Tolstoy has a story dedicated to the history of a man who, on the verge of death, felt the meaninglessness of his life. The way the great Russian writer portrayed the torment of a dying soul cannot be understood by reading the summary. "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" (and this is how this story is called) is a deep work, leading to gloomy reflections. It should be read slowly, analyzing each fragment of the text.

However, for those who do not want to delve into bleak philosophical reflections, stories are also suitable. This article is a summary of it.

The death of Ivan Ilyich - the main character of the work - is the event that formed the basis of the plot. But the story begins from the moment when the soul of the aforementioned character has already left the mortal body.

First chapter (summary)

The death of Ivan Ilyich became an event not so commonplace, but far from being of paramount importance. In the building of judicial institutions, during a break, Pyotr Ivanovich - a colleague of the deceased - learned about the sad news from the newspaper. Having told other members of the court session about the death of Ivan Ilyich, he thought first of all about how this event would turn out for him and for his relatives. Another official will take the place of the deceased. Therefore, there will be one more vacant position. Pyotr Ivanovich will attach his brother-in-law to it.

It is worth mentioning one feature of Tolstoy's work, without which it is not easy to present a summary. The death of Ivan Ilyich, as well as the last days of his life, are described in the story from the perspective of the protagonist. And he constantly suffers not only from physical pain, but also from the thought that everyone around him is just waiting for his death. In this terrible conviction, Ivan Ilyich is partly right. After all, each of his colleagues, after the tragic news, comes up with thoughts about the upcoming relocation of posts. And also the feeling of relief that arose from the fact that an unpleasant phenomenon called "death" happened somewhere nearby, but not with him. In addition, everyone thought about the boring duties of decency, according to which one should go to the memorial service and express condolences.

As you know, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy was a connoisseur of human souls. The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a summary of which is set out in this article, is a heartfelt work. The author outlined in a small essay the fate of the hero, all his joys and torments. And the main thing is the rethinking of spiritual values ​​that took place in the last days of life.

An ordinary and terrible story

It is impossible for the reader to understand the depth of Ivan Ilyich's soulful experiences without knowing the basic data from his biography. Therefore, the second chapter deals with the life of the protagonist. And only then in all colors Tolstoy describes the death of Ivan Ilyich. The summary of the story is just the story of the life and death of the hero. But maybe it will inspire you to read the original.

Ivan Ilyich was the son of a privy councilor. His father was one of those happy people who managed to rise to high ranks, receive fictitious positions and non-fictitious monetary rewards. The family of the privy councilor had three sons. The elder is correct and lucky. The youngest did not study well, his career was not successful, and it was unacceptable to remember him in his kindred circle. The middle son was Ivan Ilyich. He studied well. And already as a student, he became what he later was almost until his death: a man striving to be closer to high-ranking officials. He succeeded.

This is the portrait of the character that Tolstoy created. The death of Ivan Ilyich is, in a sense, not only the physical termination of his existence. It is also a spiritual rebirth. A few days before his death, Ivan Ilyich begins to understand that his life was somehow wrong. However, those around him do not know about it. And nothing can be changed.

Marriage

In his younger years, Ivan Ilyich had an easy and pleasant position in society. There were connections with the milliners, and drinking with the adjutants' wing, and long pleasure trips. Ivan Ilyich served diligently. All this was surrounded by decorum, aristocratic manners and French words. And after two years of service, he met with a person who was ideally suited for the role of wife. Praskovya Fyodorovna was an intelligent and attractive girl. But above all - a good noble family. Ivan Ilyich had a good salary. Praskovya Fyodorovna is a good dowry. A marriage with such a girl seemed not only pleasant, but also profitable. That is why Ivan Ilyich got married.

Family life

Marriage promised him only joy. In fact, it turned out differently. Difficulties in family life is one of the themes that Leo Tolstoy raised in his work. The Death of Ivan Ilyich, whose plot at first glance may seem very simple, is a complex philosophical work. The hero of this story tried to make his existence easy and hassle-free. But even in family life, he had to be disappointed.

Praskovya Fedorovna arranged scenes of jealousy for her husband, she was constantly unhappy with something. Ivan Ilyich more and more often went into a separate world, arranged by him. This world was service. In the judicial field, he wasted all his strength, for which he was soon promoted. However, for the next seventeen years, the bosses did not honor him. He did not receive the desired job with a salary of five thousand, because, according to his own understanding, in the ministry where he worked, he was not appreciated.

New position

Once an event happened that influenced the fate of Ivan Ilyich. A coup took place in the ministry, as a result of which he received a new appointment. The family moved to St. Petersburg. Ivan Ilyich bought a house in the capital. For several years in the family main theme was the purchase of one or another interior detail. Life sparkled with new bright colors. Quarrels with Praskovya Fyodorovna, although they occurred from time to time, did not depress Ivan Ilyich as much as before. After all, he now had a good position and a significant position in society.

Everything would be fine if not for the death of Ivan Ilyich. The last months of his life can be summarized as follows: he suffered and hated everyone who did not know his pain.

Ailment

The disease came into his life unexpectedly. However, one can hardly treat the news of a terrible illness in cold blood. But the case of Ivan Ilyich was especially tragic. None of the doctors could say with certainty what exactly he was suffering from. It was a wandering kidney or intestinal inflammation, or a completely unknown disease. And most importantly, neither the doctors nor Ivan Ilyich's relatives wanted to understand that the diagnosis was not so important for him, but the simple, albeit terrible truth. Will he live? Is the disease that causes him so much pain fatal?

Gerasim

It is worth saying that the physical suffering of Ivan Ilyich was incomparable with his mental anguish. The thought that he was leaving was causing him unbearable pain. Praskovya Fyodorovna's healthy skin color, her calm and hypocritical tone aroused only anger. He did not need the care of his wife and constant examinations of the doctor. Ivan Ilyich needed compassion. The only person who was capable of this was the servant Gerasim.

This young man addressed the dying master with simple kindness. The main thing that tormented Ivan Ilyich was a lie. Praskovya Fyodorovna pretended that her husband was only sick, that he needed to be treated and remain calm. But Ivan Ilyich understood that he was dying, and in difficult moments he wanted to be pitied. Gerasim did not lie, he sincerely sympathized with the exhausted and weak master. And he called this simple man more and more often and talked with him for a long time.

Death of Ivan Ilyich

Reading the summary, as already mentioned, is not enough to feel the depth of the story of the great Russian writer. Tolstoy described the last minutes in a person's life so vividly that it seems that he, together with his hero, experienced the sensations of a soul leaving the body. Ivan Ilyich in the last minutes began to understand that he was tormenting his relatives. He wanted to say something, but he only had enough strength to say the word "I'm sorry." He did not experience the fear of death that had become habitual in recent months. Just a feeling of relief. The last thing that Ivan Ilyich heard was the word "Finished" uttered by someone nearby.

As a manuscript

FET Natalia Abramovna

ABOUT THE POETICS OF THE STORY OF LEO TOLSTOY "THE DEATH OF IVAN Ilyich"

Saint Petersburg - 1995

The dissertation was completed at the Department of Russian Literature of the Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University

Supervisor:

Official opponents:

Doctor of Philology, Professor J.S.Bilinkis

Doctor of Philology, Professor E.V. Dushechkina

Candidate of Philology Associate Professor L.N. Morozenko

Lead organization: Institute of Russian Literature

(Pushkinsky I

The defense will take place "___

at a meeting of the dissertation council & 113.05.05 to award the degree of candidate of philological sciences under Russia! State Pedagogical University named after A.I. Hertseng

Address: 119053, St. Petersburg. V.O., 1st line, d.! aud. ¿U

The dissertation can be found in the foundation, the library of the Russian State Pedagogical University. A.I. Herzen.

Scientific secretary of the dissertation council, candidate of philological sciences, associate professor N.N.K?

GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF WORK

The relevance of the study of the poetics of "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" is due to the still existing in literary criticism "gap" between the rich and complete studies of the poetics of Leo Tolstoy as a whole and, as it were, the descriptions of the poetics of this story that do not take into account these studies.

"The Death of Ivan Ilyich" has always existed "in the shadow" of the large-scale works of L. Tolstoy. Small in volume, it served as a supplement to the already built systems of his artistic or religious-philosophical creativity. Critics found that "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" after "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina" did not add anything to the characterization of the artistic talent of Count Leo Tolstoy, but it gives a lot to define his world outlook "(R.A. Disterlo, 1886, p. 149). In turn, the philosophers who reconstructed the religious worldview of L. Tolstoy based their conclusions only on the analysis of his treatises and journalistic articles, also believing, apparently, that the story adds nothing to them. So, almost simultaneously with the emergence of the story, its philosophical and critical, and later literary criticism, appears, which has not yet been overcome.

In Soviet literary criticism, parts of the story and certain aspects of its poetics were repeatedly involved in the study of the general problems of Tolstoy's work. We mean the works of D.S. Merezhkovsky, Yu.I. Aikhenvald, M.A.Aldanov, M.M. Bakhtin, L.Ya. Ginzburg, N. Ya. Berkovsky, E.N. Kupreyanova, G. Ya .Galagan and others.

In the works entirely devoted to "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" the story is viewed through one, the most fundamental from the point of view of the authors, category of L. Tolstoy's artistic consciousness: detail - N. P. Eremin, individualistic consciousness - B. Tarasov, time - E. F. Volodin ... These descriptions leave a feeling of incomplete adequacy to Leo Tolstoy's text, if only because none of them explains his emotional impact. The chaining moments of literary scholars are precisely the desire to preserve the rigor and orderliness of research, expanding it from one

center, as well as the very choice of the central category: it is made intuitively and in most cases independently of the general studies of the poetics of L. Tolstoy.

So, on the one hand, not a single serious problem of Tolstoy's creativity was posed and solved only on the basis of "The Death of Ivan Ilyich"; on the other, its holistic descriptions, striving to find a single principle covering the entire content of the story, do not achieve this goal.

In our opinion, this contradiction is removed by expanding the research framework. We proceed from the premise that “the unity of the text (usually ambivalent, internally contradictory), which was previously sought in its immanent core, is now assumed to encompass what is outside. other phenomena of life and art. The characteristic research gesture - “What if you read text A with text B in your hands ?!” - now aims at revealing the action that is performed in text A over text B; and this gesture is reproduced several times, in order to establish what actions were committed simultaneously with respect to the texts C, D, D "(A.K. Zholkovsky, 1992, p. 7).

"The Death of Ivan Ilyich" is considered in the dissertation in the context of other genres and other types of arts. Placing the story in the deliberately heterogeneous contexts of a parable (another genre) and cinema (another kind of art), we strive to ensure that the research framework does not constrain the bulk of Tolstoy's text and highlight its previously unconsidered facets. This also overcomes the isolation of the story, which we talked about above. With this approach, the text of the story appears as a complex unity formed from the interaction of text structures of different origins and time of occurrence (from traditional genres - parables - to prototypes of just emerging cinematography). In this case, the question of how deliberately the author constructs the various layers and levels of the text is of particular importance. Therefore, in a separate chapter of the thesis, the problem is considered

the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious in the work of the late Tolstoy.

The contexts in which The Death of Ivan Ilyich is considered (the genre of parables, cinematography and the sensual principle in the poetics of Leo Tolstoy) are strengthened by the literary tradition. Even pre-revolutionary criticism created several images of the writer in which critics completed and brought together (the image became) their feelings from Tolstoy's work. "A simple Jew of the first century, waiting in the sultry desert for the words of the great Teacher of life" (VG Korolenko, 1927, p. 45) is hidden in the chapter about the parable; pagan Pan with love for his bodily life and with a "pagan soul" (DS Merezhkovsky) is guessed as a prototype of "bodily poetics", and the Modernist VV Nabokova is associated with cinematic poetics.

The goals and objectives of the research include: to find out how the general idea of ​​the writer's contradiction is refracted in the structure of the story; how Tolstoy's rationalism and the principle of the emotional infectiousness of the work proclaimed by Tolstoy himself are connected in it; to what extent the story, created in the years of the turning point at the same time as the folk stories, is, like them, an "experimental" text in terms of searching for new forms. Scientific novelty consists in a fundamentally new look at a certain range of problems and issues developed by modern thick studies. In particular, the question of the relationship between the philosophical and artistic principles of Leo Tolstoy's work is being solved in a new way; at the same time, a new interpretation of the nature of contradictions within the writer's artistic system is proposed. The concept outlined in the dissertation essay makes it possible to explain the individual originality of the creative method of the late Tolstoy and opens up new prospects for further work in this direction.

Practical significance. The results of the dissertation research can be used in the preparation of university lecture courses, special courses and special seminars, practical classes on the history of Russian literature and literary theory, as well as the history and theory of cinema. In addition, the conclusions drawn in the work can

used in further research devoted to the study of the problems of creativity Leo Tolstoy.

Approbation of research results. The main provisions of the dissertation were presented at the scientific interuniversity conference (Tomsk, 1988) and the interuniversity conference on the problems of higher education (Novosibirsk, 1993), reflected in four publications. The dissertation was discussed at a meeting of the Department of Russian Literature of the Herzen State Pedagogical University and a meeting of the Department of Russian Literature at NSPU.

The structure of the thesis. The work consists of an introduction, three chapters, a conclusion and a bibliography. Each chapter is annotated. Bibliographic list includes 163 items.

In the introduction, the relevance of the research topic is substantiated, the goals and objectives of the work are formulated, its scientific and practical significance is revealed, the methodological and theoretical foundations of the dissertation are determined, and ways of solving research problems are outlined.

The first chapter, "The Death of Ivan Ilyin as a Parable," examines the ideal meanings expressed in the story through and with the help of things. For the first time, the key image of a deadly disease for the story appears in L. Tolstoy's "Confession" (1879). An appeal to a ready-made, easily embodied image in order to characterize something different, unimaginable and "not allowing sign expression" (N.L. Muskhelishvili, Y.A.Shrader, p. 101), reproduces the logic of the Gospel parables: Kingdom of Heaven for leaven, grain, etc. ".

The description of the images of Tolstoy's own parable is preceded by an analysis of biblical archetypes in the text of the story: Lazarus, resurrected by Jesus on the fifth day after death; judges (the parable of the unrighteous judge, Luke XVIII, 2-8); the Pharisee and the publican (Luke XVIII, 10-14); Job and Christ. Each of them exists in the cosmos of culture

as an image of an idea or event that changed this cosmos.

We show that L. Tolstoy significantly transforms these ideas: the possibility of "lawless law" (N.L. Muskhelishvili, Yu.A. Shreider, p. 101), demonstrated in the parables about the unjust judge and the Pharisee and the publican, shake the consciousness of the audience, forcing them to change the very way of understanding, is transformed by Leo Tolstoy into pictures of obligatory and inevitable retribution of "inexorable force", the same for Ivan Ilyich and Anna Karenina. After a comparative analysis of the episodes "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" and "Anna Karenina", it is concluded that the actions of an inexorable force that "returns" to a person every attack, are a revived mechanism of the categorical imperative teaching the heroes of Leo Tolstoy the ethical commandment: "Treat to the other the way you want him to treat you. " Thus, the poetics of Leo Tolstoy models ethical, not religious consciousness.

Another manifestation of Tolstoy's voluntarism is his editing of the behavior of Biblical heroes. The real participants in the story are transformed by Tolstoy into characters of his own creativity. We illustrate this in the twelfth chapter of the story. The agony of Ivan Ilyich, which bears a resemblance to the agony of Christ on the cross, ends with the word "Finished" uttered by someone "over him". Nikolay Levin hears almost the same thing. In his "Unification and Translation of the Four Gospels," Leo Tolstoy corrects what Christ said on the cross "It is finished" (John 19:13) to his "Finished", forcing Jesus to speak as the author and Ivan Ilyich humbly repeating after him.

The first to be named here is the image of the "aching, suffering body" as real (as opposed to imaginary) being.

A suffering body is an image of a sinful being punished by God and - at the same time - an image of a sinful world for which the innocent body of a righteous person suffers. The relevance of the second meaning is confirmed, for example, by the texts of "People's Tales": "Everything that we do to another person, we will do to Him ... When we

we rape people and take out evil for evil against them, when we torture people and shed human blood, do we not torture our Lord, the one who told us not to resist evil. "

Both meanings are united by the theme of the path to truth. "He spoke another parable to them: the Kingdom of Heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and put in three measures of flour, until everything was leavened" (Matthew 13:33). "The process of souring is a process of decay ... and in this sense it has an affinity with decay and putrefaction, with that which is related to death." Thus, the path to Truth (God) passes through the unclean, the limit of which is shameful death, the sign of which is decay. Ivan Ilyich also goes the same way, but biblical signs (decay) are found in the form of a "light smell of a decomposing corpse" felt by Peter Ivanovich, and in the form of an attribute of the "living dead": the smell from the mouth of his wife. The rotting body of a dead man grows into an ugly, indecent, naked body of truth, and the "white, sleek" body of a wife becomes a sign of deception.

The body of truth is naked. Ivan Ilyich tries to rip off clothes that "crush and strangle him." "I came out naked from the bowels of my birth, and naked I will return back" (Book of Job).

Tolstoy has nagas orphans and angels thrown to the ground ("How people live"). Nudity here means heavenly fatherhood and, at the same time, earthly orphanhood: "In the face of eternity, everyone must expose themselves from everything perishable and become naked. And hence the emptiness of the soul, which has lost most of its inner content, is understandable." But stripping off clothes has another meaning: "The gates are narrow and the path leading to life is narrow, and few find them" (Matt. 7:13). The "narrow size of the whole room" is emphasized in the Arzamas horror. "The more you live, the shorter both time and space become: that time is shorter, everyone knows that, but that space is less, I just now realized. Everything seems smaller and smaller, and the world becomes cramped ... Man always strives to get out of their limits ... Always one to the detriment of the other: he only stretches the bag in which he sits. " The sack into which Ivan Ilyich is pushed by "an invisible, irresistible force" is not only a metaphor for the mother's womb, but also the determination of a person by his body, materiality in general. Death is therefore of course

"being born into eternal life," but described as "shaking out of the bag," from the bag of space-time, and even from the bag of one's body. In this regard, let us remember that Ivan Ilyich struck while draping the curtain; the hero of "Diary of a Madman" is haunted by a window with a red curtain; in the living room of the Golovins, the widow of Ivan Ilyich "caught the black lace of a black mantle on the carving of the table"; and "Pyotr Ivanovich remembered how Ivan Ilyich arranged this living room and consulted with him about this very pink cretonne with green leaves."

Curtains, curtains, wallpaper, mantles - these are all types of curtains, curtains. "The veil is a metaphor for death, the womb." At the same time, it is Maya's veil. "There are two very rude and harmful superstitions ... that the world, hachim it seems to us, and our life, that is, the law of our life, is determined by our attitude to this world" (Leo Tolstoy, vol. 57, p. 72).

Inside the "curtains", lace, pouf, and bag stand out in a separate group. Already in the sound envelope, the word "lace" connects "circle" and "horror". The hooked lace, which must be unhooked, but not easy to unhook, first appears in Anna Karenina after Anna's silent confession to Vronsky: Vronsky "(part 2, chapter 7).

Lace in combination with "admiration" (the original meaning of the verb "delight" is to abduct, to catch) creates the image of Anna caught in the net. It is not accidental, therefore, that she and Vronsky then repeated the word "break" many times over.

In "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" lace appears in a pair with "upset springs and a pouf that was incorrectly fed under the seat". They both "catch" and do not let people in, ie. play the role of tricks, which are resorted to when lying. A series of enveloping surfaces, from which a sinful person cannot get rid of and from which a sinful person cannot get out, completes the black bag, into which Ivan Ilyich cannot crawl - the deception of time and space, and with them the bodily form of human existence.

The "tormenting and merciless force" of retribution appears in the story in the form of mechanical inanimate movement.

Thus, Leo Tolstoy's parable is constructed from the following images:

(1) an aching, suffering and naked body is the true being and the way to it through the experience (as getting rid of) of one's sinfulness;

(2) curtains and canopies (curtains, wallpaper, curtains, shawls) - screens that temporarily separate a person from the truth;

(3) nets (lace, pouf, bag) - deception and lies that resist exposure and make it difficult to move towards the truth;

(4) a stone, a screw, a carriage (railway) - images of inanimate movement and an inexorable force that moves them, that is, retribution;

(5) a fly, a hellish worm (blind gut) - sin and reckoning for it.

The images of Tolstoy's parables almost do not coincide with the traditional ones, although they are at different distances from them: groups (1), (2) and (5) still have prototypes in spiritual culture, and (3) and (4) are actually Tolstoy's. The deformation of the traditional genre carried out in this way reveals a general model of Tolstoy's relationship with Christian culture. Feeling the impossibility to take it for granted, he begins to investigate it in order to correct it. This ultimately leads to the rewriting of the Gospel and the adaptation of Christian truths to their own worldview.

Chapter 2. Cinematic poetics of the story "The Death of Ivan Ilyich"

The Death of Ivan Ilyich was completed in 1886. Therefore, we cannot talk about the influence of cinema on the poetics of the story. But if we accept that an image can take shape not only as a “semblance” of the existing and ready-made, but also as its anticipation, that the new perception of the world ripening in the history of the human spirit condenses into images that unexpectedly arise in already established types of creativity, earlier than in a separate form art, then you can try to see the cinema as if on the eve of your birth and in search of your own language. In this sense, we will talk about cinematic images and cinematic ™ "Death of Ivan

Ilyich. "(When we say" cinema, "we mean only silent films).

Our reasoning in this chapter is based on an analysis of the scene of the battle of Pyotr Ivanovich with the pouf and the detachment of Praskovya Fyodorovna's lace from the 1st chapter of the story. The stylistic cohesion of an episode is realized by its rhythm, or by the similarity of the syntactic structure of replicas with the general semantics - "possession of something." She is one of the most important semantic structures of the entire narrative, and in particular, the 1st chapter.

The internal movement of the scene being analyzed consists in a partial "liberation" from the power of man of the object to which the action is transferred (III): in sentences 1 - 3 he is absolutely passive and only perceives the action that reaches him; in sentence 4, a more active instrumental weapon appears - "black lace", and in sentences 5 and 7, the pouf becomes an independent subject of action, while reviving.

"The more clearly we realize that objects inexorably exist as concrete and the more existence we find in them, the more existence falls away from us, the more my" I "decreases (Yu.S. Stepanov, 1973, p. 18).

The living only depicts its existence; does not seem to exist. The feeling of "illusion" and separation of self-awareness (oneself as an emotional-bodily unity) and self-expression (an external manifestation of this unity, for example, a gesture) is the first moment of the cinematic worldview introduced by Leo Tolstoy.

The inability to feel the interlocutor, that is, to see his reaction to oneself, deprives Tolstoy's heroes of self-awareness (because we know for sure that we exist only by the fact that we respond in another). And this "partition", which prevents one from feeling alive, has its parallel in cinema: the film actor and the spectator exist in different space-time continua.

The action played out by Praskovya Fyodorovna and Petr Ivanovich is completely wordless. Heroes not only fail to talk. Fiasco and their constantly carried out "shifting" themselves into the subject (see the syntactic structure of the excerpt). This desire to identify with the thing is the desire for final embodiment (because the thing is real, unlike

seeming person). But the transformation of a person into one hundred percent matter is impossible: there is death, and it puts an insurmountable barrier between a mortal person and an immortal thing.

Praskovya Fedorovna and Pyotr Ivanovich are completely ridiculed precisely because they are imperfect both from the point of view of an “ideal”, “harmonious” person, and from the “point of view” of a thing. Nevertheless, in his attempt to "merge" a person and a thing, Leo Tolstoy again anticipates cinema. We rely on the studies of Z. Krakauer, V. Pudovkin, A. Pirandello, characterizing the side of the film image that interests us.

The interaction of a person and a thing takes place within the framework of a comic situation (V.Ya.Propp, 1976, A. Bergson, 1992). "We are funny when external, physical forms of manifestation of human deeds and aspirations obscure their inner meaning" (V.Ya.Propp, S.ZO). The emphasis on "external, physical forms" falls in the scene being analyzed because of its dumbness. But the funny thing can be defined more precisely. According to A. Bergson, comically "alive, covered with a layer of mechanism" (A. Bergson, p.31). In our examples, be it the tricks of Charlie Chaplin or the pouf of Praskovya Fedorovna, rather the opposite: the comically unexpected, hidden in the mechanical. The sudden animation instantly turns the thing into an actor portraying itself and something else. Thus, the thing acquires the ability to partner with a person. The comic in the sphere of this partnership is always associated with the unexpected movement of the immovable.

Being in the space of a comic situation, revealing the cinematic nature of the scene we are analyzing, we can understand why L. Tolstoy literally “breaks off” the emerging poetics, does not use its techniques outside the given episode, and thus does not allow it to form into a whole.

The comic situation of L. Tolstoy is almost destroyed by the nature of the laughter it provokes. Neither Praskovya Fyodorovna nor Pyotr Ivanovich laugh. It is not given to them to laugh at their attachment to things and thereby free themselves from it. Therefore, the author laughs at them, destroying them for this attachment.

For Leo Tolstoy, people are strictly divided into those who laugh and those who are laughing at, and ridicule is the discovery and denunciation of vice, almost in the etymological sense of these words:

"bringing" the vice outward, the discovery of its image, in which it (the vice) is visible both to others (laughter) and to oneself (shame). The vicious is thus exposed and exposed, turned into shame and repentance of the mocked. But not destroyed. You can be aware of your sin and be unable to "get out" from it. Tolstoy wrote the story "The Devil" about this. Thus, the culture of reason, which does not trust the feeling and the body (laughing at the vice in itself) and "leads" the correction of sins into the area of ​​moral instruction, turns out to be powerless in front of the "material-bodily bottom". And the more powerless she is, the stronger the fear and mistrust in him. And the stronger the fear and mistrust, the more uncontrollably this matter fills the space of Tolstoy's story.

Tolstoy opposes attempts to gain immortality through the possession (possession) of immortal things in the central 6th chapter of the story and once again - in chapter 10, identification with completely different things: raw wrinkled French prunes in childhood, about its special taste and the abundance of saliva when it came to the bone, and next to this memory of taste a whole series of memories of that time arose: nanny, brother, toys. ", Ivan Ilyich said to himself, and again transferred himself to the present" (Ch. 10).

We compare this awakening of the soul and the experience of gaining loss with the poems of A. Fet "When my dreams are beyond the past days", "The night shone. The garden was full of the moon", "Alter ego", revealing the similarity of the lyrical feeling of the above passage and the above-mentioned poems.

Thus, we once again set the boundary of Tolstoy's cinematic ™: Leo Tolstoy's description of the true experience trusts the tried and true poetics of the lyric poem.

But cinematic theory also reflected the moment of transition from a unique thing to a reproduced one. This was done by V. Benjamin, who in the 1930s studied the structure of perception of a work of art and, more broadly, things and changes in this structure at the time of the emergence of cinema. His work is used by us to create

historical and cultural perspective and the identification of features of other types and types of art in Tolstoy's own description of the thing.

In the second chapter of the work it is shown how from the translucent screens of "white square horror" and Plato's cave, which was actively present in the minds of artists at the end of the last century, in the stories of Leo Tolstoy in the 80s. the model and the image of the cinema screen and some elements of the cinema language almost take shape. These include:

1. Images of inanimate movement. In cinema, the feeling of the ghostly and mechanistic nature of what is happening is created because the space-time continua of the viewer and the actor do not intersect at any point.

2. Constructing a comic situation by condensing reality, that is, by translating meaning into an image.

3. The absolute, that is, the unsigned nature of matter, living according to its own laws in time.

4. Numerous tricks with things and bringing things to life: the acting of the thing.

5. Literalization of metaphors, associated by Leo Tolstoy with his dislike for conventions in general and for conventions of a sign in particular, and in cinema - with an attempt to create a universal language understandable to everyone, that is, in essence, with the same desire to reduce conventions.

The third chapter, "The Sensual and the Rational in the Poetics of the Story," consists of two sections.

The first paragraph is "The Poetics of Corporeality". The purpose of this section is to identify the means of expression that create the strongest emotional impact of the story. Their totality is called by us "corporeal poetics".

Despite the general idea of ​​Leo Tolstoy as an ideological and tendentious writer, capable of even violating the requirements of artistic truth for the sake of promoting his ideas, Leo Tolstoy himself never put ideas in a work of art above feeling, which then received a theoretical basis in his treatise "What is art": "The activity of art is based on the fact that a person, perceiving by hearing or sight expressions of another person's feelings, is able to experience the same

the very feeling experienced by a person expressing his feeling ... ";" Art begins when a person, in order to convey to other people the feeling he has experienced, again calls it in himself and expresses it with known external signs "(Ch. 5).

Reason is assigned the role of "critic" of already manifested feelings, dividing them into "more kind", that is, "more necessary for the good of people" and "less kind" - and depending on the prevalence of one or the other in the work of art - its final assessment. The role of reason that reviews feelings is clearly secondary, feelings, or, more precisely, from the point of view of today's psychology, emotional-bodily reactions (which the mind, when comprehending, transforms into feelings), come to the fore.

The principles of "transmitting to another the feelings experienced by the writer" or, as it is more sharply stated elsewhere - "contagion" by them, substantiate the principled withdrawal of the reader from logical thinking and his immersion into the realm of the sensuously experienced, which is carried out in the story. The line between text and reader is blurring. The text literally imposes on the reader a certain state, and through it - the attitude to what is happening.

L. Tolsgy's methods of "capturing" the reader are similar to the elements of "sensory thinking" described in the works of Levy-Bruhl, K. Levy-Strauss, W. Turner and other researchers of "primitive" cultures: 1. All emotional states of the hero are depicted like his bodily reactions: disgust - like turning his face away, hatred - the inability or unwillingness to look. The connection between emotion and physical gesture is already fixed in the internal form of words, therefore, in this case, L. Tolstoy returns to the ancient image of feeling. 2. Ivan Ilyich tries to "speak" the kidney or the cecum. The work shows that the failure of the conspiracy is connected precisely with the violation of its rules, with the incorrectness of the language used by Ivan Ilyich. 3. The hero's anger is the body's imitation of its own death so that the world (more precisely, the ones he hates in this world) cease to exist for him. 4. "Animal nature" in man is depicted by L. Tolstoy by animal features in human form or by comparing man with an animal. The identification of passion and carnal sin with

horse. The little princess in War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Pozdnyshev's wife (The Kreutzer Sonata) and ... Ivan Ilyich are compared with her. All these women perish unrepentant and unforgiven, their dead faces are distorted (the trait of "animality"), and their surviving loved ones are doomed by their death to eternal torments of conscience. Ivan Ilyich is the first to whom death returns a human face not distorted by sin. This also fits in with classical physiognomics. See, for example, Lavater's interest in the study of the dying and "death masks" allegedly "returning a person to his true physiognomy" (MB Yampolsky, 1989, p. 79). 5. The text of the story is full of images human body... In the handwritten editions and versions of the story we have reviewed, the physicality is even thicker. The spectacle of the human body is both attractive and hateful to all the heroes of the story who are seeing their sight. From the second draft, L. Tolstoy deletes the phrase belonging to Pyotr Ivanovich (then still Mikhail Semenovich Tvorogov) about the bewitching form of a dead man.

Tolstoy's body has the form of death. Death fills the entire intersubject space of the story: its insubstantial presence is revealed in the anger and fear of Ivan Ilyich, in the numerous screen-pieces set up to fence ourselves off from it, and in the very density of the human body, which is the borderline of mortality that is visible to us: "Life depicted by death, manifested in the phenomenon of man as God's creature: immortal soul, consolidated (designated, depicted) by a mortal body "(K.G. Yusupov, p. 35).

The poetics of the story is presented in the work as a system of involving the reader in the circle of states of mortal melancholy and anxiety experienced by the hero. Therefore, these states are not the theme and subject of the image, "cooled" by the form-creation of the author aesthetically outside these feelings, but the beginning from which and in the struggle against which the form of the work unfolds.

The logic of the movement of the story consists in the consistent detection of death in what seems to be life, and the image that initiates this logic is she (Leo Tolstoy's italics) - death, looking at Ivan Ilyich through screens "which were not so much destroyed as they were shining through, as if she penetrated everything, and nothing could overshadow her. "

The "step" approach to death is made up of a contrasting comparison of life and death with the obligatory emphasis of the latter and "refusal" movements (S.M. Eisenstein), reflecting in their structure the emotional unacceptability and logical antinomy of death.

In addition, the mechanism of refusal movement so understood, including the shaken consciousness, is a model of the emotion of dissatisfaction with which the story is oversaturated. Both the general thematic-expressive movement of the story ("death through all the veils"), and its dynamic model - the refusal movement - are "inspired" by this emotion and are reproductions of its structure. Considering further the metaphor of the "white light of death" illuminating the truth for the dying heroes of L. Tolstoy, we come to the conclusion that L. Tolstoy refers to the ability to see a lie as being involved in the truth. Tolstoy's denunciation of lies takes place in the same intonations, syntactic constructions and has the same logic of development as the emotional experience of impending death, therefore it is the author's attempt to rationalize and overcome this experience.

The purpose of this section was to study the mechanisms of the emotional impact of the text of the story on the reader. The conscientiousness and thoughtfulness of the methods of this influence allowed them to be combined into a special principle of poetics, called in the work "the poetics of corporeality." In the course of the study, we found that the role of emotions in the structure of the story is even higher, that such rational levels of the text as the plot and motivational structure, as well as the axiological theme of truth and lie, also have an emotional background and reproduce the emotion of dissatisfaction with their structure.

The question of the degree of reflection of this moment by the author and another related to it - the author's interpretation of emotional complexes - will be the subject of further research.

In the second section, "The Problem of the Author and the Hero," variants of Tolstoy's proper rationalization of the emotional content of the story are considered. They are largely determined by the general nature of Leo Tolstoy's rationalism. MM Bakhtin calls the consciousness of the dying heroes of Tolstoy "solitary": "He (Leo Tolstoy - NF) depicts death not only

from without, but also from within, that is, from the very consciousness of a dying person, almost like a fact of this consciousness. He is interested in death for himself, that is, for the dying person himself, and not for others, for those who remain. " consists already in a sharp evaluative ™, unshakable in the artistic world of L. Tolstoy, opposition "external - internal." - the real, the appearance - the essence. The movement "inward" means, thus, the movement towards the truth, into the essence.

The "inner space" and "volumetric" of the heroes is tested by Leo Tolstoy by their responsiveness (ability to react to ...) and the presence of something inside. A thing belongs to someone, the soul (body) contains something in itself. Something that is inside Ivan Ilyich ("something ... unheard of, that wound up in him and, without ceasing, sucks him") acts as a guarantor of this content, measured not by length, form or boundaries, but by experience. Pain is the self-expression of the inner, that through which this inner feels itself. The moment of immediacy of feeling and its complete concentration in perception destroys the possibility of lying. Thus, according to L. Tolstoy, the truth should be experienced.

Ivan Ilyich is inside his feelings. His despair seems to be all-encompassing and absolute. In reality, the frontier of despair is the hero's dissatisfaction itself. But Ivan Ilyich does not seem to notice her. So Leo Tolstoy preserves his sincerity and unity. Ivan Ilyich is sincere because he says what he feels, and untrue because he attributes his feelings to objective reality.

The paradox of the "sincere but untrue hero" is a consequence of the prohibition on going beyond the boundaries of one's consciousness. The hero of L. Tolstoy cannot make a self-test carried out in reflection, since any distance from the inner leads to its distortion. Therefore, the confirmation of the hero's righteousness is organized in the story in a different way: by the gradual convergence and then the merging of the points of view of the author and

hero. The work describes the gradual rapprochement of the author with the hero and notes that it is "layered" on the biographical closeness of II Golovin and LN Tolstoy, which is not limited to the plot line, but even extends to intimate feelings and their verbal expressions. Another consequence of the lack of self-control of consciousness is a gap between the feelings and actions of the hero and their interpretation proposed by the author. The author's distorting interpretation of the hero's emotions looks consistent and systemic.

The most significant discrepancy is in the ending of the story. The figure of Vasya / Volodya is an amazing transformation of paternal love with a "subconscious archaic" principle. He - the only one who "understood and pitied", who by the hand took Ivan Ilyich from the world of the living to the kingdom of the dead, appears as a wordless, hiding creature.

Appearance from below, secret touch and "terrible blue under the eyes" (empty eye sockets of the dead) are the features of a chthonic being. The high school student also has a "shamanic" two-sidedness, seeing this and this world. Through him, that world can be seen. The look of Vasya / Volodya is terrible for Ivan Ilyich: he sees the inevitability of death. The worldview of the "late" Leo Tolstoy gives the child just such a place: children are a senseless prolongation of life (Leo Tolstoy believed that when people reach perfection, they will stop giving birth to new ones), a sign of insufficient perfection of parents, in other words, their sinfulness. In this sense, the appearance of a child does lead to the death of the parents.

Subconsciously and consciously, the child is associated with death. What happens in the last scene? The figure of a blind person, "throwing" his hands until someone gets in, is reminiscent of the driver in blind man's buff. A.A. Potebnya showed that playing blind man's buff means the abduction of children by death. In addition, Ivan Ilyich's gesture - a hand falling on his son's head, coincides with the picture of death from A. Fet's poem "Death": "Let your hand touch my head." The subconscious salvation of the hero not by his own death, but by someone else's, and the salvific substitution made at the same time by consciousness is the actual content of Tolstoy's inconsistency, the external expression of which in the story is the discrepancy between its finale and the main text, as seen by the researchers.

So, the peculiarities of Tolstoy's rationalism explain the "substitute" and "reviewing" character of the author's consciousness. Leo Tolstoy "builds" his interpretations over a completely different descriptive text (see analysis of the hero's death scene), does not allow the images of the emerging cinematic poetics to form into a system only because of the element of formal play they contain (Ch. 2), rewrites gospel stories and creates his own texts in the genres consecrated and enshrined in tradition (Ch. 1).

In the conclusion of the dissertation, the results are summed up.

The work includes several readings of the story "The Death of Ivan Ilyich". As a result of the research, the story appeared to be a complex and heterogeneous structure, bearing traces of images of culture that developed at different times (biblical archetypes and the structure of a parable, A. Fet's lyrical experience and the righteous of traditional spiritual culture), with each of which L. Tolstoy develops a special relationship ... We managed to trace some moments in the history of these relations.

Considering the poetics of one work of the writer, we widely turned to his other texts, chronologically located at completely different distances from the story. In all of them, not similar, but identical motives, clutches, images and whole episodes are found. They exist in different combinations, in some plots they are fully represented, and in others - partially. But on the whole, we can say that Tolstoy belongs to the type of artists who rewrite their own impressions many times.

The formation of meanings in his texts is similar to the kaleidoscope principle described by K. Levi-Strauss, "in which fragments of various building materials are endlessly arranged, pass through many mirror reflections and as a result turn into unique figures (models)" (quoted from: B M. Gasparov, 1984, p. 329).

Reconstruction of these meanings can create new foundations for describing Tolstoy's poetics as a whole.

a) Dvorkina H.A. Code and text of "Resurrection" // Materials of the scientific student conference. - Novosibirsk, 1986 .-- S.81-87.

b) Dvorkina H.A. The problem of death in L. Tolstoy's story "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" // Problems of method and genre. Abstracts of the interuniversity scientific conference. - Tomsk, 1988 .-- S. 118-119.

c) Dvorkina H.A. Genres of confession and parables in Leo Tolstoy's story "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" // Russian literature of the XI-XX centuries. Learning problems. Abstracts of reports. - SPb., 1992 .-- S.25-26.

"The Death of Ivan Ilyich" - the story of L.N. Tolstoy. The impetus for its creation was the story he heard about the death of cancer on July 2, 1881 by Ivan Ilyich Mechnikov, a member of the Tula District Court, the brother of a famous biologist. In 1909, when Mechnikov visited Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy told journalist S.P. Spiro, that the story "has something to do" with the late brother of the scientist, "a very nice man ...".

The text of the first edition, created in the form of the judge's notes, includes a fragment dated "December 16, 1881". Apparently, close to this date, Tolstoy's work began. In the spring of 1882, the author read the first chapters in the editorial office of the newspaper "Sovremennye Izvestia", proposing to N.P. Gilyarov-Platonov to print the story. However, the work was interrupted and was continued only in 1884. In August 1885 Tolstoy wrote to a friend, the former Tula vice-governor, Prince L.D. Urusov: “I seem to have told you the plan: a description of the simple death of an ordinary person, describing from it.” "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" appeared in the 12th part of "Works by gr. L.N. Tolstoy "(1886). The manuscript fund of the story (autographs, copies, proofreads) is 290 sheets.

The beginning of the story was established already in the first edition: "I learned about the death of Ivan Ilyich ...". The main event, in violation of the chronology, is reported immediately, and then follows the story of how everything happened. Such a composition will be used in the "Kreutzer Sonata", "Father Sergius", the novel "Resurrection", where Katyusha Maslova is first tried, and later it becomes known what brought her to the courtroom. This technique enhances the drama of the plot: the whole story is illuminated by the knowledge of the end.

Like most of the heroes of the late Tolstoy, Iva Ilyich is an ordinary, ordinary person, of whom there are many, what everyone is like, everywhere, always. But on the verge of death, a coup takes place with him (the author insisted that sooner or later this can and should happen to everyone), the consciousness comes that his whole past life was “not that”. The story of death has become a picture of the search for the meaning of life, its acquisition, albeit hopelessly late. A latecomer for the hero, but not for the reader, whom Tolstoy sought to wake up.

The existentialists of the 20th century, who asserted the idea of ​​the absurdity of being and the inevitable, fatal loneliness of man, referred to the tremendous power with which all this is depicted by the Russian writer in Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilyich. Meanwhile, the story is inspired by another creative task: to show that the meaning of life is in unity with people. The more vividly the horror of separation and loneliness is presented, the more necessary a way out of it is. The spiritual struggle, disclosed by the master of the "dialectic of the soul" as a tense dispute of voices (like a dialogue in a drama), an internal question and an internal answer, is ultimately resolved by enlightenment. One must ruthlessly condemn the past in order to overcome it; to give up selfishness, "a pleasant life", surrendering to the service of others; expose the lies to find the truth. Not delusions, as was the case with Andrei Bolkonsky, Pierre Bezukhov, Natasha Rostova, but a general lie, and his own too, are revealed to Ivan Ilyich (glimpses of this approach are in the last parts of Anna Karenina). Psychological analysis is also changing: the interpretation of views and gestures is not intended to explain the inexpressible, not stated in words, but to expose the lie - not only of words, but of all behavior. The characters in the story do not live, do not feel, do not act, but "pretend." The only exceptions are the canteen man Gerasim, who takes pity on the sick master, and his teenage son. And most importantly, Ivan Ilyich himself stops lying to himself and to those around him.

"The Death of Ivan Ilyich" by Tolstoy, which appeared among the "last works" (excerpts from "So what should we do?" artistic creation, but raised it to a different height. In the fall of 1886, the drama Power of Darkness was created, and soon work began on the novellas Kreutzer Sonata, The Devil, Father Sergius, and the novel Resurrection. The originality of Tolstoy's new creation was understood and appreciated by many contemporaries.

In 1978, the Petrozavodsk television studio staged a play based on "The Death of Ivan Ilyich"; in Novocherkassk there was a performance based on the story and later stories of Tolstoy.

Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy

Death of Ivan Ilyich

annotation

In the story "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" (1884-86), Tolstoy tells the story of an ordinary person who, on the verge of death, felt the meaninglessness of his life. The enlightenment of the soul of a dying person, the symbolic "light" appearing in his mind in the last minutes, should, according to Tolstoy, embody the idea of ​​religious "salvation." But these illusions were defeated by the sober psychological realism of the story.

Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy

DEATH OF IVAN Ilyich

In a large building of judicial institutions, during a break in the meeting in the Melvinsky case, the members and the prosecutor met in the office of Ivan Yegorovich Shebek, and they started talking about the famous Krasov case. Fyodor Vasilyevich got excited, proving his lack of jurisdiction, Ivan Yegorovich stood his ground, while Pyotr Ivanovich, without first entering into an argument, did not take part in it and looked through the just filed "Vedomosti".

Gentlemen! - he said, - Ivan Ilyich is dead.

Really?

Here, read, - he said to Fyodor Vasilyevich, handing him a fresh, still fragrant number.

In a black rim it was printed: “Praskovya Fedorovna Golovina informs relatives and friends of the death of her beloved husband, a member of the Judicial Chamber, Ivan Ilyich Golovin, which followed on February 4 of this 1882 with sincere sorrow. Removal of the body on Friday at one o'clock in the afternoon. "

Ivan Ilyich was a companion of the assembled gentlemen, and everyone loved him. He had been ill for several weeks; they said that his illness was incurable. The place remained with him, but there was a consideration that in the event of his death Alekseev could be appointed to his place, and to Alekseev's place - either Vinnikov or Shtabel. So, upon hearing about the death of Ivan Ilyich, the first thought of each of the gentlemen gathered in the office was what significance this death could have on the movement or promotion of the members themselves or their acquaintances.

“Now, I’ll probably get a place for Shtabel or Vinnikov,” thought Fyodor Vasilyevich. "This has been promised to me for a long time, but this increase is for me eight hundred rubles in addition, except for the office."

“I’ll have to ask now about the transfer of my brother-in-law from Kaluga,” thought Pyotr Ivanovich. - The wife will be very happy. Now it will be impossible to say that I have never done anything for her family. "

I thought that he would not get up, - Pyotr Ivanovich said aloud. - It's a pity.

What did he actually have?

The doctors could not determine. That is, they were determined, but differently. The last time I saw him, it seemed to me that he would recover.

And I have not been with him since the holidays. Everything was going.

What, he had a fortune?

It seems that the wife has something very small. But something insignificant.

Yes, I'll have to go. They lived awfully far away.

That is, it is far from you. Everything is far from you.

Now, he cannot forgive me that I live across the river, ”said Pyotr Ivanovich, smiling at Shebek. And they started talking about the range of city distances, and went to the meeting.

In addition to the thoughts caused by this death in every consideration of displacements and possible changes in the service that could follow from this death, the very fact of the death of a close acquaintance caused in everyone who learned about her, as always, a feeling of joy that he died, not me.

“What, died; but here I am, ”- everyone thought or felt. Close acquaintances, the so-called friends of Ivan Ilyich, at the same time involuntarily thought that now they had to fulfill the very boring duties of decency and go to the memorial service and to the widow with a visit of condolences.

Fyodor Vasilievich and Pyotr Ivanovich were the closest of all.

Pyotr Ivanovich was a fellow at the school of jurisprudence and considered himself obliged to Ivan Ilyich.

At dinner, having conveyed to his wife the news of Ivan Ilyich's death and considerations of the possibility of transferring his brother-in-law to their district, Pyotr Ivanovich, without lying down to rest, put on a tailcoat and went to Ivan Ilyich's.

At the entrance to Ivan Ilyich's apartment there was a carriage and two cabbies. Downstairs, in the anteroom, by the hanger, leaned against the wall was an embellished coffin lid with tassels and polished galloon powder. Two ladies in black were taking off their fur coats. One, the sister of Ivan Ilyich, is a friend, the other is an unfamiliar lady. Pyotr Ivanovich's comrade, Schwartz, descended from above and, seeing him coming in from the upper step, stopped and winked at him, as if to say: "Ivan Ilyich made a foolish order: is it you and I?"

Schwartz's face with English sideburns and the whole thin figure in a tailcoat had, as always, graceful solemnity, and this solemnity, always contrary to the character of Schwartz's playfulness, had a special salt here. So Pyotr Ivanovich thought.

Pyotr Ivanovich let the ladies go ahead of him and slowly followed them up the stairs. Schwartz did not go down, but stopped at the top. Pyotr Ivanovich understood why: he obviously wanted to come to an agreement about where to turn today. The ladies went up the stairs to the widow, and Schwartz, with seriously folded, strong lips and a playful gaze, with a movement of his eyebrows showed Pyotr Ivanovich to the right, into the dead man's room.

Pyotr Ivanovich entered, as always happens, with bewilderment as to what he would have to do there. One thing he knew was that baptism in these cases never interferes. As to whether it was necessary to bow at the same time, he was not entirely sure and therefore chose an average: entering the room, he began to cross himself and bow a little as if. As far as the movements of his arms and head allowed him, he at the same time looked around the room. Two young men, one a schoolboy, it seems, nephews, crossing themselves, left the room. The old woman stood motionless. And the lady with strangely raised eyebrows was saying something to her in a whisper. A sexton in a frock coat, cheerful, resolute, read something aloud with an expression that excluded any contradiction; the pantry man Gerasim, walking lightly in front of Pyotr Ivanovich, sprinkled something on the floor. Seeing this, Pyotr Ivanovich immediately felt the slight smell of a decomposing corpse. On his last visit to Ivan Ilyich, Pyotr Ivanovich saw this peasant in his study; he acted as a nurse, and Ivan Ilyich especially loved him. Pyotr Ivanovich kept baptizing himself and bowing slightly in the middle direction between the coffin, the sexton, and the icons on the table in the corner. Then, when this movement of baptism by the hand seemed to him too long, he paused and began to examine the dead man.

The dead man lay, as the dead always lie, especially heavily, deadly, drowned by numb limbs in the bedding of the coffin, with his head bent forever on the pillow, and exposed, as the dead always expose, his yellow wax forehead with licks on sunken temples and a protruding nose. as if pressing on the upper lip. He had changed a lot, had even lost weight since Pyotr Ivanovich had not seen him, but, like all the dead, his face was more beautiful, most importantly, more significant than that of a living one. There was an expression on his face that what needed to be done had been done, and had been done correctly. In addition, in this expression there was also a reproach or a reminder to the living. This reminder seemed to Pyotr Ivanovich inappropriate or, according to at least that does not concern him. Something became unpleasant to him, and therefore Pyotr Ivanovich again hastily crossed himself and, as it seemed to him, too hastily, inconsistent with decency, turned and walked to the door. Schwartz was waiting for him in the passage room, legs wide apart and playing with both hands behind his back with his top hat. One glance at the playful, clean and elegant figure of Schwartz refreshed Pyotr Ivanovich. Pyotr Ivanovich realized that he, Schwartz, stood above this and did not give in to depressing impressions. One kind of him said: the incident of Ivan Ilyich's funeral service cannot serve as a sufficient reason for recognizing the order of the meeting as violated, that is, that nothing can prevent this evening from clicking, opening it, with a deck of cards, while the footman will place four unburned candles; in general, there is no reason to suppose that this incident could prevent us from having a pleasant evening today. He said this in a whisper to Pyotr Ivanovich who was passing by, offering to join up for a game at Fyodor Vasilyevich's. But, apparently, Pyotr Ivanovich was not destined to screw this evening. Praskovya Fyodorovna, a short, fat woman, despite all efforts to arrange the opposite, nevertheless widened from the shoulders downward, all in black, with a head covered with lace and with the same strangely raised eyebrows as the lady standing opposite the coffin came out of her chambers with other ladies and, having led them to the door of the dead man, said:

Now there will be a memorial service; go through.

Schwartz, bowing vaguely, stopped, apparently not accepting or rejecting this offer. Praskovya Fyodorovna, recognizing Pyotr Ivanovich, sighed, went up to him, took his hand and said:

I know that you were a true friend of Ivan Ilyich ... - and looked at him, expecting him to act in accordance with these words.

Pyotr Ivanovich knew that just as there it was necessary to be baptized, here it was necessary to shake hands, sigh and say: "Believe me!" And he did just that. And, having done this, he felt that the result was the desired one: that he was touched and she was touched.

Let's go before it starts there; I need to talk to you, ”said the widow. - Give me your hand.

Pyotr Ivanovich gave his hand, and they went into the inner rooms, past Schwartz, who winked sadly at Pyotr Ivanovich: “That's the screw! Do not excuse yourself, we will take another partner. Nothing five of you when you get off, ”said his playful look.

Pyotr Ivanovich sighed even deeper and more sadly, and Praskovya Fyodorovna gratefully shook his hand. Entering her pink cretonne living room with an overcast lamp, they sat down at the table: she was on the sofa, and Pyotr Ivanovich on a low pouf, which was upset by springs and incorrectly fed under his seat. Praskovya Fyodorovna wanted to warn him to sit down on another chair, but found this warning inconsistent with her position and changed her mind. Sitting on this pouf, Pyotr Ivanovich remembered how Ivan Ilyich had arranged this living room and consulted with him about this very pink cretonne with green leaves. Sitting on the sofa and passing by the table (in general, the whole living room was full of gizmos and furniture), the widow caught her black lace of black mantilla on the carving of the table. Pyotr Ivanovich raised himself to unhook him, and the pouf freed under him began to agitate and push him. The widow began to unhook her lace herself, and Pyotr Ivanovich sat down again, crushing the pouf that rebelled under him. But the widow did not unhook everything, and Pyotr Ivanovich got up again, and again the pouf rebelled and even clicked. When all this was over, she took out a clean cambric handkerchief and began to cry. Pyotr Ivanovich was cooled off by the episode with lace and the fight with the pouf, and he sat frowning. This awkward situation was interrupted by Sokolov, Ivan Ilyich's barman, with a report that the place in the cemetery that Praskovya Fyodorovna had appointed would cost two hundred rubles. She stopped crying and, looking at Pyotr Ivanovich with the air of a victim, said in French that it was very hard for her. Pyotr Ivanovich made a silent sign expressing his undoubted confidence that it could not be otherwise.

Smoke, please, ”she said in a magnanimous and at the same time murdered voice, and with Sokolov took up the question of the price of the place. Petr Ivanovich, lighting a cigarette, heard that she had very thoroughly inquired about the different prices of land and determined the one that should be taken. Besides, having finished about the place, she gave orders about the choristers. Sokolov left.

I do everything myself, ”she said to Pyotr Ivanovich, pushing the albums lying on the table to one side; and, noticing that the ashes were threatening the table, she did not hesitate to move the ashtray to Pyotr Ivanovich and said: - I find it a sham to assure that I cannot do practical things out of grief. On the contrary, if something can not comfort me ... but entertain, then it is - worries about him. - She again took out a handkerchief, as if about to cry, and suddenly, as if overpowering herself, shook herself and began to speak calmly:

However, I have business with you.

Pyotr Ivanovich bowed, not allowing the springs of the pouf to disperse, which immediately stirred under him.

In the last days he suffered terribly.

Did you suffer a lot? - asked Pyotr Ivanovich.

Oh, awful! The last, not minutes, but hours, he did not stop shouting. For three days in a row, he shouted without translating his voice. It was unbearable. I can't figure out how I got it; behind three doors could be heard. Oh! what have I endured!

And was he really in the memory? - asked Pyotr Ivanovich.

Yes, she whispered, until the last minute. He said goodbye to Us a quarter of an hour before his death and also asked to take Volodya away.

The thought of the suffering of a man whom he knew so closely, first as a cheerful boy, schoolboy, then as an adult partner, despite the unpleasant consciousness of the pretense of his own and this woman, suddenly horrified Pyotr Ivanovich. He saw again this forehead, his nose pressing on his lip, and he was afraid for himself.

“Three days of terrible suffering and death. After all, it is now, any minute can come for me too, ”he thought, and for a moment he felt scared. But immediately, he himself did not know how, the usual thought came to his aid that this had happened to Ivan Ilyich, and not to him, and that this should not and could not happen to him; that, thinking so, he succumbs to a gloomy mood, which should not be done, as it was evident from Schwartz's face. And, having made this reasoning, Pyotr Ivanovich calmed down and began to ask with interest the details about the death of Ivan Ilyich, as if death were such an adventure that was peculiar only to Ivan Ilyich, but not at all peculiar to him.

After various conversations about the details of the really, terrible physical suffering endured by Ivan Ilyich (Pyotr Ivanovich learned these details only from how Ivan Ilyich's suffering acted on Praskovya Fyodorovna's nerves), the widow obviously found it necessary to get down to business.

Oh, Pyotr Ivanovich, how hard, how awfully hard, how awfully hard — and she began to cry again.

Pyotr Ivanovich sighed and waited for her to blow her nose. When she blew her nose, he said:

Believe me ... - and again she got into a conversation and expressed what was, obviously, her main business to him; it consisted of questions about how to get money from the treasury on the occasion of her husband's death. She pretended to ask Pyotr Ivanovich for advice about the pension: but he saw that she already knew to the smallest details and what he did not know: everything that could be pulled from the treasury on the occasion of this death; but what she wanted to know was if there was some way she could get more money. Pyotr Ivanovich tried to invent such a means, but after thinking a little and out of decency scolding our government for its stinginess, he said that it seemed that it was no longer possible. Then she sighed and, obviously, began to think of a means to get rid of her visitor. He realized this, put out the cigarette, got up, shook his hand and went into the hall.

In the dining room with the clock, which Ivan Ilyich was so glad he bought in a bricabrack, Pyotr Ivanovich met the priest and several other acquaintances who had come to the funeral service, and saw a beautiful young lady he knew, the daughter of Ivan Ilyich. She was all in black. Her waist, very thin, seemed even thinner. She looked grim, determined, almost angry. She bowed to Pyotr Ivanovich, as if he was to blame for something. Behind his daughter stood with the same offended look a rich young man, familiar to Pyotr Ivanovich, a forensic investigator, her fiancé, as he heard. He bowed dejectedly to them and was about to go into the dead man's room, when from under the stairs appeared the figure of a schoolboy son who looked terribly like Ivan Ilyich. It was little Ivan Ilyich, as Peter Ivanovich remembered him in Jurisprudence. His eyes were both tear-stained and the kind that unclean boys have at thirteen or fourteen years old. The boy, seeing Pyotr Ivanovich, began to frown sternly and bashfully. Pyotr Ivanovich nodded to him and entered the dead man's room. A memorial service began - candles, groans, incense, tears, sobs. Pyotr Ivanovich stood frowning, looking at his feet in front of him. He did not even look at the dead man and did not completely succumb to the relaxing influences and was one of the first to leave. No one was in the hall. Gerasim, a pantry man, rushed out of the dead man's room, tossed all the fur coats with his strong hands in order to find Pyotr Ivanovich's fur coat, and handed it over.

What, brother Gerasim? - said Pyotr Ivanovich to say something. - It's a pity?

God's will. We'll all be there, '' said Gerasim, baring his white, solid peasant teeth, and, like a man in the midst of intense work, briskly opened the door, called the coachman, gave Pyotr Ivanovich a boost, and jumped back to the porch, as if wondering what else he could do. do.

Pyotr Ivanovich was especially pleased to breathe in clean air after the smell of incense, corpse and carbolic acid.

Where will you order? asked the coachman.

It's not too late. I'll stop by to see Fyodor Vasilyevich again. And Pyotr Ivanovich drove off. And indeed, he found them at the end of the first rubber, so it was convenient for him to enter the fifth.

The past history of Ivan Ilyich's life was the simplest and most ordinary and the most terrible.

Ivan Ilyich died at forty-five years old, a member of the Trial Chamber. He was the son of an official who made a career in St. Petersburg in various ministries and departments, which brings people to a position in which, although it turns out clearly that they are not fit to fill any significant position, they are nevertheless service and their ranks cannot be kicked out and therefore receive invented fictitious places and non-fictitious thousands, from six to ten, with which they live to a ripe old age.

Such was the secret councilor, an unnecessary member of various unnecessary institutions, Ilya Efimovich Golovin.

He had three sons, Ivan Ilyich had a second son. The elder made the same career as his father, only in a different ministry, and was already close to the service age at which this inertia of salary is obtained. The third son was a loser. He messed up for himself in different places everywhere and now served on the railways: both his father and brothers, and especially their wives, not only did not like to meet with him, but unnecessarily and did not remember about his existence. My sister was behind Baron Gref, the same Petersburg official as his father-in-law. Ivan Ilyich was le phenix de la famille, as they said. He was not as cold and orderly as the elder, and not as desperate as the younger. He was in the middle between them - an intelligent, lively, pleasant and decent person. He was brought up together with younger brother in jurisprudence

The younger did not finish and was kicked out of the fifth grade, while Ivan Ilyich finished the course well. In jurisprudence, he was already what he was after all his life: a capable, cheerful good-natured and sociable person, but strictly fulfilling what he considered his duty; he considered his duty everything that was considered to be the highest placed people. He was not an ingratiating boy, or then an adult, but from a young age he had the fact that he, like a fly to the light, was drawn to the highest people in the world, he assimilated their techniques, their views on life and with them established friendships. All the hobbies of childhood and youth passed for him without leaving any big traces; he gave himself up to sensuality and vanity, and - in the end, in the upper classes - to liberality, but everything within certain limits, which his feeling correctly indicated to him.

In Jurisprudence, he committed acts that had previously seemed to him to be great disgusting things and inspired him with disgust for himself, while he was doing them; but later, seeing that these deeds were performed by people of high standing and were not considered bad by them, he not only recognized them as good, but completely forgot them and was not in the least distressed by the recollections of them.

Coming out of Jurisprudence in the tenth grade and receiving money from his father for an outfit, Ivan Ilyich ordered a dress from Sharmer, hung a medal on the key rings with the inscription: "respice finem" said goodbye to the prince and educator, dined with his comrades at Donon's and with a new fashionable suitcase, linen , a dress, shaving and toiletries and a rug, ordered and bought in the best stores, went to the provinces to take the place of the governor's special assignment official, which his father had brought him.

In the provinces, Ivan Ilyich immediately arranged for himself the same easy and pleasant position as was his position in jurisprudence. He served, made a career, and at the same time enjoyed himself pleasantly and decently; From time to time he traveled to the districts on behalf of his superiors, behaved with dignity and with superior and inferior, and with precision and incorruptible honesty, which he could not but be proud of, carried out the assignments entrusted to him, mainly on matters of schismatics.

In official affairs, despite his youth and inclination to light fun, he was extremely restrained, official and even strict; but in public he was often playful and witty and always good-natured, decent, and bon enfant, as his boss and boss spoke of him, with whom he was a domestic man.

There was also a connection with one of the ladies in the provinces, who imposed herself on a dapper lawyer; there was also a milliner; there were also drinking parties with the visiting adjutants and trips to a distant street after supper; there was also serving the boss and even the boss's wife, but all this bore such a high tone of decency that all this could not be called bad words: all this fit only under the heading of the French dictum: il faut que jeumesse se passe. hands, in clean shirts, with French words and, most importantly, in the highest society, therefore, with the approval of people of high standing.

So Ivan Ilyich served for five years, and a change in service began. New judicial institutions have appeared; new people were needed.

And Ivan Ilyich became this new man.

Ivan Ilyich was offered the position of a forensic investigator, and Ivan Ilyich accepted him, despite the fact that the position was in another province and he had to abandon the established relationship and establish new ones. Ivan Ilyich was seen off by friends, made a group, presented him with a silver cigarette box, and he left for a new place.

Forensic investigator Ivan Ilyich was just as comme il faut, decent, able to separate official duties from private life and inspiring general respect, as he was an official on special assignments. In the previous service, it was pleasant to walk freely in Sharmer's uniform to walk past the quivering and waiting petitioners and officials who envied him, straight into the chief's office and sit down with him for tea and a cigarette; but there were few people who directly depended on his arbitrariness. Such people were only police officers and schismatics when he was sent on errands; and he loved to treat such people who depended on him with courtesy, almost comradely, he loved to make it feel that he, who could crush, was friendly, just dealt with them. There were few such people then, but now, as a judicial investigator, Ivan Ilyich felt that everyone, without exception, the most important self-satisfied people - everything is in his hands and that he only has to write the famous words on paper with a headline, and this important, self-righteous person will be brought to him as an accused or a witness, and he will, if he does not want to sit him, stand in front of him and answer his questions. Ivan Ilyich never abused this power of his; on the contrary, he tried to soften its expression; but the consciousness of this power and the ability to mitigate it were for him the main interest and attractiveness of his new service. In the service itself, precisely in the investigations, Ivan Ilyich very quickly mastered the method of removing from himself all circumstances not related to service, and putting on every most complex case in such a form in which the case would only be externally reflected on paper and in which it was completely excluded his personal opinion and, most importantly, all the required formality would be observed. This was a new business. And he was one of the first people to develop in practice the application of the statutes of 1864

Moving to a new city to the place of a forensic investigator, Ivan Ilyich made new acquaintances, connections, put himself in a new way and took a slightly different tone. He put himself at some decent distance from the provincial authorities, and chose the best circle of judges and wealthy nobles who lived in the city, and adopted a tone of slight dissatisfaction with the government, moderate liberalism and civilized citizenship. At the same time, without at all changing the elegance of his dress, Ivan Ilyich, in his new position, stopped shaving his chin and gave freedom to his beard to grow where it wants.

The life of Ivan Ilyich in the new city was very pleasant: the society opposing the governor was friendly and good; the salary was higher, and the whist added to life, which Ivan Ilyich began to play, who had the ability to play cards cheerfully, quickly thinking and very subtle, so that in general he was always a winner.

After two years of service in the new city, Ivan Ilyich met with his future wife. Praskovya Fedorovna Mikhel was the most attractive, intelligent, brilliant girl in the circle in which Ivan Ilyich moved. Among other amusements and rests from the work of the investigator, Ivan Ilyich established a playful, easy relationship with Praskovya Fedorovna.

Ivan Ilyich, being an official for special assignments, danced in general; as a forensic investigator, he already danced as an exception. He danced already in the sense that, although in the new institutions and in the fifth grade, if it comes to dancing, then I can prove that in this kind I can better than others. So, from time to time at the end of the evening he danced with Praskovya Fyodorovna, and mainly during these dances, he defeated Praskovya Fyodorovna. She fell in love with him. Ivan Ilyich did not have a clear, definite intention to marry, but when the girl fell in love with him, he asked himself this question: "Indeed, why not marry?" he said to himself.

The maid Praskovya Fyodorovna was of a good noble family, not bad-looking; was a small fortune. Ivan Ilyich could count on a more brilliant game, but this was a good game too. Ivan Ilyich had his salary, she, he hoped, would have the same. Good relationship; she is a sweet, pretty and quite decent woman. To say that Ivan Ilyich got married because he fell in love with his bride and found in her sympathy for his views on life would be just as unfair as to say that he got married because the people of his society approved of this party. Ivan Ilyich got married for both reasons: he did what was pleasant for himself, acquiring such a wife, and at the same time did what the highest placed people considered right.

And Ivan Ilyich got married.

The very process of marriage and the first time of marriage life, with matrimonial affection, new furniture, new dishes, new linen, went very well before his wife's pregnancy, so that Ivan Ilyich was already beginning to think that marriage would not only not violate the nature of life, easy, pleasant, cheerful and always decent and approved by society, which Ivan Ilyich considered characteristic of life in general, but would further aggravate it. But here, from the first months of his wife's pregnancy, something new, unexpected, unpleasant, difficult and indecent, appeared, which could not be expected and from which there was no way to get rid of.

His wife, without any reason, as it seemed to Ivan Ilyich, de gaité de coeur, as he told himself, began to disturb the pleasantness and decency of life: she was jealous of him for no reason, demanded that he take care of herself, found fault with everything and made him unpleasant and rude scenes.

At first, Ivan Ilyich hoped to get rid of the unpleasantness of this situation by the very easy and decent attitude to life that had helped him out before - he tried to ignore the mood of his wife, continued to live as easily and pleasantly as before: he invited friends to join him, tried to leave himself. to the club or to friends. But his wife once with such energy began to scold him with rude words and so stubbornly continued to scold him every time he did not fulfill her demands, apparently firmly resolved not to stop until he submitted, that is, he would not sit at home and she won’t be grieving that Ivan Ilyich was horrified. He realized that married life - at least with his wife - does not always contribute to the pleasures and decency of life, but, on the contrary, often violates them, and therefore it is necessary to protect oneself from these violations. And Ivan Ilyich began to look for funds for this. Service was one thing that appealed to Praskovya Fyodorovna, and Ivan Ilyich, through service and the responsibilities arising from it, began to fight with his wife, shielding his independent world.

With the birth of a child, attempts at feeding and various failures at the same time, with real and imaginary diseases of the child and the mother, in which Ivan Ilyich was required to participate, but in which he could not understand anything, the need for Ivan Ilyich to shield himself the world outside the family became even more insistent.

As his wife became more irritable and more demanding, Ivan Ilyich more and more shifted the center of gravity of his life to the service. He became more fond of service and became more ambitious than he was before.

Very soon, not later than a year after his marriage, Ivan Ilyich realized that married life, presenting some comforts in life, is, in essence, a very difficult and difficult matter, in relation to which, in order to fulfill his duty, that is, to lead a decent, life approved by society, you need to develop - a certain attitude, as well as to the service.

And such an attitude towards married life was developed by Ivan Ilyich. He demanded from family life only those comforts of home dinner, a hostess, a bed that she could give him, and, most importantly, that decency of external forms that were determined by public opinion. For the rest, he looked for merry pleasures, and if he found them, he was very grateful; if he met with resistance and grumbling, he immediately went into his own separate world of service, fenced off by him, and found pleasantness in it.

Ivan Ilyich was appreciated as a good campaigner, and three years later he was made assistant prosecutor. New responsibilities, their importance, the ability to bring to court and put everyone in prison with publicity of speeches; the success that Ivan Ilyich had in this matter - all this attracted him even more to the service.

Come on, children. His wife became more and more grumpy and angry, but the attitude towards home life developed by Ivan Ilyich made him almost impervious to her grumbling.

After seven years of service in one city, Ivan Ilyich was transferred to the post of prosecutor in another province. They moved, money was scarce, and my wife did not like the place where they moved. The salary was higher than before, but life was more expensive; besides, two children died, and therefore family life became even more unpleasant for Ivan Ilyich.

Praskovya Fyodorovna reproached her husband for all the misfortunes that happened in this new place of residence. Most of the subjects of conversation between husband and wife, especially raising children, led to questions on which there were memories of quarrels, and quarrels were ready to flare up at any moment. There were only those rare periods of falling in love that were found on the spouses, but did not last long. These were islands, on which they pestered for a while, but then again plunged into a sea of ​​hidden enmity, expressed in alienation from each other. This alienation could upset Ivan Ilyich if he believed that it should not be so, but he now recognized this situation not only as normal, but also as the goal of all activities in the family. His aim was to free himself more and more from these troubles and to give them the character of harmlessness and decency; and he achieved this by spending less and less time with his family, and when he was forced to do this, he tried to ensure his position by the presence of strangers. The main thing is that Ivan Ilyich had a service. All the interest of life was concentrated for him in the service world. And this interest absorbed him. Awareness of his power, the ability to destroy any person whom he wants to destroy, importance, even external, at his entrance to court and meetings with subordinates, his success before higher and subordinates and, most importantly, the skill of his business, which he felt - all this delighted him and, together with conversations with comrades, dinners and whist, filled his life. So, in general, Ivan Ilyich's life continued to go on as he thought it should go: pleasantly and decently.

So he lived for another seven years. The eldest daughter was already sixteen years old, another child died, and there remained a schoolboy, a subject of contention. Ivan Ilyich wanted to send him to Jurisprudence, and Praskovya Fyodorovna, in spite of him, sent him to the gymnasium. The daughter studied at home and grew up well, the boy also studied well.

So Ivan Ilyich's life went on for seventeen years from the time of his marriage. He was already an old prosecutor, who refused some transfers, waiting for a more desirable position, when suddenly one unpleasant circumstance happened, which completely disturbed his peace of mind. Ivan Ilyich was waiting for the chairman's seat in the university city, but Goppe ran ahead somehow and got this seat. Ivan Ilyich became irritated, began to reproach and quarreled with him and with his immediate superiors; they became cold towards him and in the next appointment he was again bypassed.

This was in 1880. This year was the most difficult in Ivan Ilyich's life. This year it turned out, on the one hand, that the salary was not enough to live on; on the other, that everyone had forgotten him, and that what seemed to him to be the greatest, most cruel injustice to him, seemed to others to be quite an ordinary matter. Even his father did not consider it his duty to help him. He felt that everyone had left him, considering his position with 3,500 salaries the most normal and even happiest. He alone knew that with the consciousness of the injustices that had been done to him, and with the eternal sawing of his wife, and with the debts that he began to do, living beyond his means, he alone knew that his situation was far from normal.

In the summer of this goal, to facilitate funds, he took a vacation and went to live with his wife in the summer in the village with his brother Praskovya Fyodorovna.

In the village, without service, Ivan Ilyich for the first time felt not only boredom, but unbearable melancholy, and decided that it was impossible to live like this and it was necessary to take some decisive measures.

After spending a sleepless night, which Ivan Ilyich spent the whole time on the terrace, he decided to go to Petersburg to bother and, in order to punish them, those who did not know how to appreciate him, go to another ministry.

The next day, despite all the persuasions of his wife and brother-in-law, he went to Petersburg.

He was driving for one; to beg for a place of five thousand salaries. He no longer adhered to any ministry, direction or kind of activity. He only needed a place, a place with five thousand, for administration, for banks, for railways, for the institutions of Empress Maria, even customs, but without fail five thousand and certainly leave the ministry, where they did not know how to evaluate him.

And this trip of Ivan Ilyich was crowned with an amazing, unexpected success. In Kursk, an acquaintance, FS Ilyin, sat down in the first grade and reported a fresh telegram received by the Kursk governor that a coup would take place in the ministry one of these days: Ivan Semyonovich was appointed to replace Pyotr Ivanovich.

The proposed coup, in addition to its significance for Russia, was of particular importance for Ivan Ilyich in that he, nominating a new person, Peter Petrovich and, obviously, his friend Zakhar Ivanovich, was extremely favorable for Ivan Ilyich. Zakhar Ivanovich beat comrade and friend Ivan Ilyich.

In Moscow, the news was confirmed. And having arrived in Petersburg, Ivan Ilyich found Zakhar Ivanovich and received the promise of a right place in his former Ministry of Justice.

A week later, he telegraphed his wife:

"Zakhar is Miller's place at the first report I receive an appointment."

Thanks to this change of faces, Ivan Ilyich unexpectedly received such an appointment in his previous ministry, in which he became two degrees higher than his comrades: five thousand salaries and three thousand five hundred lifting salaries. All the annoyance at his former enemies and at the entire ministry was forgotten, and Ivan Ilyich was completely happy.

Ivan Ilyich returned to the village cheerful, contented, as he had not been for a long time. Praskovya Fyodorovna also cheered up, and a truce was concluded between them. Ivan Ilyich talked about how everyone honored him in St. Petersburg, how all those who were his enemies were put to shame and now dishonored him, how they envy him for his position, especially how everyone loved him very much in St. Petersburg.

Praskovya Fyodorovna listened to this and pretended that she believed it, and did not contradict in anything, but made only plans for a new arrangement of life in the city where they were moving. And Ivan Ilyich saw with joy that these plans were his plans, that they converged, and that again his faltering life was acquiring a real, characteristic of her, character of cheerful pleasantness and decency.

Ivan Ilyich came for a short time. On September 10, he had to accept the position and, in addition, he needed time to settle in a new place, to transport everything from the provinces, to buy, to order, and much more; in a word, to settle down as it was decided in his mind, and almost exactly as it was decided in the soul of Praskovya Fyodorovna.

And now, when everything worked out so well, and when they agreed with his wife on purpose and, moreover, lived little together, they got on as amicably as they had not gotten together from the first years of their married life. Ivan Ilyich thought to take the family away at once, but the insistence of his sister and son-in-law, who suddenly became especially kind and kindred to Ivan Ilyich and his family, made Ivan Ilyich leave alone.

Ivan Ilyich left, and the cheerful mood, produced by luck and agreement with his wife, one reinforcing the other, did not leave him all the time. They found a lovely apartment, the very thing that the husband and wife dreamed of. Wide, tall, old-style reception rooms, a comfortable grandiose study, rooms for a wife and daughter, a classroom for a son - everything was deliberately invented for them. Ivan Ilyich himself took up the device, chose wallpaper, bribed furniture, especially from old ones, to which he gave a special comme il faut style, upholstery, and everything grew, grew and came to the ideal that he had formed for himself. When he was halfway comfortable, his device surpassed his expectation. He understood that comme il faut, graceful and not vulgar character, which will accept everything when it is ready. Falling asleep, he imagined the hall, what it would be like. Looking at the living room, which was not yet finished, he already saw the fireplace, the screen, the bookcase and these chairs scattered, these dishes and plates on the walls and bronze, when they were all in place. He was gladdened by the thought of how he would amaze Pasha and Lizanka, who also have a taste for it. They don't expect this in any way. In particular, he managed to find and buy cheap old things that gave everything a particularly noble character. In his letters, he deliberately represented everything worse than it was, in order to impress them. All this interested him so much that even his new service, who loved this work, took less than he expected. In meetings, he had moments of absent-mindedness: he thought about which cornices for the curtains, straight or matched. He was so busy with this that he often fiddled himself, even rearranged furniture and outweighed the curtains himself. Once he climbed the ladder to show the incomprehensible upholsterer how he wanted to drape, stumbled and fell, but, like a strong and dexterous man, he resisted, only bumped sideways on the frame handle. The bruise ached, but soon passed - Ivan Ilyich felt all this time especially cheerful and healthy. He wrote: I feel that fifteen years have jumped off me. He thought to finish in September, but it dragged on until mid-October. But it was lovely - not only he spoke, but everyone who saw it spoke to him.

In essence, it was the same thing that happens to all not quite rich people, but those who want to be like the rich and therefore only resemble each other: damask, ebony, flowers, carpets and bronzes. Dark and brilliant - everything that all people of a certain kind do to be like all people of a certain kind. And it looked so similar that one could not even pay attention; but it all seemed to him something special. When he met his people at the railway station, he brought them to his lighted finished apartment and a footman in a white tie opened the door to the front hall decorated with flowers, and then they entered the living room, the study and gasped with pleasure - he was very happy, he took them everywhere , drank their praise and beamed with pleasure. That same evening, when over tea Praskovya Fyodorovna asked him, among other things, how he fell, he laughed and imagined in his faces how he flew and frightened the upholsterer.

I'm not a gymnast for nothing. Another would have been killed, but I just hit right here; when you touch it, it hurts, but it already passes; just a bruise.

And they began to live in a new room, in which, as always, when they had settled down well, only one room was missing, and with new funds, for which, as always, only a little - some five hundred rubles - was lacking, and it was very good. It was especially good at first, when not everything was arranged yet and it was still necessary to arrange: first buy, then order, then rearrange, then adjust. Although there were some disagreements between husband and wife, both were so pleased and there was so much to do that everything ended without big quarrels. When there was nothing more to arrange, it became a little boring and lacking in something, but then acquaintances, habits had already become, and life was filled.

Ivan Ilyich, after spending the morning in court, returned to dinner, and at first his disposition was good, although it suffered a little precisely from the premises. (Every stain on the tablecloth, on the damask, the torn thread of the curtain irritated him: he put so much work on the device that every destruction hurt him.) But in general, Ivan Ilyich's life went the way, according to his faith, life should have flowed: easy , nice and decent. He got up at nine, drank coffee, read the newspaper, then put on a uniform and went to court. The clamp in which he worked was already crumpled there; he immediately fell into it. Applicants, inquiries in the office, the office itself, meetings - public and administrative. In all this, one had to be able to exclude all that raw, vital, which always violates the correctness of the course of official affairs: one must not allow any relations with people, other than official ones, and the reason for the relationship should be only official and only official relations. For example, a person comes and wants to know something, Ivan Ilyich is a non-duty person and cannot have anything to do with such a person; but if there is an attitude of this person as a member, such that can be expressed on paper with a headline, within the framework of these relations Ivan Ilyich does everything, everything decisively that is possible, and at the same time observes the semblance of human friendly relations, that is, courtesy. As soon as the service relationship ends, so everything else ends. With this ability to separate the service side, without mixing it with his real life, Ivan Ilyich possessed in the highest degree and long practice and developed it to such an extent that he even, like a virtuoso, sometimes allowed himself, as if jokingly, to mix the human and the service relationship. He allowed himself to do this because he felt within himself the strength whenever he needed to again single out one service and discard the human. Ivan Ilyich did this not only easily, pleasantly and decently, but even masterly. In between, he smoked, drank tea, talked a little about politics, a little about general affairs, a little about cards, and most of all about appointments. And tired, but with a sense of a virtuoso, who clearly finished his part, one of the first violins in the orchestra, he returned home. At home, the daughter and mother went somewhere or they had someone; the son was in the gymnasium, prepared lessons with tutors and studied regularly what they teach in the gymnasium. All was good. After dinner, if there were no guests, Ivan Ilyich sometimes read a book about which they talk a lot, and in the evening he sat down to business, that is, he read papers, coped with the laws, collated testimonies and brought them under the laws. It was neither boring nor fun for him. It was boring when it was possible to play screw: but if there was no screw, it was still better than sitting alone or with his wife. Ivan Ilyich's pleasures were small dinners, for which he invited ladies and men of important social status, and a pastime with them that would look like an ordinary passing of the time of such people, just as his living room looked like all living rooms.

Once they even had an evening, they danced. And Ivan Ilyich had fun, and everything was fine, only there was a big quarrel with his wife over cakes and sweets: Praskovya Fyodorovna had his own plan, and Ivan Ilyich insisted on taking everything from the dear pastry chef, and took a lot of cakes, and the quarrel was that the cakes remained, and the pastry chef's bill was forty-five rubles. The quarrel was big and unpleasant, so Praskovya Fyodorovna said to him: "Fool, sour." And he grabbed his head and in his hearts mentioned something about the divorce. But the evening itself was merry. There was a better society, and Ivan Ilyich danced with Princess Trufonova, the sister of the one who is known for the establishment of the society "Take away my grief"

The joys of office were the joys of pride; the joys of society were the joys of vanity; but Ivan Ilyich's real joys were the joys of playing vint. He confessed that after everything, after any unpleasant events in his life, the joy that, like a candle, burned in front of all the others, is to sit with good players and non-screaming partners in the screw, and certainly four (five it’s very painful to go out, although you pretend that I really love), and play a smart, serious game (when the cards are coming), then have dinner and have a glass of wine. And to sleep after screw, especially when in a small win (big - unpleasant), Ivan Ilyich went to bed in a particularly good mood.

This is how they lived. Their circle of society was the best, both important people and young people traveled.

In looking at the circle of their acquaintances, the husband, wife and daughter were in complete agreement and, without saying a word, equally wiped themselves off and freed themselves from all kinds of friends and relatives, scum, who scattered to them with tenderness into the living room with Japanese dishes on the walls. Soon these creepy friends stopped scattering, and the Golovins were left with only the best company. Young people courted Lizanka, and Petrishchev, the son of Dmitry Ivanovich Petrishchev and the only heir to his fortune, a forensic investigator, began to look after Liza, so Ivan Ilyich had already talked about this with Praskovya Fyodorovna: whether not to bring them to ride in troikas or put on a performance. This is how they lived. And everything went on like this, without changing, and everything was very good.

Everyone was healthy. It was not unhealthy that Ivan Ilyich sometimes said that he had a strange taste in his mouth and something awkward in the left side of his stomach.

But it happened that this awkwardness began to increase and pass not into pain yet, but into the consciousness of a constant heaviness in the side and into a bad mood. This bad mood, growing stronger and stronger, began to spoil the pleasantness of an easy and decent life that had been established in the Golovin family. Husband and wife began to quarrel more and more often, and soon the lightness and pleasantness disappeared, and one decency was hardly maintained. The scenes became more frequent again. Again, there were only islands, and there are few of those on which husband and wife could converge without an explosion.

And Praskovya Fyodorovna now, not without reason, said that her husband had a difficult character. With her habit of exaggerating, she said that she had always had such a terrible character that her kindness was needed to endure it for twenty years. The truth was that the quarrels now began with him. His nagging always began just before dinner and often, just when he started eating, at soup. Now he noticed that something from the dishes was spoiled, then the food was not like that, then the son put his elbow on the table, then the daughter's hairdo. And he blamed Praskovya Fyodorovna for everything. Praskovya Fyodorovna at first objected and told him trouble, but once or twice during the beginning of dinner he was so furious that she realized that this was a painful condition that was caused in him by eating, and humbled herself; no longer objected, but only hurried to dinner. Praskovya Fyodorovna put her humility as a great merit. Deciding that her husband had a terrible disposition and made her life unhappy, she began to feel sorry for herself. And the more she felt sorry for herself, the more she hated her husband. She began to wish that he died, but she could not wish that, because then there would be no salary. And that annoyed her even more against him. She considered herself terribly unhappy precisely because even his death could not save her, and she was irritated, hid it, and this hidden irritation of her intensified his irritation.

After one scene in which Ivan Ilyich was especially unfair and after which he, and during the explanation, said that he was definitely irritable, but that it was from an illness, she told him that if he was sick, then he needed to be treated, and demanded that he he went to see a famous doctor.

He went. Everything was as he expected; everything was as it is always done. And the expectation, and the feigned importance of the doctor, familiar to him, the same one that he knew in himself in court, and tapping, and listening, and questions requiring definite and, obviously, unnecessary answers, and a significant look that suggested that You, they say, just submit to us, and we will arrange everything - we know and undoubtedly how to arrange everything, all in one manner for every person you want. Everything was exactly the same as in court. As he pretended in court to the defendants, so the famous doctor pretended to him too.

The doctor said: this and that indicates that you have this and that inside you; but if this is not confirmed by the research of this and that, then you have to assume such and such. If we assume this, then ... and so on. For Ivan Ilyich, only one question was important: is his position dangerous or not? But the doctor ignored this inappropriate question. From the point of view of the doctor, this question was idle and not subject to discussion; there was only a weighing of probabilities - a vagus kidney, chronic catarrh and diseases of the cecum. There was no question about Ivan Ilyich's life, but there was a dispute between the vagus kidney and the cecum. And the doctor brilliantly resolved this dispute in front of Ivan Ilyich in favor of the cecum, making a reservation that a urine test could provide new evidence and that then the case would be reviewed. All this was exactly what Ivan Ilyich himself had done a thousand times over the defendants in such a brilliant manner. The doctor made his resume just as brilliantly and triumphantly, even merrily, looking from above his glasses at the defendant. From the doctor's resume, Ivan Ilyich drew the conclusion that it is bad, and that he, the doctor, and, perhaps, everyone does not care, but he feels bad. And this conclusion painfully struck Ivan Ilyich, evoking in him a feeling of great self-pity and great anger at this doctor, who was indifferent to such an important question.

But he said nothing, but got up, put the money on the table and, sighing, said:

We patients probably often ask you inappropriate questions, ”he said. - In general, is it a dangerous disease or not? ..

The doctor looked at him sternly with one eye through his glasses, as if saying: Defendant, if you do not stay within the limits of the questions put to you, I will be forced to make an order to remove you from the courtroom.

I have already told you what I thought was necessary and convenient, ”the doctor said. - Further research will show. And the doctor bowed.

Ivan Ilyich went out slowly, sadly sat down in the sleigh and drove home. All the way, he did not stop going over everything that the doctor said, trying to translate all these confusing, obscure scientific words into simple language and read in them the answer to the question: is it bad - is it really bad for me, or nothing else? And it seemed to him that the meaning of everything the doctor said was that it was very bad. Everything seemed sad to Ivan Ilyich on the streets. The cabbies were sad, the houses were sad, the passers-by, the shops were sad. This pain, a dull, aching pain that did not cease for a second, seemed to acquire a different, more serious meaning in connection with the doctor's vague speeches. Ivan Ilyich, with a new heavy feeling, was now listening to her.

He came home and began to tell his wife. His wife listened, but in the middle of his story, his daughter came in in a hat: she was going to go with her mother. She sat down with an effort to listen to this boredom, but could not stand it for a long time, and her mother did not listen to the end.

Well, I'm very glad, - said the wife, - so now you, look, take your medicine carefully. Give me the prescription, I'll send Gerasim to the pharmacy. - And she went to get dressed.

He did not catch his breath while she was in the room, and sighed heavily when she left.

Well then, he said. - Maybe, and definitely nothing else.

He began to take medications, to fulfill the doctor's prescriptions, which changed due to the study of urine. But then it just so happened that in this study and in what was to follow it, there was some kind of confusion. It was impossible to get to the doctor himself, but it turned out that what was being done was not what the doctor had told him to do. Either he forgot, or lied, or hid something from him.

But Ivan Ilyich nevertheless began to fulfill the instructions for sure, and in doing this he found consolation for the first time.

The main occupation of Ivan Ilyich since his visit to the doctor was the exact fulfillment of the doctor's prescriptions regarding hygiene and taking medications and listening to his pain, to all his bodily functions. The main interests of Ivan Ilyich were human diseases and human health. When people spoke with him about the sick, about the dead, about the recovered, especially about such an illness that resembled his, he, trying to hide his excitement, listened, questioned and applied to his illness.

The pain did not diminish; but Ivan Ilyich made efforts to force himself to think that he was better. And he could deceive himself as long as nothing worried him. But as soon as there was a nuisance with his wife, failure in the service, bad cards in the screw, so now he felt the full force of his illness; sometimes he endured these failures, expecting that I would soon correct the bad, overcome, wait for success, a grand slam. Now every failure undermined him and plunged him into despair. He said to himself: just now I began to recover and the medicine was already beginning to work, and now this damned misfortune or nuisance ... And he was angry at the misfortune or at the people who made him trouble and killed him, and felt how this anger was killing him; but could not refrain from it. It would seem that it should have been clear to him that his anger at circumstances and people aggravates his illness and that therefore he should not pay attention to unpleasant accidents; but he did exactly the opposite reasoning: he said that he needed calmness, watched everything that disturbed this calmness, and at every slightest disturbance he became irritated. What worsened his position was that he read medical books and consulted with doctors. The deterioration went so evenly that he could deceive himself, comparing one day to another - there was little difference. But when he consulted with the doctors, then it seemed to him that he was going for the worse and very quickly even. Despite this, he constantly consulted with doctors.

This month he visited another celebrity: another celebrity said almost the same as the first one, but put the questions differently. And the advice with this celebrity only aggravated Ivan Ilyich's doubt and fear. A friend of his friend - a very good doctor - he still defined the disease in a completely different way and, despite the fact that he promised recovery, with his questions and assumptions confused Ivan Ilyich even more and intensified his doubt. A homeopath - he defined the disease in a different way and gave medicine, and Ivan Ilyich, secretly from everyone, took it for a week. But after a week, not feeling relief and losing confidence in both the previous treatments and this, I became even more despondent. Once a lady friend told me about healing with icons. Ivan Ilyich found himself listening attentively and believing the reality of the fact. This incident frightened him. “Am I so mentally weak? he said to himself. - It's nothing! This is all nonsense, one should not give in to suspiciousness, but, having chosen one doctor, strictly adhere to his treatment. So I will do it. It's over now. I will not think about it and will strictly follow the treatment until summer. And there it will be seen. Now the end of these hesitations! .. ”It was easy to say this, but impossible to fulfill. The pain in his side was still tormenting, everything seemed to intensify, it became constant, the taste in his mouth became more and more strange, it seemed to him that he smelled something disgusting from his mouth, and his appetite and strength were getting weaker. You could not deceive yourself: something terrible, new and so significant, which was never more significant in his life with Ivan Ilyich, was happening in him. And he alone knew about it, yet those around him did not understand or did not want to understand and thought that everything in the world was going on as before. It was this that tormented Ivan Ilyich most of all. Household - the main thing is his wife and daughter, who were in the midst of the trips - he saw, did not understand anything, annoyed that he was so sad and demanding, as if he was to blame for this. Although they tried to hide it, he saw that he was a hindrance to them, but that his wife had developed a certain attitude towards his illness and kept to it regardless of what he said and did. The attitude was this:

You know, she said to her acquaintances, Ivan Ilyich cannot, like all good people, strictly follow the prescribed treatment. Today he will take the drops and eat as ordered, and lie down in time; tomorrow, suddenly, if I look over, he forgets to take it, eats sturgeon (but he was not ordered), and even stays up for a screw up to an hour.

Well, when? - Ivan Ilyich will say with annoyance. - Once at Pyotr Ivanovich's.

And yesterday with Shebek.

All the same, I could not sleep because of the pain ...

Yes, there is already for some reason, only in this way you will never recover and torture us.

External, expressed to others and to himself, Praskovya Fyodorovna's attitude toward her husband's illness was such that Ivan Ilyich was to blame for this illness, and this whole illness is a new nuisance that he makes to his wife. Ivan Ilyich felt that this was coming out of her involuntarily, but that did not make it any easier for him.

In court, Ivan Ilyich noticed, or thought he was noticing, the same strange attitude towards himself: it seemed to him that they were looking at him as if he were a person who would soon empty his seat; then all of a sudden his friends began to make fun of his suspiciousness in a friendly way, as if something awful and terrible, unheard of, that had wound up in him and sucked him uncontrollably and irresistibly attracted him somewhere, was the most pleasant subject for a joke. Schwartz especially irritated him with his playfulness, vitality and comme ilchism, reminiscent of Ivan Ilyich himself ten years ago.

Friends came to make a party, sat down. They dealt, warmed up new cards, added tambourines to tambourines, there are seven of them. The partner said: no trump cards, - and supported two tambourines. What else? Cheerfully, it should be - a helmet. And suddenly Ivan Ilyich feels this sucking pain, this taste in his mouth, and it seems to him something wild in the fact that at the same time he can enjoy the helmet.

He looks at Mikhail Mikhailovich, his partner, as he hits the table with a sanguine hand and politely and condescendingly refrains from grabbing bribes, and pushes them towards Ivan Ilyich in order to please him in collecting them without bothering himself, without stretching his hand far. “Well, he thinks that I am so weak that I cannot stretch my hand far,” thinks Ivan Ilyich, forgets his trump cards and trumps his cards once more and loses the helmet without three, and what is most terrible of all is what he sees, how Mikhail Mikhailovich suffers, but he doesn't care. And it's terrible to think why he doesn't care.

Everyone sees that it is hard for him, and they tell him: “We can stop if you are tired. You rest. " Relax? No, he is not at all tired, they are playing out the rubber. All are gloomy and silent. Ivan Ilyich feels that he has let this gloom on them and cannot dispel it. They have supper and leave, and Ivan Ilyich is left alone with the knowledge that his life is poisoned for him and poisons the lives of others, and that this poison does not weaken, but more and more penetrates his whole being.

And with this consciousness, and even with physical pain, and even with horror, I had to go to bed and often stay awake from pain for most of the night. And the next morning I had to get up again, get dressed, go to court, talk, write, and if I didn't go, be at home with the same twenty-four hours a day, each of which was a torment. And he had to live like this on the edge of destruction alone, without one person who would understand and take pity on him.

This went on for a month and two. Before the New Year, his brother-in-law came to their city and stayed with them. Ivan Ilyich was in court. Praskovya Fyodorovna went shopping. Entering his office, he found his brother-in-law, a healthy sanguine person, unpacking his suitcase himself. He raised his head to the steps of Ivan Ilyich and looked at him for a moment in silence. This glance opened everything to Ivan Ilyich. Brother-in-law opened his mouth to gasp, and restrained himself. This movement confirmed everything.

What, changed?

Yes ... there is a change.

And no matter how much Ivan Ilyich suggested after his brother-in-law to talk about his appearance, the brother-in-law kept silent. Praskovya Fyodorovna arrived, her brother-in-law went to her. Ivan Ilyich locked the door with a key and began to look in the mirror - straight ahead, then from the side. He took his portrait with his wife and compared the portrait with what he saw in the mirror. The change was enormous. Then he bared his arms to the elbow, looked, dropped his sleeves, sat down on the ottoman and became blacker than night.

“Don't, don't,” he said to himself, jumped up, walked over to the table, opened the file, began to read it, but could not. He unlocked the door and went into the hall. The door to the living room was closed. He approached her on tiptoe and listened.

No, you are exaggerating, - said Praskovya Fyodorovna.

How am I exaggerating? You can't see - he's a dead man, look at his eyes. No light. What does he have?

Nobody knows. Nikolaev (it was another doctor) said something, but I don't know. Leschetitsky (it was a famous doctor) said opposite ...

Ivan Ilyich walked away, went to his room, lay down and began to think: "Kidney, wandering kidney." He remembered all that the doctors had told him, how she came off and how she wandered. And with an effort of imagination he tried to catch this kidney and stop, strengthen it: so little was needed, it seemed to him. "No, I'll go to Pyotr Ivanovich again." (This was the friend who had a friend, the doctor.) He called, ordered the horse to be pledged, and got ready to go.

Where are you, Jean? - asked the wife with a particularly sad and unusually kind expression.

This unfamiliar goodness embittered him. He looked at her grimly.

I need to see Pyotr Ivanovich.

He went to see a friend who had a friend, a doctor. And with him to the doctor. He found him and talked with him for a long time.

Examining the anatomical and physiological details of what, according to the doctor, was happening in him, he understood everything.

There was one little thing, a little thing in the cecum. All this could get better. Strengthen the energy of one organ, weaken the activity of another, absorption will occur, and everything will get better. He was a little late for dinner. I had lunch, talked merrily, but for a long time could not go to study. Finally he went into his study and immediately sat down to work. He read the cases, worked, but the knowledge that he had an important, sincere business aside, which he would do after graduation, did not leave him. When he finished the business, he remembered that this soulful business was the thoughts of the cecum. But he did not indulge in them, he went into the drawing-room for tea. There were guests, talking and playing the piano, singing; there was a forensic investigator, a desired groom for his daughter. Ivan Ilyich spent the evening, as Praskovya Fyodorovna remarked, more cheerful than the others, but he did not forget for a minute that he had important thoughts about the cecum that had been put off. At eleven o'clock he said goodbye and went to his room. He had slept alone since his illness, in a small room by his study. He went, undressed and took Zola's novel, but did not read it, but thought. And in his imagination, that desired correction of the cecum took place. Absorbed, discarded, recovered

Shishkhova Nelly Magometovna 2011

UDC 82.0 (470)

BBK 83.3 (2 = Pyc) 1

Shishkhova N.M. The concept of death in the story of L.N. Tolstoy "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" Abstract:

The originality and features of the concept of death in the story of L.N. Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" in the light of the modern ethical and philosophical approach, the meaning-forming function of death for structuring a literary plot is considered. Tolstoy's story is constantly in the field of view of researchers in recent decades in this area, who emphasize the writer's concept of the fundamental incomprehensibility of death. Human consciousness is only able to state such a fact, but it is not able to reveal it empirically.

Keywords:

Concept, thanatology, death and immortality, the phenomenon of death, modern ethical-philosophical approach, basic metaphors of death.

Candidate of History, Associate Professor of Literature and Journalism Department, the Adyghe State University, e-mail: [email protected]

Concept of death in L.N. Tolstoy "s great story" Ivan Ilich "s Death"

The paper analyzes the originality and features of the concept of death in L.N. Tolstoy "s great story" Ivan Ilich "s Death" in the light of the modern ethic-philosophical approach. The author examines a sense-forming function of death for constructing a plot structure. The great story by Tolstoy is always in the field of vision of researchers of last decades who emphasize the writer’s conception on fundamental incomprehensibility of death. The human consciousness is capable only to establish such a fact, but it is not capable to uncover it empirically.

Concept, thanatology, death and immortality, a death phenomenon, the modern ethic-philosophical approach, basic metaphors of death.

The ethical and philosophical approach, characteristic of Russian literature, provides the most profound understanding of the phenomenon of death. The spiritual experience of Russian culture clearly testifies that death is not the norm, and fixes its morally negative essence. According to Yu.M. Lotman, “... literary work, introducing the theme of death into the plot plan, in fact, should at the same time subject it to denial ”[Lotman, 1994, 417].

In recent decades, there has been a kind of rediscovery of death in culture, which acquires a variety of motives. A relatively new science, thanatology, emerged as a humanitarian discipline. In K. Isupov's encyclopedia, this term is defined as the philosophical experience of describing the phenomenon of death ”[Culturology XX century: Encyclopedia, 1998]. In the same vein, the term is interpreted in G. Tulchinsky's article "New terms and concepts", one of the main themes of personology "[Projective philosophical dictionary, 2003]. In the humanitarian branch of thanatology literary experience occupies one of the nodal places. The semantic function of death for structuring a literary plot, for example, is considered in the article by Yu.M. Lotman "Death as a problem of the plot". Some fundamental ideas are expressed in it, equally important for cultural studies and literary criticism. For example, about the possibility of creating basic metaphors of death as

interpretive models of culture.

Recently, the postmodern discourse of death has been popular, the fundamental principles of which manifest death as a “naked” argument of the absurd beyond any philosophical and moral comprehension. That is why the spiritual and intellectual traditions, the national originality of the typological characteristics in relation to this issue in Russian literature and philosophy acquire a special meaning.

The philosophical, aesthetic and artistic experiments of L. Tolstoy in comprehending the phenomenon of death are in the constant field of vision of modern researchers in philosophy and literary criticism, for Tolstoy's problem of death is included in philosophical, religious, moral, and social problems, although it is does not exclude her existential solution. Thoughts about death, especially in the late Tolstoy, are generated not only by biological feeling, but by other, religious and spiritual searches. For a writer, the diversity of individual manifestations of death is very important. But death for Tolstoy is, first of all, the revelation of the true essence of the life of this or that person.

V.F. Asmus, analyzing his philosophical views, wrote: “In the center of the issues of Tolstoy's worldview, and therefore in the center of the concept of faith, was the contradiction of faith between the finite and infinite existence of the world<...>Tolstoy realized this contradiction as a life contradiction that captures most deeply the core of his personal existence and consciousness.<...>The desire to strengthen the root of life, shaken by the fear of death, Tolstoy draws not from the strength of life itself, but from the religious tradition ”[Asmus, 1969, 63].

Reflection on death is most capable of “kindling” the metaphysical “passion” of a person, awakening in him a genuine philosophical burning, and therefore making his being spiritual.

Programming in terms of conceptualizing the idea of ​​death in the work of the late Tolstoy is the story "The Death of Ivan Ilyich", about which he wrote: ". a description of the simple death of an ordinary person, describing from it ”[Tolstoy, 1934, 63, 29]. His hero is one of those people whom Tolstoy ("The Kingdom of God is within you") called "conventional", who lived by inertia, by habit. The ordinary life of people, subject to automatism and lack of freedom.

It is curious that according to one of the versions the term “thanatology” was introduced into the use of medical and biological sciences at the suggestion of I. Mechnikov, and in 1925 Professor G. Shor, a student of Mechnikov, published in Leningrad the work “On the Death of a Person (Introduction to Thanatology) ". Shor's book is addressed to doctors, but important steps were taken in it for the formation of science as a whole. The author creates a kind of typology of death: "Accidental and violent", "sudden", "usual"

[Mechnikov, 1964, 280]. It is known, according to Tolstoy himself, that his story was conceived of the life story of Ivan Ilyich Mechnikov, the prosecutor of the Tula District Court, who died on June 2, 1881 from a serious illness. In his memoirs about the death of his brother, Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov spoke about his reflections, "filled with the greatest positivism," about the fear of death and, finally, about reconciliation with it [Mechnikov, 1964, 280]. TA Kuzminskaya, according to the widow of the deceased, told Tolstoy about Ivan Mechnikov's talk "about the futility of his life" [Kuzminskaya, 1958, 445-446].

It is obvious how much all this fits into the mainstream of the ideas of the artistic creativity of the writer of the 80s, who believed that the story of the dying and epiphany of an official was “the simplest and most ordinary”, albeit “the most terrible”. The insight and awakening that came before death take away the fear of imminent disappearance and rejection of death, but do not remove the inevitability of the end.

The fear and horror of dying go through such painful stages that any "trick" prepared by Ivan Ilyich became useless. Any consolation almost immediately lost its meaning. As Boris Poplavsky wrote in his essay on Death and Pity, “no, not the horror of death, but the grievance of death<...>amaze his imagination ”[Ivanov, 2000, 717]. This

the insult of the hero of the story is caused by chance and the lack of clarity of the cause of the fatal illness: “It is true that here, on this curtain, I lost my life, as if on an assault. Really? How awful and how stupid? It can't be! It cannot be, but there is ”[Tolstoy, 1994, 282]. For Ivan Ilyich, the most terrible thing about the phenomenon of death is inevitability. As the hero's illness progresses, the image of death becomes more and more "material", i.e. fleshly, physiological, causing both transcendent horror and disgust: "torment from uncleanness, indecency and smell", "powerless thighs", "hair flatly pressed against a pale forehead", etc. That is why Ivan Ilyich looks at his wife with a "physiological" gaze and notes with hatred the "whiteness and plumpness", "the purity of her hands, neck", "the gloss of her hair" and "the shine of her eyes full of life." The hero's gaze sharply captures the signs of fleshly health, and this gaze is directed at all the heroes: Gerasim, his wife, daughter and her fiancé with "huge white breasts and tight black pants covered with strong thighs." In comparison with this excess flesh, his disappearing body becomes frightening, from him blows cold and stench. From these physiological details, on the one hand, death looks even more reliable, on the other, even more incomprehensible. We see the perception of death by the dying person himself. And no matter how strange his near-death pastime seemed, Tolstoy does not allow us to forget that this perception is completely different from a look at dying from the outside. Hope and despair replace each other, hatred takes away the last strength. Ivan Ilyich in Tolstoy agrees that Kai is mortal (how can one dispute what is so natural and legal!), But his whole being cries out that he is not Kai. The death of another, the experience of his dying do not console the Tolstoyan hero, he is focused on external and internal signs only of his individual process of leaving. The past life seems to him "good", and Ivan Ilyich never sought deliverance from it. The ordinary life of people, subject to automatism and unfreedom, according to the Russian philosopher L. Shestov, is not life, but death: “Some, very few, feel that their life is not life, but death” [Shestov, 1993, 50]. This feeling will come to the hero, but only in the last minutes. The fear of death and the end confronts Ivan Ilyich with the need to understand life's reality as something deliberate. The search for the meaning of his life becomes for the Tolstoyan hero not so much an awakening of consciousness as a deadly poison, which he was unable to endure: “And his service, and his life arrangement, and his family, and these interests of society and service - all this could be not that. He tried to defend it all in front of him. And suddenly he felt all the weakness of what he was defending. And there was nothing to defend. " Awareness of the revealed truth "multiplied his physical suffering tenfold," hatred of everything around him, from clothes to the sight of his wife, carried away his dwindling strength. The premonition of an irrevocably passing life plunges Ivan Ilyich into panic, traditional, metaphysical horror.

It is interesting in what vein Gaito Gazdanov interprets the creative nature of the Russian writer in The Myth of Rozanov. Gazdanov views it in an existential vein: “Rozanov is a process of dying,” and his merit lies in the fact that he embodied this process. It is no coincidence that the author of the article recalls "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" in connection with Rozanov. He explains the mystery of Rozanov's human and artistic nature with the tragic feeling of death: “There are no laws for the agonizing one. No shame, no morality, no duty, no obligation - there is too little time for all this. " The absence of hopes and illusions, according to Gazdanov, is fraught with immoralism [Gazdanov, 1994].

The naturalistic picture of three days of agony, pain and a continuous cry of "Y / Yy / Y" says that the source of unbearable horror - the fear of death - has become an absolute reality for the Tolstoyan hero, no "tricks" can already get rid of him. It was obvious that it was useless to wallow in a black sack that would never be untied. There is only one thing left: to be sucked into "this black hole", to fall into it. Ivan Ilyich finally merged with his tormentor - fear - and got rid of it. At the end of the black hole that was tormenting him, "something lit up", indicating the "real direction", and immediately he realized that "his life was not what he needed, but that it could still be corrected." And he really manages to correct it at the last moment, opening his heart to those around him. Ivan Ilyich

does what he dreamed of in the process of dying for himself as the highest good: pity those close to him. And not only his little son, a slender schoolboy with black circles under his eyes, but also his hated wife, to whom he tries to say "I'm sorry" with chilling lips.

The symbols used in religious books are of great importance to the writer. For example, in the Old Testament, resurrection is described as awakening from the sleep of death, returning to the light after immersion in full night, i.e. into a life devoid of a spiritual principle. It is just before his physical death that Ivan Ilyich sees a light in a black hole, which finally destroys the fear of death, kills death itself.

The story "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" has been repeatedly compared with the story "The Master and the Worker" (1895), in which the merchant Brekhunov is suddenly seized by a feeling of pity, love for his neighbor, a desire to serve him and even sacrifice his life. He saves the peasant Nikita from freezing with his body, and in return, peace, peace and meaning settle in his soul. It is no accident that at the end of the story the dying merchant thinks "that he is Nikita, and Nikita is he and that his life is not in himself, but in Nikita."

It is interesting that the metaphor of movement from a life journey to a journey, the last, fatal one, is associated in Tolstoy with a train, with the feeling of being “in a railway carriage, when you think that you are going forward and going back, and suddenly you know the real direction”. Another metaphor is the image of a stone flying downward with increasing speed, faster and faster towards the end, "a fall that the writer calls terrible and destructive. The mythologeme of the mountain also gets its fully justified place (eternity, top: “As if evenly I walked downhill, imagining that I was going up the mountain. And so it was. public opinion I walked up the mountain, and that was exactly how life left me. "). The illusion of Eternity and Top is another "trick" for Ivan Ilyich.

Tolstoy finds a lot of additional impulses for the development of the theme of dying, extinction. Many mythologemes and metaphors today are customary and common for

postmodern literature, actively developing the theme of death (Yuri Mamleev, Milorad Pavich, Victor Pelevin, Andrei Dmitriev). For the apocalyptic

attitude of the postmodern era, the mythologeme of death is one of the

fundamental. And in solving this problem, it is not so difficult to find points of contact between traditional Russian classical literature and postmodern literature. According to Andrey Dmitriev, "death is not a kind of punishment and illness is not a kind of punishment, but rather a kind of edification." These words could serve as a kind of epigraph to the story of L.N. Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich."

The critic Marina Adamovich writes about Dmitriev's ability to "generate an exact system of time - eternity, thereby preserving reality in the artistic space", and ends his reasoning with the following conclusion: or new realism, whatever you like) - it seems to me to work for this type of prose ”[Adamovich. Continent. - 2002].

Notes:

1. Lotman Yu.M. Death as a plot problem // Yu.M. Lotman and the Tartu-Semiotic School. M .: Gnosis, 1994.

2. Culturology. XX century: an encyclopedia. T. 2.SPb., 1998.446 p.

3. Projective philosophical dictionary: new terms and concepts. SPb., 2003.512s.

4. Asmus V.F. Tolstoy's worldview // Asmus V.F. Selected philosophical works. T. 1.M., 1969.S. 40-101.

5. Tolstoy L.N. Full collection cit .: in 90 volumes.Vol. 63.Moscow, 1994.S. 390-391.

6. Shor G.V. On the death of a person (Introduction to thanatology). SPb., 2002.272 p.

7. Mechnikov I.I. Studies of optimism. M., 1964. Ts ^: http://whinger.narod.ru/ocr.

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