t do any harm and often helps. It’s really nothing. Even healthy people often …”
He opened his eyes wide.
“What? Take communion? Why? There’s no need! Although …”
She began to cry.
“Yes, my dear? I’ll send for ours, he’s so nice.”
“Excellent, very good,” he said.
When the priest came and confessed him, he softened, felt a sort of relief from his doubts and consequently from his sufferings, and a moment of hope came over him. He began thinking about the appendix again and the possibility of its mending. He took communion with tears in his eyes.
When they laid him down after communion, he felt eased for a moment, and hopes of life appeared again. He began to think about the operation that had been suggested to him. “To live, I want to live,” he said to himself. His wife came to congratulate him on his communion; she said the usual words and added:
“Isn’t it true you’re feeling better?”
He said “Yes” without looking at her.
Her clothes, her figure, the expression of her face, the sound of her voice—all told him one thing: “Not right. All that you’ve lived and live by is a lie, a deception, concealing life and death from you.” And as soon as he thought it, his hatred arose and together with hatred his tormenting physical sufferings and with his sufferings the consciousness of near, inevitable destruction. Something new set in: twisting, and shooting, and choking his breath.
The expression of his face when he said “Yes” was terrible. Having uttered this “Yes,” he looked her straight in the face, turned over with a quickness unusual in his weak state, and shouted:
“Go away, go away, leave me alone!”
XII
FROM THAT MOMENT began a three-day ceaseless howling, which was so terrible that it was impossible to hear it without horror even through two closed doors. The moment he answered his wife, he realized that he was lost, that there was no return, that the end had come, the final end, and his doubt was still not resolved, it still remained doubt.