Quotations from *The Death of Ivan Ilyich*, 1 of 2
Leo Tolstoy (Lev Tolstoi)
1828-1910 Russian
translated by Lynn Solotaroff

As a law student he had become exactly what he was to remain the rest of his life: a capable, cheerful, good-natured, and sociable man but one strict to carry out whatever he considered his duty, and he considered his duty all things that were so designated by people in authority.
—Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich

So they lived. Everything went along without change and everything was fine.
—Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich

“What do you want?” was the first thought sufficiently intelligible to be expressed in words. “What do you want? What do you want?” he repeated inwardly. “What? Not to suffer. To live,” he replied.

And once again he listened with such rapt attention that even the pain did not distract him.

“To live? How?” asked the voice of his soul.

“Why, to live as I did before—happily and pleasantly.”

“As you lived before, happily and pleasantly?” asked the voice.
—Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich

His marriage—a mere accident—and his disillusionment with it, and his wife’s bad breath, and the sensuality, and the pretense! And that deadly service, and those worries about money; and so it had gone for a year, two years, ten years, twenty years—on and on in the same way. And the longer it lasted, the more deadly it became. “It’s as though I had been going steadily downhill while I imagined I was going up. That’s exactly what happened. In public opinion I was moving uphill, but to the same extent life was slipping away from me. And now it’s gone and all I can do is die!

“What does it all mean? Why has it happened? It’s inconceivable, inconceivable that life was so senseless and disgusting. And if it really was so disgusting and senseless, why should I have to die, and die in agony? Something must be wrong. Perhaps I did not live as I should have,” it suddenly occurred to him. “But how could that be when I did everything one is supposed to?” he replied and immediately dismissed the one solution to the whole enigma of life and death, considering it utterly impossible.
—Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Quotations from *The Death of Ivan Ilyich*, 2 of 2
Leo Tolstoy (Lev Tolstoi)
1828-1910 Russian
translated by Lynn Solotaroff

“What is this for?” And he stopped crying and, turning his face to the wall, began to dwell on one and the same question: “Why all this horror? What is it for?”

But think as he might, he could find no answer. And when it occurred to him, as it often did, that he had not lived as he should have, he immediately recalled how correct his whole life had been and dismissed this bizarre idea.
—Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich

...he suddenly asked himself: “What if my entire life, my entire conscious life, simply was not the real thing?”

It occurred to him that what had seemed utterly inconceivable before—that he had not lived the kind of life he should have—might in fact be true. It occurred to him that those scarcely perceptible impulses of his to protest what people of high rank considered good, vague impulses which he had always suppressed, might have been precisely what mattered, and all the rest not been the real thing. His official duties, his manner of life, his family, the values adhered to by people in society and in his profession—all these might not have been the real thing. He tried to come up with a defense of these things and suddenly became aware of the insubstantiality of them all. And there was nothing left to defend.
—Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich

In them he saw himself, all he had lived by, saw clearly that all this was not the real thing but a dreadful, enormous deception that shut out both life and death.
—Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich

“Not the real thing. Everything you lived by and still live by is a lie, a deception that blinds you from the reality of life and death.”
—Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich

“It is all over,” said someone standing beside him.

He heard these words and repeated them in his soul.

“Death is over,” he said to himself. “There is no more death.”

He drew in a breath, broke off in the middle of it, stretched himself out, and died.
—Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich