The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Confession - Avalon Library

LEO TOLSTOY

The Death of Ivan Ilyich

AND

Confession

TRANSLATED BY PETER CARSON

LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION

A Division of W. W. Norton & Company

New York ? London

DEDICATION

To my daughter Charlotte

CONTENTS

Cover

Title

Dedication

Tolstoy and His Translator by Mary Beard

The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Confession

A Note on the Translations by Rosamund Bartlett

Acknowledgments

About the Translator

Other Works

Praise for Peter Carson's translation of The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Confession

Copyright

TOLSTOY AND HIS TRANSLATOR

by Mary Beard

Leo Tolstoy died from pneumonia, aged eighty-two, at the railway station of Astapovo, a remote Russian

village, on November 7, 1910. He had left his family home on October 28, in the middle of the night,

walking out on his wife of forty-eight years¡ªthe long-suffering and increasingly paranoid Sonya. ¡°I am

doing what old men of my age usually do: leaving worldly life to spend the last days of my life in solitude

and quiet,¡± he wrote in the uncomfortably chilly letter of explanation he left for her.

In fact, there were to be very few of those ¡°last days.¡± For whatever Tolstoy¡¯s plans for the future had

been (and we can now only guess at them), they were soon interrupted when he was taken ill on board a

train and forced to get out at Astapovo, where the stationmaster gave him the use of his house. And there

was certainly very little solitude or quiet. His death became one of the first international media ¡°events.¡±

It attracted to the little station not only hundreds of his admirers (and some watchful government spies) but

also a Path¨¦ News camera team, eager to catch the great man¡¯s final moments on film, and reporters from

all over the world who wired often unreliable stories back to their editors. ¡°Tolstoy is Better . . . The

Count Is Very Weak, but the Doctors Say There Is No Immediate Danger,¡± blazed a headline in the New

York Times just a couple days before his death, when he was already drifting in and out of consciousness.

One of the most haunting images caught on camera is of Sonya herself, peering in through the window of

the room in which her sick husband lay. She had traveled to Astapovo as soon as she heard of his illness,

but the friends caring for him did not allow her in until Tolstoy was on the very point of death.

This drama at the railway station unfolded more than thirty years after Tolstoy had written the novels

for which he is now best known: War and Peace, completed in 1869, and Anna Karenina, completed in

1877. His popular celebrity in 1910 owed more to his political and ethical campaigning and his status as

a visionary, reformer, moralist, and philosophical guru than to his talents as a writer of fiction. Vegetarian,

pacifist, and enemy of private property, he was, over the last decades of his long life, a persistent critic of

the Russian imperial regime (hence the government spies infiltrating the crowds at Astapovo) and of the

Russian Orthodox Church. He came to favor a primitive version of Christianity based entirely on the

teachings of Jesus, rejecting the dogma of Orthodoxy (hence his excommunication by church authorities in

1901). And he was a vigorous supporter of the Russian poor. He had launched welfare programs,

including soup kitchens and funded schools. In a gesture of solidarity with the underprivileged, he

renounced his aristocratic title (¡°Count¡± Leo Tolstoy) and took to wearing the characteristic dress of the

peasants¡ªthough neither contemporary photographs nor the comments of eyewitnesses suggest that he

ever really looked the part of an authentic laborer.

It was perhaps fitting that his final days became so celebrated across the world because, throughout

his life but particularly from the late 1870s on, death was another of Tolstoy¡¯s obsessions. He had

firsthand experience of death and the dying that was unusual even for a man of his era. As an active-duty

soldier in 1854¨C55 he had witnessed the slaughter of the Crimean War, and he vividly recalled both the

agonizing death of his brother Dmitry from tuberculosis in 1856 and the appalling sight¡ªand sound¡ªof a

man being guillotined in Paris in 1857 (it was partly this experience that made him a staunch opponent of

the death penalty). Of his thirteen children with Sonya, no fewer than five had died before they were ten.

But in his writing he went beyond the horrors of death to reflect on the big questions that the inevitability

of death poses for our understanding of life itself: if we must die, what is the point of living? Some of his

 ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download