in 1886, the 60-page novella is considered a classic portrayal of dying and
suffering. However, this story of a respected judge, who becomes ill
and dies at age forty-five, is much more. It is a cautionary tale about the
choices we make, and don’t make, in our lives, with a message that needs
to be heard (more than once) and seriously considered by everyone, including
contemplating a legal career.
Tolstoy opens the story with the line: “Ivan Ilych’s life had been
most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.” One critic
“Ivan, the protagonist, followed a well-traveled road, adhering to
‘comme il faut’ (as is expected) or doing what one was supposed
to do in career matters, selection of clothes, choosing a wife, raising
children.”
In keeping with our ongoing “self-assessment” campaign [e.g., see here
(aimed at 1L’s; here (aimed at all law students and recent grads); here
(Homework for those considering law school); and here (for practicing
lawyers)], you can consider this another plea to take stock of your own
values and priorities (not those of your parents, classmates, or the
profession or society in general), and then choose to be true to yourself.
Reading or re-reading The Death of Ivan Ilyich should get you in the
mood to stop procrastinating and start finding out who you really are.
“booksShelvedN”
Please, let me assure you, this assignment won’t be torture. Tolstoy’s
skillful depiction of the desperation and shallowness (and spousal
aggravation) in Ilyich’s life makes for great reading. Lawyer’s will enjoy
small touches, such as the judge’s realization, when he first goes to
a doctor for his stomach pain that “It was all just as it was in the law
courts. The doctor put on just the same air towards him as he himself
put on towards an accused person.” Later, when he’s on his deathbed
and the doctor puts Ilyich through a complicated examination, the
narrator tells us:
“Ivan Ilych knows quite well and definitely that all this is
nonsense and pure deception, but when the doctor, getting
down on his knee, leans over him, putting his ear first higher
then lower, and performs various gymnastic movements over
him with a significant expression on his face, Ivan Ilych submits
to it all as he used to submit to the speeches of the lawyers,
though he knew very well that they were all lying and why they
were lying.”
Ivan Ilyich’s desperate life — always doing what he considered his
“duty” and seeking “orderliness” — may seem far too drastic to be
relevant to your own. But, there is a good bit of Ivan Illy, Esq., in
every lawyer caught up in the status to be gained from “success” in
the legal profession; in the fear of disappointing parents or spouse by
choosing less-travelled paths; or in the endless putting off self-assess-
ment and assertion, due to the attractions or necessity of everincreas-
ing income.
I’ll leave you with a few (of the many) passages that may ring true to
you, and hopefully make you click through to Ilyich’s tale right now
and bookmark it. (All emphases added. The full story contains much
more character and ambiance development for your literary enjoyment.)
From his early years:
Even when he was at the School of Law he was just what
he remained for the rest of his life: a capable, cheerful,
good-natured, and sociable man, though strict in the
fulfillment of what he considered to be his duty: and he
considered his duty to be what was so considered by those
in authority. Neither as a boy nor as a man was he a toady,
but from early youth was by nature attracted to people of
high station as a fly is drawn to the light, assimilating their
ways and views of life and establishing friendly relations
with them. All the enthusiasms of childhood and youth passed
without leaving much trace on him; he succumbed to sensuality,
to vanity, and latterly among the highest classes to liberalism,
but always within limits which his instinct unfailingly indicated
to him as correct.
At school he had done things which had formerly seemed to
him very horrid and made him feel disgusted with himself when
he did them; but when later on he saw that such actions were
done by people of good position and that they did not regard
them as wrong, he was able not exactly to regard them as right,
but to forget about them entirely or not be at all troubled at
remembering them.
After 17 years practicing law:
This was in 1880, the hardest year of Ivan Ilych’s life. It was
then that it became evident on the one hand that his salary
was insufficient for them to live on, and on the other that he
had been forgotten, and not only this, but that what was for
him the greatest and most cruel injustice appeared to others
a quite ordinary occurrence. Even his father did not consider
it his duty to help him. Ivan Ilych felt himself abandoned by
everyone, and that they regarded his position with a salary
of 3,500 rubles as quite normal and even fortunate. He alone
knew that with the consciousness of the injustices done him,
with his wife’s incessant nagging, and with the debts he had
contracted by living beyond his means,his position was far
from normal.
“booksShelved”
Next day, despite many protests from his wife and her brother,
he started for Petersburg with the sole object of obtaining a
post with a salary of five thousand rubles a year. He was no
longer bent on any particular department, or tendency, or
kind of activity. All he now wanted was an appointment to
another post with a salary of five thousand rubles, either in
the administration, in the banks, with the railways in one of
the Empress Marya’s Institutions, or even in the customs —
but it had to carry with it a salary of five thousand rubles and
be in a ministry other than that in which they had failed to
appreciate him.
After the seriousness of his illness (probably stomach cancer)
became clear and Ilyich was in constant pain:
And in imagination he began to recall the best moments of
his pleasant life. But strange to say none of those best
moments of his pleasant life now seemed at all what they
had then seemed — none of them except the first recollections
of childhood. There, in childhood, there had been something
really pleasant with which it would be possible to live if it could
return. But the child who had experienced that happiness
existed no longer, it was like a reminiscence of somebody else.
As soon as the period began which had produced the present
Ivan Ilych, all that had then seemed joys now melted before his
sight and turned into something trivial and often nasty.
And the further he departed from childhood and the nearer he
came to the present the more worthless and doubtful were the
joys. This began with the School of Law. A little that was really
good was still found there — there was light-heartedness,
friendship, and hope. But in the upper classes there had already
been fewer of such good moments. Then during the first years of
his official career, when he was in the service of the governor, some
pleasant moments again occurred: they were the memories of love
for a woman. Then all became confused and there was still less of
what was good; later on again there was still less that was good,
and the further he went the less there was.
. . . then that deadly official life and those preoccupations about
money, a year of it, and two, and ten, and twenty, and always the
same thing. And the longer it lasted the more deadly it became.
“It is as if I had been going downhill while I imagined I was going
up. And that is really what it was. I was going up in public opinion,
but to the same extent life was ebbing away from me. And now it
is all done and there is only death.
“Then what does it mean? Why? It can’t be that life is so senseless
and horrible. But if it really has been so horrible and senseless,
why must I die and die in agony? There is something wrong!
“Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done,” it suddenly occurred
to him. “But how could that be, when I did everything properly?”
he replied, and immediately dismissed from his mind this, the sole
solution of all the riddles of life and death, as something quite
impossible.
. . . Why, and for what purpose, is there all this horror? But however
much he pondered he found no answer. And whenever the thought
occurred to him, as it often did, that it all resulted from his not having
lived as he ought to have done, he at once recalled the correctness
of his whole life and dismissed so strange an idea.
When the death of Ivan Ilyich was very near:
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. [emphasis
added]
someone else’s affair
you think…
lanterns for the dead
In the very near future, I will be set up a Career Choices/Changes Page,
listing resources that can help in the process of self-assessment. If you
feel the urge to start the process of getting to know yourself and your
career options better, you can find links to relevant materials in this post
If you’d like to try a book that helped me
think about and act on taking charge of my own life and
Qualities of Authentic Adulthood, by Fran Cox, Louis
Cox (Conari Press, 1995) (available used for cheap)
his quiet funeral —
a man who did
most of the talking
sweltering twilight
a waft of cool air
from the graveyard
against the tombstone
with the faded name
homeless man rests
funeral procession . . .
snowflakes blowing
into the headlights
After a week of prolix punditry on our Home Page, haikuEsq has re-asserted himself. Below, you’ll find a crop of pumpkin haiku and senryu. We’ll be adding more by our Honored Guests, as we dig them up. 
………………….. see Lissa & James shop for pumpkins 
potluck
Prof B. puts it well: “First, judges are supposed to decide 
Chief Justice Roberts gave the 
If nothing else, laying the Faith Card face up on the table is the honest 
Thus, 
That’s right: the more partner-vampires suck blood from
Which “serious law school reports” don’t rank SMU? 
In a 
Although missing out on nature, I nonetheless 
I hope Gen. Casey truly has a “plan and a strategy” to complete 
-r
k
, 
Of course, I’m willing to be persuaded otherwise, but my initial 
Federalist No. 76 
