Quotations from an introduction to *The Death of Ivan Ilyich* by Leo Tolstoy, 2 of 3
Ronald Blythe
1922- English

Maeterlinck was amazed by the crudeness of Western man’s thought when it came to the subject of his own death. The fatuity and shallowness of man’s philosophy appalled him. “We deliver death into the dim hands of instinct,” he writes in La Morte, “and we grant it not one hour of our intelligence. Is it surprising that the idea of death, which should be the most perfect and the most luminous, remains the flimsiest of our ideas and the only one that is backward? How should we know the one power we never look in the face? To fathom its abysses we wait until the most enfeebled, the most disordered moments of life arrive.”
—Ronald Blythe, an introduction to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

How should I fear death? When I am, death is not; and when death is, I am not.
—Epicurus, in an introduction by Ronald Blythe to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

Present trends are to make us conscious of death as a mass social tragedy which, by means of compassion, economics, improved medicine, and the like, can be conquered. Multiple death in wars, famines, epidemics, accidents—even as a statistic issued by the anti-smoke and drink lobbies—is shown as not incurable, and talk of this death sends no shiver down the individual spine.
—Ronald Blythe, an introduction to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

Ivan Ilyich’s gray tragedy is that of a man who debased life and who tried to fight off death.
—Ronald Blythe, an introduction to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

What did you do with this divine asset, Life? demands Tolstoy. You made no attempt to live it outside the meanest terms. You played safe according to the most selfish rules. You took care to see that everything you did was done with “clean hands, in clean shirts, and with French phrases.” You never put a foot wrong and so you never stepped out of your rut. Your life has been “most simple and commonplace—and most horrifying.” The bleak indictment continues with Ivan Ilyich’s opportunism, marriage of convenience, vanity, and limitation, and then, with astonishment, the reader finds himself beginning to like this conventional man and to be sorry when he starts to lose out to death.
—Ronald Blythe, an introduction to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

...we are sympathizing with ourselves and all the little hopes and aspirations we have; aspirations which are so despicable or laughable when put into our dossier or official record but which are so precious to us.
—Ronald Blythe, an introduction to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy