the death of ivan ilyich

Illustration from The Divine Comedy by Gustave Dore

'What if my whole life has been wrong?'

It occurred to him that what had appeared perfectly impossible
before, namely that he had not spent his life as he should have
done, might after all be true. It occurred to him that his
scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was
considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely
noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have
been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his professional
duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and
all his social and official interests, might all have been false.
He tried to defend all those things to himself and suddenly felt
the weakness of what he was defending. There was nothing to
defend.

'But if that is so,' he said to himself, 'and I am leaving
this life with the consciousness that I have lost all that was
given me and it is impossible to rectify it -- what then?'

Extract from 'The death of Ivan Ilyich' by Leo Tolstoy, first published 1886.


I would encourage anyone to read this classic novella by Leo Tolstoy. It is both sobering and frightening in confronting the reader with the meaning of life, or lack thereof and yet at the end of its darkness is light.


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