NATALIE REPIN (New York, U.S.A.

BEING-TOWARD-DEATH IN TOLSTOY'S
THE DEATH OF IVAN IL'ICH:
TOLSTOY AND HEIDEGGER
Introductory words
If not the reason, certainly the propinquity for this essay leads to the "Tolstoy footnote" in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, which, in spite of its brevity, is
rather significant, since it amounts to Heidegger's unequivocal recognition o f
Tolstoy's successful comprehension of the question of death, a recognition
that has proved not easy to gain. The footnote reads as follows:
In his narrative (Erzdhlung) The Death o f Ivan Il'ich (Der Tod des
Iwan I jitsch) L. N. Tolstoy has presented (dargestellt) the phenomenon
of the shattering and breakdown of (that) "one dies/people die" (.man
stierbt). (Division II, Section 51 [Being-toward-death and the Everydayness ofDasein])11
The Tolstoy-Heidegger connection has remained insufficiently addressed
both in Slavic studies and in philosophy, quite unexpectedly so in view o f the
immense scale of the two figures involved. As a result, the grounds of Heidegger's recognition of Tolstoy have remained unclarified. The present essay
seeks to address this lacuna by mounting an endeavor to unpack the Tolstoy
footnote of Heidegger and thereby speak to the Tolstoy-Heidegger connection. In particular, what is proposed here in this regard is a reading o f Tolstoy's The Death o f Ivan Il'ich from the vantage point of the concept of
death, the central problematic of the work, while adopting purposefully in the
process Heidegger's conception as a point of reference. As a rundown of what
follows, I first begin with a rather brief exposition of Heidegger's main concepts of authentic and inauthentic interpretation of death, which supplies the

1. The basis of the English text of Sein und Zoit used in this essay is its first English translation by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York, Hagestarm, San Francisco, London:
Harper Row, Publishers, 1962), S. 254/p. 495, n. 12. References are given in the text parenthetically, indicating page numbers o f the German and English texts, respectively. At moments,
slight alterations are introduced.

reference point, as stipulated. Then I move to the central part of the essay,
which is the retrieval of Tolstoy's implied critique of everydayness and conception of death as implemented in the story of Ivan Il'ich. And finally, I
draw together the main results in a brief concluding section. To put it another
way, here is an attempt to unpack Heidegger's reticence about Tolstoy, or to
tease Rede out of his Schweige, while trying not to fall back into chatter
(Gerede).
.

,',

P A R T ONE: Heidegger

Before broaching the Heidegger exposition, it is incumbent upon us to enter a caveat: while, unfortunately, it is impossible here and now to do justice
to Heidegger's tremendous achievements, this, fortunately, is not the goal, for
only a specific aspect of Heidegger's ideas will suffice for the task at hand.
It is prudent to start with an effort to sketch the horizon on which Heidegger may be maximally comprehensible with a minimum of means involved.
Famously, his lifelong project was the creation of a brand-new ontology, the
first, he claims, equipped to capture Sein (Being). Heidegger relentlessly explored this single, yet multilateral, objective, and the final results are marked
by what seems to be the classic ambiguity of leaving the project incomplete
yet achieving results tantamount to a revolution in the field. A process unfolding for more than half a century, Heidegger's work is conventionally, but with
sufficient justification, captured in terms of early and later work. The Heidegger we here subpoena to bear witness in Tolstoy's case is the early Heidegger. '
It is only fair to point out that Heidegger himself eventually came to view his
own project as not only incomplete but even impossible, and consequently he
took great pains to redefine it, while not transcending its major objective - the
ontology of Sein.
Focusing on his early project, built around Sein und Zeit, Heidegger determined the dictate that propelled his project: that it is imperative to avoid
the collapse of Being and entities (Sein and Seienden), which is the major
presupposition of creating a new viable ontology. But then the question was
how to access Sein, since Sein is not empirically/ontically available. Here
Heidegger would make a move that was at once crucial to his early project
and dispensable from the standpoint of his later work. He asserted that Sein
could be accessed, if at all, only through a Seiende suitable to offer a passage
to it. As if coincidentally, Heidegger stumbles upon that lucky finding, that
unique entity that indeed conveniently offers the sought-out passage to Sein namely, man captured in terms of his existence as Dasein, which Heidegger
'
substantiates as follows. Man properly captured could provide access to Sein
simply because the nature of man as an entity is such that, in order to.exist,
man must somehow deal with Sein. Put differently, this amounts to man's be-

ing a natural ontologist. But to get to Sein, it becomes clear, Heidegger still
cannot vault forward into Sein but must instead carry out an investigation into
Daseinlman, which, moreover, has to be executed so that it must arrive at
Sein. This investigation is preliminary to the targeted investigation o f Sein,
but until the latter is within reach, the former is the only chance to get there.
To be successful, Heidegger determines, this inquiry must be only of one
kind, which he calls existential analytic. It is geared to capture man as Dasein,
or in terms of its differentia specifica, which is human existence. Basically,
this is what Sein und Zeit is all about: providing the investigation of man as
Dasein with the ultimate goal o f "logging in," as it were, on Sein. Put nontechnically, Sein und Zeit is an ontological investigation into the identity and
nature of man, and as such it is relevant to our task at hand, while Heidegger's
ultimate goal of creating the ontology of Sein remains outside of our interest.
In Sein und Zeit, Heidegger focuses on man and captures him as inseparable from the world, as encoded in his famous notion of being-in-the-world
(in-der-Welt-sein). This is the starting point of Heidegger's step-by-step process of mastering the question of the essence of man. His first step in this regard is a wholesale rejection o f all anthropological endeavors to date, arguing
that they captured man in terms of Yorhandenheit (presence), whereas- he is to
be captured in terms of Zuhandenheit (activity/readiness-to-hand). Once this
crucial distinction has been drawn, Heidegger expresses Zuhandenheit further
in man's being-in-the-world, which amounts to the claim that man is Dasein
and is not to be separated from the world in the process of inquiry, which,
Heidegger charges, no one before him had observed. While a number of accounts of man seem to resist Heidegger's accusation as insufficiently discriminate - for example, those of Hegel, Marx, partially even Kant - Heidegger certainly deserves the credit for emphasizing this unity in proportion to its
significance. Because of this tight and indestructible umbilical connection between man and the world, Heidegger ascertains, man's identity, which is to
say the overarching characteristic supplying a unity to the diversity of man's
existence, is identified as care (Sorge). In other words, Sorge is a network of
constant and diverse concerns that has man thrive in everydayness. Moreover,
according to Heidegger, it is more primordial than any other trait, such as, for
example, engaging in theoretical enterprises. And when Sorge seems to be
that very concept, which provides the totality of man's existence, it becomes
transparent that still there is something that stands out-side of it, yet has
essentially to do with human existence. If it were not for this something,
Sorge would be the undeniable common denominator of human identity. But
still it is not, because of that unique, out-standing something - death. The fact
of death shows that Sorge provides only empirical totality or identity of
human existence, not the genuine totality of it, which would require that death
be somehow factored in and accommodated. Perhaps it is fair to say that in

everydayness, and with death left unconsidered, also given that consideration
of it requires special understanding and a concept of death, man lives his everyday existence as if immortal, like a god. The act of factoring in death actually means that human life is adjusted to the fact of human mortality and finitude. Unless and until the latter has been done, human existence remains inauthentically handled. Thus Heidegger distinguishes a radical duality of authentic and inauthentic existence, with the criterion of this duality being man's attitude to death. But after this general outline of Heidegger's early project, we
must rewind and consider in slower motion the elements of this panoramic
picture that are relevant to the task of relating Heidegger to Tolstoy.
Heidegger is not, to be sure, a pioneer in the process of realization of the
significance of death. He has an impressive number of impressive forerun` ners. Besides Tolstoy, Heidegger also acknowledges Rilke, who believed that
life and death are in unity. Another figure here is Max Scheler, who in Death
and Life Hereafter points out that death is in every act of life. It should be
pointed out that deep insight into the death-life relation dates as far back as
the beginning of metaphysics and was present already in Socrates and Plato as
well as in the Stoics, all o f whom considered philosophy to be a preparation
for death, if not even a posthumous affair. Still earlier, Heraclitus was the first
to express the dialectic of life and death. Rilke's and Scheler's standpoints,
however, are marked by the features of modernity, as is that of Tolstoy. Basically, modernity eliminated the Platonic-Stoic-Epicurean model, or the premodern model, of the negative treatment of death as non-being. The culmination and embodiment o f this model may be seen in Epicurus and his robust'
paradigmatic articulation of it. Conversely, modernity seizes upon death in
terms of being, although the debris of the pre-modern concept still remains
scattered throughout modernity. Sartre, for one, with his concept of nothingness, may be seen as connected to the conventional comprehension of death,
yet ultimately even he is far from it. It may be argued that the concept of
death that Heidegger generated is unconditionally among the most sophisticated and profound conceptions of death in the annals of the theme.
1. The way to the question of death
Thus 'the theme of death is foundational in Heidegger's prodigious philosophical framework, for without death Dasein's structure cannot be genuinely comprehended. Death serves that very coil that produces the recoil from
inauthentic to authentic existence, which are both tied in a causal connection, >
but still do not operate automatically. Division One o f Heidegger's Sein und
Zeit ends up with the general conclusion that Sorge (care) provides unity of
Dasein's structure as a whole. Division One also prepares the stage for a further quest, insofar as it shows the internal split in Dasein, between D a z e and
das Man (average existence), as well as the difference between authentic and

inauthentic existence. The question o f Division Two is above all the question
of the rescue of Dasein from the state of fallenness, das Man. This question
requires that the residual existentiality in the state of fallenness be disclosed,
and thus that the possibility of understanding in the state of das Man and inauthenticity be shown and reinforced. This very requirement may also be seen
as a program for overcoming inauthenticity. This is how Heidegger arrives at
the phenomenon of death: death is something proved by existence itself
through the lack of it. This is an important determination insofar as death already shows that Sorge does not provide the horizon of totality, for it does so
only in empirical terms, as we have seen, since there is something missing
from, and unaccommodated by, Sorge, which is death.
Thus, owing to death, care, as exhibited in Division One, turns out to be
only relatively and empirically holistic. Therefore, both care and empirical
description of everydayness fall short of totality. Heidegger ascertains that the
analysis of death is thus indispensable for the horizon of totality. Ironically,
the totality of existence requires that death be added to it. Now the new point
is that death, as the other o f existence, is the condition of possibility o f
achieving the totality of life's description. Here are at least two vast applications that need to be considered. On the one hand, death determines and
proves the finiteness of existence, and on the other, it introduces the dimension of impossibility. These two implications create the tension that to a great
extent lies at the heart of Division Two. Thus, the only perspective of authenticity, that of existentiality and possibility, ultimately leads to, and turns out to
be, an impossibility, and existence is therefore grounded in impossibility.
This may be identified as the paradox of existence. Without death, as we already know, no completeness and totality may be achieved, and care provides
only empirical totality. What could be considered the greatest contribution o f
death, as it were, is the supplying of the absolute transcendental horizon, and
thereby the possibility of viewing things of and in existence in an absolute
way. To equivocate, unless death is factored in, the nature and identity of man
cannot be achieved. Death, therefore, is the condition of the possibility for
absolute knowledge concerning existence. Now it becomes clear that the notyet (loch-nicht) that renders everydayness out-standing stands ultimately for
death. Heidegger puts it beautifully: to be out-standing means that what belongs together is not yet all-together (S. 242/p. 286). Thus, death is a turning
point that emerges at the point of no return. Death is the recoil point.
2. Death as the recoil point
The crucial question of Division Two is in its very departure point, which
leads once again to the question of death. As Heidegger follows the line of
existentiality and possibility, which is Dasein's being ahead of itself, he establishes the paradox of the out-standing (ausstehen), which reveals some-

thing essential about existence: that it is neither past nor present, but futural.
Dasein is out-standing with respect to what is yet to come. This very condition and state of out-standing is provided by Verstehen (understanding) as a
projectival disclosedness o f Dasein. The out-standing part is a kind of promise for a futurality of Dasein. The theme of death, therefore, is to be viewed
as truly foundational in Heidegger's philosophical conceptions. Death is precisely the turning point on the brink of transition from inauthenticity to authenticity, from the empirical to the transcendental, from the incomplete to the
t o t a l . Without death, Dasein's structure cannot be understood and achieved.
The dialectic of life and death permeates Heidegger's Sein und Zeit. Let us
touch upon it. Dasein must become so as fruit is to ripen (reifen). But ripening is also a movement toward the end, and death is the embodiment of the
end. Thus, death is understood in terms of ending (Enden). But what kind of
end (Ende) does death amount to? Without clarifying this question, the understanding of death remains problematic. According to Heidegger, there are
negative and positive ways to understand the end. The negative one, Aufhoren .
(stopping), is the interruption of continuity, but it is still there as present (vorhandene). Heidegger illustrates it by the example of a road that ends. The end
of a road does not remove the road, and the road remains there after it has
ended. This is end as presence. But clearly, it is a different case when it
comes to death. And the question of the end of Dasein is a case of a unique
end, whose differentia specifica consists in the complete physical disappearance of Dasein. This uniqueness of Dasein's end is precisely the differentia
specifica of death here sought. Here is how Heidegger refers to this matter:

. . . j u s t as Dasein is already its not-yet, and is its "not-yet" constantly as long as it is, it is already its end, too. The "ending" which we
have in view when we speak of death, does not signify Dasein's Beingat-an-end (zu-Ende-sein) but a Being-toward-the-end (Sein zum Ende)
of this Dasein. Death is a way to be, which Dasein takes over as soon as
it is. As soon as man comes to life, he is at once old enough to die. (S.
2451p.289)

Heidegger's statement shows that the unity of Dasein's existence/life and

death is always already there, in a fashion somewhat similar to the unity of
Dasein and the world in being-in-the-world (in-der-Welt-sein). This is why and here is one of Heidegger's particularly important findings - Dasein could
be understood adequately only as being-toward-the-end, that is, being-towarddeath, which, non-technically, means existing with full awareness of upcoming death. This is the radical way to express Dasein's finitude: as always at
presence, which captures death always already in life. Thus death's "not-yet"
turns out to be "always already (Immer-schon) there."

Heidegger is not interested in death as Aujhdren. Nor is he interested in

postmortality. The reason this is so is both subtle and crucial: these kinds of
death are not marked by what he calls Jemeinichkeit ("mine-ness"), rather,
they are somebody else's. A nightmare to translators, this term may be rendered into English only by an act of linguistic violence and the joint efforts of
two terms: mine-ness and whoever-ness, or mineness-of-everyone. Jemeinichkeit is born out of ascribing a particular death to a particular Dasein, whereby
every Dasein has a death that is his or her own and unique, "assigned" to him
or her, as it were. The classic way to overlook the genuine problem of death is
when death is understood as the death of someone else. Even das Man could
claim "proficiency" and "fluency" in that kind of knowledge of death. In order to be an existentiel, that is, a concept of existential investigation, death
has to be "mine," and moreover, death has to be understood not as not-yet but
as always already in life. Death has to be the concrete presence of an abstract
fact, and this fact has to constantly inform existence without interfering in it.
As is obvious, Heidegger shows that even the knowledge of death and the attitude to it may be inauihentic. The inauthentic appropriation of the concept of
death is precisely death filtered through curiosity, chatter, and ambiguity,
which we recognize as the modes of the disclosing of fallenness of das Man.
Thus, we have arrived at the distinction, crucial to Heidegger's work, between
inauthentic and authentic concepts of death.
3. Heidegger's concept of death
Heidegger distinguishes between authentic and inauthentic interpretations
or concepts of death. Even though some aspects of this distinction have already been alluded to, it is imperative to allot special attention to these two
concepts in order to clarify them further. The latter is the way death looks to
one engaged in inauthentic existence, or das Man. The former, on the other
hand, is death in the framework of authentic existence, or Dasein. The fact
that both Dasein and das Man die means that both must have some kind of
recourse to death, which in turn signifies that each o f them does have some
understanding of death. The major question on Heidegger's way, as he tackles
the problematic of death, is the ostensibly trivial question of how one is to
think of one's own death when death is not there. Obviously, Heidegger must
address and overcome the epistemological resistance of the question o f death
by criticizing the inauthentic concept of it.
a. Inauthentic concept o f death
.
For das Man, death is a tragic moment that happens. This concept is rendered by Heidegger's term Todesfall, or case of death. The "case of death" is
a case of a non-personal death, which is always transcendent as remote and
somebody else's. Thus, death gets no chance to be reflected upon by das

Man, and as a result, is trivialized immensely. Heidegger captures this attitude

as follows:
Someone will die one day, but right now it has nothing to do with
me. When I say one dies, I do not mean anybody, that means that one is
the nobody. (S. 253/p. 297)
This attitude describes death as a set of stable predicates: first, transcen dent; second, somebody else's but not mine; and third, futural.
The first way of glimpsing at death is through the death of the other, an
other Dasein (Yerstorbene), in the conditions of community (Mitwett) (S.
237/p. 281), but this in and o f itself is hardly profound. This knowledge is,
according to Heidegger, an extract of the understanding of death in terms of:
. . . a change-over of an entity from Dasein's kind of being to nolonger-Dasein. (S. 238/p. 281)

In this case, simultaneously one distinguishes vorhandene and no-longerDa.sein. Clearly, death is understood here as the end of Dasein. Heidegger
writes also:
'
This something which is present-at-hand-and-no-more is "more" a
lifeless material thing. In it we encounter something unalive which has
lost its life. (S. 238/p. 282)
This view shows death as a case of un-alive-ness. Its significance lies in
the loss of Dasein but its validity is only for the living Dasein. Here is the
crucial point: death is the loss of being, and this is a peculiar bit of experience
that is not given to any living Dasein whatsoever. Thus, epistemologically
speaking, death as knowledge is always a matter of analogy with the death of
an other, and thereby remains always transcendent and outside of experience.
So far, we have gained the "methodology" of anticipating das Man's attitude to death, knowing about it not from experience but by analogy. We know
that it is inevitably framed by the three constituents of fallenness or inauthenticity. The inauthentic understanding of death is always characterized in terms
of ambiguity, by way o f Gerede, and as a matter of curiosity. The rattle o f superficial chatter strives to yield consolation with a few nice words while at the
same time showing either the complete impossibility to digest the imminence
of death or the panicked fear of death. Both of those extremes betray the inauthentic attitude to death, according to Heidegger. Sometimes it takes on the
shape of pretended boldness, as though death were a trifle o f life. This mock
superiority over death, Heidegger is convinced, divorces, even further, from

authenticity (S. 254/p. 298). It is due to this reason, he holds, that the bottom
line of the inauthentic understanding of death is either invasion o f death or
freeing from death, in both of which Heidegger finds death to be a constant
issue (S. 255/p. 299). Even in this attitude to death Heidegger discerns traces
of authentic elements (S. 259/p. 303), but this attitude speaks of the significance of death rather than of das Man's sensitivity to death. '
This is the paradox of the inauthentic understanding of death - it avoids
death as transcendent, only, ironically enough, to encounter it right in its
home, in its utmost intimate quarters, in the private space of its bed. However,
the analogical inferences and the experience of another's death should result
at least in one firm conclusion: the unique individuality and non-transferability of death. This is probably seen above all in the impossibility of any
Dasein having an other Dasein involved and participate when it comes to
death, for as Heidegger states:
No one can take the other's dying away from him. (S. 240/p. 284)
Death, therefore, is an absolute form of the blending of Existenz and
Jemeinichkeit into mine-to-be, now seen as constituents of death (S. 240/p.
284). Thus, the question of the correct, authentic knowledge of death is located in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit in the framework of existential analytic,
that is, only as a question of "my" death. Every Dasein is to encounter it;
therefore, it is an organic part of being-in-the-world. But then again, it would
seem, the copycat of inauthenticity is ubiquitous: if everyone dies, das Man
dies too, as does the one who has arrived at authenticity. Therefore, one may
be tempted to speak of authentic and inauthentic death. But is not every death
similar and common, just as thrownness is? Is not death another stroke of
Dasein's being thrown back, as it were? The secret here lies not in the distinction of authentic versus inauthentic death, but in the distinction of authentic
versus inauthentic interpretation/understanding of death. Thus, counterintuitively and shockingly, the question of death, posited adequately, is the
question of life, for death is an aspect of life and a constant presence in it.
More precisely, the question o f death is the question of life, only radically
posited. Death is the deepest shift in thinking about life. This shift marks the
birth of the transcendental dimension of life. It is owing to death that the
question of Sorge is posited authentically. Authentic Sorge is ultimately the
reflection of the question of death as a question of life.
'
,

b. Authentic concept o f death

'
Clearly, the only way to understand death is to authentically address it,
which engenders the authentic or existential/ontological conception of death.
What is fundamental in this conception is that it not only captures existence in

terms of Sorge, but also goes on to transcend the level of fallenness, inauthentic existence, das Man, reaching the level of existentiality, which basically
means that it factors in death. The "who" of this conception is thus not das
Man but Dasein. It is within the framework of this attitude that death is understood in terms of "not-yet," as the "out-standing" feature of the Existenz
that informs it; Dasein consequently comports toward it. But this is not the
whole story, for while death is a condition of authenticity, it is neither a guarantee of authenticity nor authenticity itself. Because there is always already
existentiality in this mode, the attitude to death is different. It is not Ausstand,
or "out-standing," as much as it is "before-standing" (Bevorstand), or "impending" (S. 250/pp. 293-94). This attitude signals a reversal, and a critical
one at that: the existential reversal of relating to death and understanding it as
something very far but, at the same time very near, constantly pending. This is
the attitude of "unbracketing" death, which suddenly changes everything and
interrupts the natural flow o f existence, eliminating existential inertia. There
is a condition here, and this is the mode of existentiality, that is, a transition
from fallenness to existentiality under the immediate impact of Verstehen.
Thus, the reversal requires the mode of possibility in thinking. It all amounts
to the following result, as Heidegger asserts:
It is a possibility-for-being (Seinsmoglichkeit) that Dasein itself has
to take over in every case with death, stands before itself in its ownntost
(eigensten) potentiality for being. (S. 250/p. 294)
,
Here it is obvious that the form of this reversal is the shift in Dasein'ss
position from world-centered to Dasein-centered. Articulated nontechnically,
this means that human existence, while still remaining in the mode of care,
now cares without obliviousness to death; consequently, different priorities of
care come into play. In the new situation, man is not in the grip of mundane
inertia and entanglement, with its infinite and insignificant demands. Rather,
having realized his mortality, man begins to prioritize accordingly. This new
attitude, which now permeates all of existence, amounts to overcoming the
empiricism of existence, and henceforth a sort of a new kind of existence begins - authentic existence.
What renders death the absolute state is that death is, as has been pointed
out, the only possibility o f capturing Dasein as being-in-the-world in absolute
terms. Only death can present a Dasein as no-longer-being-able-to-be-in-theworld (Nicht-mehr-Dasein-konnen) (S. 250/p. 294), or, translated more
closely, no longer being Dasein. It is through death that Dasein has hit the
bottom, reached the end of the empirical existence of care and everydayness.
Yet, care is a condition of the possibility of reaching this very moment of
transcendence, of traversing care. Now, only by having factored in death, has

the absoluteness in care been reached, and it is only through death that care
has become truly being-in-the-world, for it is only now that care is aware not
only of being but also of its absence, or death. Up to this moment, man was
entangled in caring for everydayness, doing so as though immortal. Upon
death entering the scene, man continues to care, but now in a qualitatively different fashion: knowing his mortality. Authentic Sorge is the reflection o f the
question of death as a question o f life. In fact, this novelty is the quest for authenticity, which amounts to a quasi-transcendental way of existing, for this
transcendentality is not bereft of everydayness, of care, or being-in-the-world,
but rather is their authentic form. This is the moment when the question of the
transition from existentiality to authenticity is posited. The absoluteness of
death is given i.n Heidegger in terms of its being an unuberholbar (S. 250/p.
294), that is, unreachable, untraversable.
Hence, when it comes to answering the question o f how is one to know
death authentically, Heidegger responds along the following lines. In terms of
possibility, death is to be understood only as the possibility of the absolute
impossibility of Dasein. This is a unique nonrelational possibility (S. 250/p.
294). Only as existentiality is Dasein grounded, but this means that his
ground of possibility is impossibility, which is that very nonrelational relation. In fact, it is this kind of grounding that allows for a personal reversal,
which cannot happen without the discovery of death. Such a reversal amounts
to a new kind of existence. Even though death is in fact introduced always already in the very first ontic act of thrownness-into-the-world (S. 251/p. 295),
it takes unexpectedly great effort for this to become discernible. And what
makes it possible is anxiety as a kind of thrownness-into-death. Unlike fear
(Furcht), anxiety (Angst) can be understood as intuition-of-death. Thus,
thrownness-into-the-world amounts ultimately to thrownness-onto-death, or
Kierkegaard's sickness-onto-death, a journey toward death. Again we see the
centrality of death in the framework of life, as it retroactively illuminates the
preceding forms of Dasein's existence and anticipatorily determines the futural ones.
P A R T T W O : Tolstoy
Life is death, and death is also a life
(Holderlin, In lieblicher Bldue bliihet)
Let us enter upon Tolstoy's work by recalling that The Death of Ivan Il'ich
was started in 1882 and, with interruptions, finished in 1886. Its original title
was "The Death of a Judge," for it is in fact an authentic story about the inauthentic life of an authentic person, Ivan Il'ich Mechnikov, who died in July
1881. Interestingly, the only non-average and authentic feature of that person

was that he was a brother of the world-famous scholar II'ia Mechnikov, who
lived and worked in France and wrote in French. It may be relevant to point
out that Il'ia Mechnikov, one o f the first gerontologists and juvenologists in
the world, applied his medical and biological knowledge to fighting death and
prolonging youth and life. Regrettably, research has not been done on the degree to which Tolstoy responds to this fact, or perhaps even undermines it.
The Mechnikov motif is not the only element that feeds the factual background of the work: it is interlaced with another, more tragic, story. On January 18, 1886, the youngest son of Leo Tolstoy died at the age of four, his last
words reportedly being "I see, I see."2 While little Sergey has been seen as a
sort of "sacrificial lamb" who inadvertently rejuvenated his parents' feeble
marriage, his death also gave the impetus for the completion of the work. His
"sacrifice" brought insignificant results, for the "family happiness" spanned
only from January to September, to be followed by a relapse. So in the final
analysis, the single significant contribution of Sergey's death, as it were, was
to The Death o f Ivan ll'ich. It should be pointed out that as a "child" of the
later Tolstoy's creativity, the narrative is more a work of contemplation than
of belletrization, and while fiction remains an essential element, its layer is
thinner. In addition to other sources, Tolstoy drew upon his own experience
of conversion and existential discoveries, as well as his lifelong commitment
to the deciphering of life, death, and the human psyche.

1. The concept and critique of everydayness

It may be prudent and instructive to take Tolstoy's aphoristic way o f open- '
ing the second chapter, namely:
The story of the life of Ivan Il'ich was most simple and ordinary, and
thus terrible.3
as a crucial statement, summary of the work to which the rest is a vast footnote, as it were: this is a sentence-novel, while the rest is a novel-sentence. It
is naturally reminiscent of the opening aphoristic statement of Anna Karenina, known even to those who have yet to read the novel. But more importantly, this statement broaches a new perspective on everydayness and sets up
its interrogation. Everydayness is the scope of The Death of Ivan 11 'ich, which
is carried out as an artistic study of life and death in their concrete identity. It

2. Cynthia Asquith, M a r r i e d to Tolstoy (New York: Greenwood Press, Publishers, 1969), p.

126.
3. The basis of the English text of The Death o f Ivan Ilyich is Lev Tolstoi, Short Stories
(Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d.), p. 240; henceforth, quoted pare'nthetically in the text. In some instances, the translation is amended.

should be pointed out that Tolstoy not only captures everydayness as a problem, but also does it in a novel and radical way, as averageness. Why is it significant and crucial? Everydayness is fatal to man only in the mode of averageness. As we have already observed in connection with Heidegger, what is
problematic is not Sorge itself but whether or not it is structured with awareness of death. So the question of everydayness is actually encapsulated in the
question of its averageness, and its Heideggerian counterpart is das Man, or
fallenness of existence. What average everydayness is, is what is customarily
known to be all there is to life, but what it turns out to be, and what is not
known, is that it is also all there is to death, as we find in Tolstoy's work. The
enigma of average everydayness, then, is that man thinks, man lives, but in
fact he does not, for he is dying, one day at a time. To express all that is the
daunting objective of Tolstoy's work. Thus, Tolstoy shows that everydayness
is more about death, for it is about a kind of life that is itself tantamount to
death. Average everydayness, in the final analysis, signifies death.
The process of dying, which is living according to average everydayness,
or living inauthentically, can also be captured and rendered transparent
through the famous Arendtian concept of the banality of evil, which is warranted by the common averageness o f dying and inauthentically living. As banal, evil is tolerable and tolerated; as evil, it is deadly. As banal and evil, it is
tantamount to the nature o f man's average life. Because of its banality, evil
does not terrify. However, evil as banality may - and in fact does - turn out to
be of the worst kind, an all-permeating, most terrifying evil, because of the
mendacious disguise that helps it get "domesticated" and "adopted." This is
the paradox of average everydayness, according to which everydayness is disclosed as averageness, not as degeneration - this is precisely the silent yet fatal vertigo of everydayness. Averageness cannot degenerate, for it is fruitless
and nongenerative to begin with. The paradox of everydayness is not in demonic depth but rather in the lack thereof, in its shallowness coupled with,
and amplified by, linear infinity. Average everydayness has the innocent and
busy look of a mundane schedule, which is replayed over and over again, day
in and day out. But what is really terrible is that in fact there is nothing more
to it. What it turns out to be, and what remains hidden, is that this schedule is
the one by which man is scheduled to die. The process of dying, or one's living inauthentically, is the banality of evil as expressed in Tolstoy's short
novel. To that effect, Kant, Heidegger, and Hannah Arendt, each in his/her
own way, may be instrumental in providing surplus insights for appreciating
and enhancing Tolstoy's view in The Death o f Ivan Il'ich if their expertise is
brought to bear upon the tremendous, though unsuspected, complexity o f the
banality of evil. Here is the collage that in broad strokes summarizes Ivan
Il'ich's life in terms of average everydayness:

'

Neither as a child nor as a grown man had he been a toady, but from
earliest youth he had been drawn to those who stood above him, as a
moth is drawn to the flame; he had adopted their manners and views,
and had established friendly relations with them. All the enthusiasms of
childhood and youth passed away without leaving a trace. (pp. 241-42)
As a law student he had been exactly what he continued to be all his
life. (p. 241) . . . In the provincial town Ivan Il'ich immediately made
his life as easy and pleasant as it had been during his student days. (p.
242) Here in the new town Ivan II'ich's life became just as pleasant as it
had been in the old. (p. 2 4 5 ) . . . Ivan Il'ich had no clear, definite intention of getting married, but when this girl (Praskov'ia Fedorovna Mikhel') fell in love with him he faced the question. "Why," said he to
himself, "should I not get married?" (pp. 245-46) ... Of married life he
demanded only the conveniences of dinners at home, of wife, and bed
and, most important, the preserving of good form, for upon this depended social approbation. He wanted to find pleasure in family life. If
he got it, he was grateful; if he was rebuffed and heard nothing but
grumbling and complaints, he instantly retired to his fenced-off world
of business and found his pleasure there. (p. 2 4 8 ) . . . He aimed to free
himself more and more from all the upsets of family life and to keep
them from becoming harmful or indecorous. He achieved this by spending less and less time at home, and by securing the peace when he had
to be there by inviting outsiders. The most important thing in his life
was his work. The world of his official duties formed the one real inter- '
est of his life, and this interest absorbed him completely. (p. 249) . . .
And so, on the whole, Ivan Il'ich's life was just what he considered it
ought to be - pleasant and decorous. (p. 249) ... In this way Ivan Il'ich
spent seventeen years of his married life. (p. 250) Everything went on
without change from day to day, and everything was fine. (p. 258)
This is the terrible continuity of average everydayness of Ivan II'ich's life
that was to be violently interrupted by the event of death, whereupon what
was behind the facade - or, better yet, the lack thereof - started to unravel.
Tolstoy relentlessly directs the reader's attention to everydayness as averageness, as well as to the ostensibility of averageness itself. The "stuff' of
Ivan Il'ich's story is that of averageness, and the core of it is his career. It is
not only family but also one's career that constitute the structure of average
everydayness. Families lead to careers, careers lead to families, families and
careers make up the circularity of everydayness, which turns out to be vicious.
Indeed, the average man basically has nothing more than his j o b - or perhaps
the job has the man, as if the office of man is his job. The family camouflages
everydayness and issues a siren's call to man. Man has to be a clever Odys-

seus to survive the seduction. Tolstoy's work, insofar as it captures the nature
of everydayness, shows family as an environment of mendacity (a sensible
reminder of Tennessee Williams and his "Tolstoyan" masterpiece Cat on a
Hot Tin Roof).
All of this virtually exhausts the visible morphology of everydayness.
What is crucial here is to clarify the average everydayness paradox: this is not
a degenerate family, but an average family, completely compliant with the
principles and values o f everydayness. Indeed, this is a crucial point in Tolstoy. Ivan Il'ich is by no means a villain, but a nice average man - but then, as
we discover, this is precisely what a villain is, from a nonconventional vantage. Average means neither good nor evil, neither good nor bad, neither right
nor wrong, but also neither live nor dead. Here is a "tapestry" of mendacity
woven out of Tolstoy's text, which addresses precisely the uncanny domesticity in average everydayness:

He reached home and told his wife what had happened. She listened,
but in the middle of the story his daughter came in with her hat on. She
and her mother were going out. She forced herself to sit and listen to his
dull account for a while, but not for long, and his wife, too, did not hear
him out. (p. 2 6 2 ) . . . The people in his house - especially his wife and
daughter who were going through the height o f the social season - saw
nothing, understood nothing, and were annoyed with him for being so
downcast and exacting, as if it were his fault. No matter how hard they
tried to hide it, he saw that they looked upon him as a nuisance ... (p.
' 2 6 5 ) . . . And he had to go on living like this, on the brink o f doom, all
by himself, without a single person to understand and pity him. (p. 267)
. . . Ivan Ilyich suffered most of all from the lie - the lie adopted by
everyone for some reason, which said that he was only ill and not dying,
and that everything would be all r i g h t . . . He was tortured by this lie,
tortured by no one's wanting to acknowledge the lie, by his knowing the
truth and everyone else's knowing the truth, and yet pressing this lie
upon him because of the horror o f his position, forcing him to become a
party to the lie. This lie, the lie forced upon him on the eve of his death,
the lie degrading the solemn, awesome act of his dying to the level of
their social calls, portieres, and oysters for supper, was an unspeakable
torture to Ivan Il'ich. (p. 279) . . . he came within a hair's breadth of
shouting out, "Stop your lying! You know and I know that I am about to
die. You might at least stop lying!" But he never had the courage to do
it. (pp. 279-80) . . . Nothing did so much as to poison the last days of
Ivan Il'ich as this lie within him and all around him. (p. 281) . . . She
[his wife] came in and kissed her husband and instantly began to explain that she had been up for a long time and it was just because of

'

some misunderstanding that she had not been in the sick man's room
when the doctor arrived. Ivan Il'ich looked at her, he took in every detail of her person, and he resented her whiteness, her plumpness, the
cleanliness of her arms and neck, the luster of her hair and the shine of
her eyes, so full of life. He hated her with every fiber of his being.
Every time she touched him he felt an upsurge of hatred. Her attitude to
him and his illness had not c h a n g e d . . . and she could not change this
attitude. (p. 285) . . . His daughter came in all dressed up, with much of
her young body naked, making a show of it while his body was causing
him such torture. (p. 287)
The world o f average everydayness is shown as a life half-uncommitted,
lived only halfway. It is the vanity fair, the theater of envy, the smell of mendacity, the decay of unripeness, the inverted world, but something too close to
see. It has to do with man's derentia specifica of having to live life according to biological as well as supra-biological criteria, which are rarely observed. Unless both are at hand and fulfilled, man has only existence, not essence. The tension between existence and essence, a crucial anthropological
tenet, is expressed but not realized in the novel, although in the final analysis
it is its fundamental concern. Perhaps this is how the writer once again has the
upper hand over the thinker in Tolstoy. In The Death of Ivan Il'ich, the illness
causing death is cancer, and it has a metaphorical dimension in the parallel
between cancer and everydayness, whereby cancer does to the body what
everydayness does to existence. Average everydayness is thus depicted i n
medical terms, which makes the work a diagnosis and, for that matter, one
with the potential of a therapy. The sickness of body shown by Ivan Il'ich is a
literary symbol of the sickness of spirit that Tolstoy, in order to make it visible, had to physicalize - but also, in order to make it significant, he had to
spiritualize the physical.
By the end of the novel, the effective reading of it should amount to a new
understanding of the everydayness of life or, more precisely, averageness.
The villain of the story about everydayness is only the average man, who in
Heidegger is the infamous das Man. This villain is the petty demon of averageness, he acts in everydayness; and his deeds are branded by banality. In
everydayness, death is shown as a self-inflicted wound - deadly, but in a
time-release fashion, while still different from suicide. Everydayness is a suicide that falls short of its immediate biological execution, but is certain in
terms of its ultimate outcome. Thus, as we have seen, the immanent and undisclosed dialectic of everydayness is that of life and death. Without this dialectic, average everydayness cannot be understood, which brings us to Tolstoy's concept of death.
'

2. The concept of death: Death as problem and fact

.
In order to adequately capture everydayness as averageness, Tolstoy needs
the concept of death, for it is only death that can expose and highlight the
core of it, bringing it out of the indiscernibility of its "den," as it were. Famously, Tolstoy himself perpetually dwelled upon death, spurred by his wish
to overcome it. Thus, he set himself up with death, so to speak, "framed himself' to do so. To that effect, Tolstoy's son Il'ia has something to recollect for
us:
[Tolstoy was] always extraordinarily curious and attentive about the
sensations of dying, and, whenever he could, picked up the smallest details about their experience.4
Death is not implied but implicated in Tolstoy's work, and it is present
throughout all his work as part of his constant involvement in total psychological analysis. The results of this analysis are framed and displayed in both
literary and nonliterary modes, and in this case literature offers exuberant
possibilities - which, one must grant, Tolstoy made the best of.
As we have seen, Tolstoy's overarching suggestion is that average everydayness amounts to death. The connection between death and average everydayness has been established, but what is the genuine principle of this connection? As we are to see, the principle is semantic. Tolstoy has a semantic
showdown with average everydayness, for it constantly dissipates meaning,
while Tolstoy is constantly in search o f meaning and seeking to make sense.
Meaning is the supranatural mode of human existence and thus precisely the
overcoming of average everydayness, its opposite and otherness. However,
death may turn out to be a semantic source for a new kind of existence, existence-with-meaning, and Tolstoy scrutinizes this possibility.
We may recall that in terms of time, the death of Ivan Il'ich takes three
days, preceded by a week o f the character's forced contemplation. The original standpoint underlying this contemplation is that death is senseless, while
life is meaningful. This stance, however, slowly breaks down as the story progresses. Ultimately, Ivan Il'ich is forced into the realization that there was
something wrong in his life, and therefore it is his life, not death, that is meaningless. Only hours before his death - and certainly because of death - does
Ivan Il'ich succeed in seeing this. This reversal of the original standpoint suggests that the original illusion, which eclipses the truth by causing broaddaylight blindness, has been overcome and a conversion has taken place. Only
is these final hours is he changed and overwhelmed by peacefulness, which is
4. (Count Ilya Tolstoy), Reminiscences o f Tolstoy by His Son Ilya Tolstoy, tr. by Gordon
Calderon (New York: Century, 1914), p. 22.

the moment when, and the way in which, the conversion takes place. It is only
at this moment that he does not fear death, but overcomes it, makes peace
with it, and in a way wishes it. Thus, the conversion means to understand
death differently. But how so?
It is not death but dying that is actually at stake in the question of death.
This is why one may claim that the title of the work is somewhat misleading,
for, strictly speaking, the work shows not the death but the dying of Ivan
Il'ich. Indubitably, this is what explains Heidegger's fascination with Tolstoy's treatment of death. To be sure, one should not forget that the Russian
language superimposes restraints on Tolstoy that are not present in other languages, for example, German and English. Tolstoy, now approaching death
differently, shows death by introducing something substantive in its own
right, a seeming entity, as if an Id. Id is death itself as perceived by man when
death invades man's experience. Ivan Il'ich thinks only about Id. Id is nothing, for it is unfathomable, but also this nothing has turned into everything.
What it is, is unclear, but clearly it is experienced by Ivan Il'ich as alldominating. Id is absolute and ultimate; it cannot be known. Now the task, at
once impossible and necessary, is to fathom the unfathomable and thereafter
to "eff ' the ineffable, so to speak. Here is a collage of Ivan Il'ich's Id rumination as presented in chapter 6, where all of this is addressed by Tolstoy:
'
"Is It the only truth?" (p. 274) . . . No legal proceedings could enable
him to escape from It. And the worst thing of all was that It demanded
all his attention without asking him to do anything but just stare at It,
stare it straight in the eye, doing nothing but suffer unspeakable torment. (pp. 274-175) . . . as if It had the power of penetrating all things,
and nothing in the world could shut it out. (p. 2 7 5 ) . . . But that was all
very well, because it helped him to forget about It; It was pushed out o f
sight. (p. 275) . . . suddenly It stepped out from behind the screen. It
flashed across his side. He hoped It would disappear again. (p. 2 7 5 ) . . .
He could not forget It and It was staring at him very clearly from behind
the plants (p. 2 7 6 ) . . . He went into his study, lay down, and once more
found himself alone with It. Face to face with It, and there was nothing
he could do about it. Nothing but contemplate It and feel his blood running cold. (p. 276) " . . . D e a t h , darkness. No, no! Anything is better
than that!" (p. 282)
At first glance and from afar, death, like everydayness, seems average, for
i t s neither terrible nor unusual but above all casual. To the extent that it is
terrible and dangerous, death is always absent, just like in Epicurus' concept
of death. So death is a non-being. It is not even certain that death exists,
strictly speaking. The famous - and, we should say, powerful - Epicurean as-

sertion that if we are dead, death is not, and if death is, there, we are not,
hence no encounter with death is ever possible, is to a certain extent addressed by Tolstoy in a theoretical essay on life. Notably, the original title o f
it was "On Life and Death," but he eliminated death from the title because of
Epicurus' proposition that there is no death.s In contrast, Heidegger finds
Epicurus' assertion incorrect, for it simply brackets death forever and ultimately amounts to perpetuating the possibility for everydayness and its forgetfulness of death, hindering the authentic understanding of human existence
by radically separating death from life. Tolstoy seems to have been persuaded
by the Epicurean scheme; nonetheless, The Death o f Ivan Il'ich provides a
different perspective.
Other Tolstoyan deaths - those of Andrei, Levin's brother Nikolai, and
Anna's suicide - memorable as they are, are qualitatively different from death
as perceived after Tolstoy's conversion and described in Master and Man,
Khadzhi Murat, and other later works. But The Death o f Ivan Il'ich is unique
even among the latter group, and is the highest achievement of Tolstoy in this
regard. Here the entire process of dying is captured in its completeness, and
therefore death is understood in terms of being rather than non-being. The
Death o f Ivan II'ich describes death from inside, whereby the act o f death
turns into a process of dying, and the attitude to it becomes a relationship with
it, as it were, that is, being-unto-death, facing death. If understood inauthentically, the knowledge of death relies sheerly on empirical analogy, as has been
shown. The fatal error of this analogy is that death is as if non-existent until it
knocks on the door to pay a visit. To man, the world of death is transcendent
and invisible. The empirical relation between life and death, captured paradigmatically by Epicurus, makes up the paradox of human life: it appears immortal, in spite o f its finitude. The only correct, or authentic, way of understanding life and death is in terms of their unity, but particularly as the constant presence of death in life, as being and non-being in becoming, however
obscure the discernibility of this presence may be. From this perspective, another paradox emerges: there is no life before death, for it is only death that
opens up the genuine perspective of life. But if life comes only after an encounter with death, the question is not whether there is life after death, for this
is the only life there is, but actually whether there could be life before death.
This requires understanding both life and death differently, and pressing this
understanding to its ultimate frontier.
Tolstoy's ultimate discovery in The Death o f Ivan Ilyich may be summarized as follows: death is nothing but the fear of death, for when this fear disappears, the problem of death disappears with it, although the. fact of death
5. See (S. A. Tolstaya), The Diary of Sophia Tolstaya, ed. and tr. by Cathy Porter (London:
Jonathan Cape, 1985), p. 86, August 4, 1887, entry.

certainly does not. This crucial distinction - death as problem versus death as
fact - though not explicit, seems to be implicitly operative in Tolstoy. Thus,
the question of death turns out to be a psychological problem arising like a
ghost out of an ontic fact, and the ontological approach (which basically
means nonpsychological) is then the only one appropriate, for it is able to
draw the aforementioned distinction and benefit from its liberating force. In
other words, the matter of death is not the fact of death but what is at stake
with it, which is life. The ontology of death calls for the deployment of Heideggerian concepts in viewing Tolstoy. What is central to the ontology of
death is that man is to live life as finite, whereby the awareness of death introduces the constant choosing of priorities, so that every commitment must
be worthy of the high price paid by the limited portfolio of human life. Ivan
Il'ich does everything but that. In a broader, historical perspective, man is to
coincide with mankind through his generation, which is the maximum immortality that may be gained in the midst of man's finitude and in spite of it. The
historical perspective, however, is left untouched in Tolstoy's story, so there
is no reason to extrapolate it here. The move from psychology to ontology of
death is entailed in, and presupposed by, the victory over death, and is the
sole way in which man can overcome death. This is what Tolstoy seems to
have achieved, though inadvertently and inconclusively. In the story, overcoming death is famously symbolized by the metaphor of light, which comes
in lieu of the darkness o f the fear o f death. This can be regarded as the adequate solution to the problem of death, which at the same time is not the dis- ,
solution of the fact o f death. The victory in the midst of defeat is described by
the following collage:
And presently it became clear to him that all he had been tortured by
and been unable to throw off, was now falling away of itself. (p. 301) ..
. "How good and how simple!" he thought. "And pain?" he asked himself. "How am I to dispose of it? Here, where are you, pain?" He felt for
the pain. "Ah, here it is. What of it? Let it be." "And death? Where is
death?" He searched for his accustomed terror of death and could not
find it. Where was death? What was death? There was no fear because

.
'

there was no death. There was light instead of death. "So that is it!" he
suddenly said out loud. "What happiness!" All of this took place in an
instant, but the significance of this instant was lasting. For those present
his death agony continued for another two h o u r s . . . "All is over,"
someone said. He heard these words and repeated them in his soul.
"Death is over," he said to himself. "There is no more death." (p. 301)

So, we are inspired to conclude, death is not a biological but rather a psychological phenomenon, which is precisely what makes it at once terrible yet

defeatable. Thus, Tolstoy, despite his own overwhelming experience in pondering and depicting death, gives expression to death authentically for the
first time in The Death o f Ivan Il'ich. This may be seen as his own transition
and evolution from conventional to unconventional and authentic comprehension of death.
Even the most average life has something unique, and this is death. It is
death that makes life matter. Life's mattering is what is at stake with death,
which is nothing short of life. This is why an encounter with death has the
meaning of discovering life. This bestowal is performed in the process of
radical ontological loneliness. Life cannot be achieved unless one faces death
and unless it is one's own death. This kind of addressing death, or rather facing it, is what Heidegger's cryptic Jemeinichkeit stands for. Death now ceases
to be a fact external to life, but has instead become part of it, has been "domesticated," so to speak. To "assign," as it were, a death to a life means to
show that there is nothing in life or to life to fall back upon, whereby life is
suddenly disclosed as grounded in groundlessness. Furthermore, lmcustomary
as it may seem, a relationship with death emerges by way of thinking it
through as situated in my life, as mine. The result is counterintuitive, so that
the concern with death becomes a concern with life, and vice versa, facing
death means facing life, and vice versa. However, this is not life as we know
it, but life as it should be. What we know is the life of everydayness or, better
yet, average everydayness, while life as it should be is life-beyondeverydayness, or more precisely, beyond average everydayness. Hence, bestowing meaning results in, and is the same as, man's existence acquiring essence. This is what it means to perceive death from the standpoint of life,
which is the harvest o f being-toward-death.
Death in its multilateralism is at once the rupture of everydayness, its suspension and implosion, and its averageness, as well as what catapults one beyond average everydayness. Indeed, what death destroys in the final analysis
is the averageness of everydayness, not life, for life appears after death, and
the bracketing of average everydayness is the opening of life, the introduction
of life, a rebirth. The main idea here is that authentic life differs radically
from average everydayness, and is even unexpectedly incompatible. This is
true even when it does not seem so on the surface, for it is a question of intrinsic attitude and attunement. In his work, Tolstoy characterizes death as a
long and lonely affair. Death reveals radical ontological loneliness that
pierces the fabric of sociality and tears it asunder. Death is always long be cause the time of death is subjective, and regardless of how long it may take,
it is always too long. But dying, as we have seen, is also a self-encounter and
a radical internal split or diremption when man is to face himself, as if before
an ultimate tribunal, being at once a plaintiff and a defendant, which makes it
impossible to perjure.

It seems that Tolstoy does have an antidote for death, insofar as there
could be such, although this aspect of the story is by no means its central concern. However undeveloped and unstated, it seems to amount to what is referred to as authentic existence. But what does that actually mean in Tolstoy's
story? Basically, it is existence that is death-aware, that finds death within itself and has been built around death already as a meaningful existence. This
existence knows death as "my death." There is here some compatibility and
even parallelism, however elliptic, with Heidegger's anticipatory resoluteness,
which is his formula for authentic existence. But there is also a difference, for
Tolstoy opens up to Christian semantics and ambiguity, which for Heidegger
is unacceptable - although the question regarding the lack of theological implications in Heidegger is by no means a foregone conclusion - yet here and
now collateral. To be sure, authentic existence could be reiterated in Christian
terms, which operate along the lines of the principle of active love or love begetting good deeds with nothing in return, love captured as non-economy of
relating to alterity. In Tolstoy's work, this is neither developed nor really absent. But certainly, selfish love, relentlessly professed by the early Tolstoy, is
fully abandoned here and replaced by love-sacrifice. In spite of the retention
o f some discernible Rousseauistic debris, the later Tolstoy is basically not
compatible with Rousseau. If there is something wrong with average everydayness, it is precisely the absence of love, or the proliferation of self-love,
which is the same. What the awareness of death activates, one may claim, is
precisely this dimension of love, which is the dimension of otherness and alterity. Love, not theory, seems to be the counterpart of death. It is to that effect, one may construe, that Tolstoy has chosen that the total breakdown of
dialog throughout the story allows for at least one exception, Ivan Il'ich's relationship with the servant Gerasim. We may now hear a Gerasim collage:
But this disagreeable business brought Ivan Il'ich one comfort:
Gerasim, the pantry-boy, always came to carry out the chamber-pot. (p.
2 7 7 ) . . . He was always bright and cheerful. (p. 277) ... Ivan Il'ich was
so glad to have him near that he did not let him go. (p. 2 7 8 ) . . . The
health, strength, and cheerfulness of everyone but Gerasim irritated
Ivan Il'ich. Gerasim's health and cheerfulness on the contrary soothed
rather than irritated him. (p. 2 7 9 ) . . . He saw that no one felt sorry for
him because no one cared to understand his position. The only person
who understood and felt sorry for him was Gerasim. And for that reason
they only person Ivan Il'ich cared to be with was Gerasim. He was quite
content when Gerasim sat with him sometimes the whole night through,
holding his feet and refusing to go to bed, saying, "Don't trouble yourself about that, Ivan Il'ich, I'll sleep later." (p. 280) . . . "Yes, send up
Gerasim." (p. 289)

Perhaps some bits of ideology have sneaked into the rather confining space
and privacy of dying to restore the damaged fabric of sociality, if only incrementally. It is as if the loneliness of dying seems at this point somehow challenged, however partially. This seems to put some pressure of ideology on
Tolstoy's far-reaching artistic sensitivity, but in the fnial analysis, even if Tolstoy seeks to accommodate his notorious didactic addiction, 'he still remains
in the frame of plausible human relations. True, Gerasim stands for the Volk
and has donned some garments of an older Rousseauistic cut, for he is not
cultured and therefore does not know the art of social pretense; he is there just
to help, if possible, not to conceptualize or fake. So, whatever residue o f ideology does survive is negligible, especially when it comes to death, for death
is always death of a human being.
As it turns out, death for man is not simply, in fact not at all, a biological
problem, which makes possible the terrible paradox of death during life, since
biological life may very well coexist with spiritual death, whereas biological
death would be not the natural dissolution of life but much more than that the retribution for spiritual death. This is what seems so torturous in Ivan
Il'ich's case, and it is also what is at stake in the novel. Thus, death is the verdict for man's crime of not committing spiritual deeds. Death is the beginning
and the end of Tolstoy's story in the novel. Like cancer, the theme of death
grows in the story from a fraction to a totality. Not only does death change
life, but life also changes death. The relation is mutual and reciprocal. In
death the matters of life are highlighted and changed, which makes it possible
for death to offer the only genuine retrieval of life and a peculiar spiritual puberty.
3. The character and the story of Ivan Il'ich
.
The frame that holds together Tolstoy's critique of average everydayness
and conception of death is the character and the story of Ivan Il'ich. The
character of Ivan Il'ich is a mask that reveals rather than hides, but what is revealed is negative - the anonymity of the character. Ivan Il'ich is just like
Kafka's nameless character; incidentally, though not accidentally, Kafka reportedly admired some of the later stories of Tolstoy. Because of Ivan Il'ich's
anonymity, his story outweighs and virtually absorbs his character, turning
into his only identification. The anonymity of Ivan Il'ich is another reiteration
of his differentia specifica and main characteristic. Inauthenticity always
looks exactly like anonymity, for it is faceless. As the story unfolds, we understand why Ivan II'ich is anonymous, which is an essential task of the story.
The character of Ivan Il'ich may be perceived as twofold, early and later,
separated by the experience of conversion, which displays it as a tripartite
structure. It must be stipulated that these structures are logical rather than
chronological, for they are acutely unequal, chronologically speaking.

a The early Ivan n'ich, or life in average everydayness

The early Ivan Il'ich, upon whom the story is almost exclusively focused,
is Tolstoy's das Man. He is depicted as a man who lives his life according to
the rules and values of average everydayness. Everything in Ivan Il'ich is average - petty feelings, petty ambitions, and so on. This petty scale of existence is what makes him a petty demon and makes the evil he is engrossed in
radical in the Kantian sense, for it is all-permeating, and banal in the Arendtian sense, for it has nothing different from what is average. There is nothing
in him besides that, but within it he is a man of honor. Ivan Il'ich's life unfolds with the clockwork regularity o f average everydayness until one average
day, like a thief at midnight - an expression of St. Paul favored by Heidegger
- death comes around'. At first, Ivan Il'ich is taken by surprise - it is as if he
has just heard the breaking news of his mortality, which he knew of but did
not understand. However preposterous that may sound, the irony of it is that it
is true, for indeed, as we have seen, average everydayness has no concept of
death as internally entailed and hence considers it intrinsically impossible.
Death is always somebody else's, and therefore it may be sad, it may be cruel,
but it is never mine, is always external to my experience and existence. In a
way, this is all there is to the early Ivan Il'ich.
b. The conversion: The between as nowhere and groundlessness
Ivan Il'ich's conversion is the most significant aspect of his story. In the
process of dying, Ivan Il'ich experiences a transition, which may be perceived.
as a conversion, and through it, while facing death, he gains the ability and
possibility to understand and accept death. In principle, conversion involves
acquiring meaning and thus understanding, so it is a semantic phenomenon.
Here one may recognize the basic autobiographical matrix of the later Tolstoy, who had just gone through a conversion himself. The point is that life
must be lived with the awareness of the ultimate outcome, that is, with death
in mind. Only in this way is one in the position to choose how to live one's
life, given the real presence of death as pending and given the punctual nonpunctuality of its habit o f being always too early, no matter how long the wait.
This is precisely what the early Ivan Il'ich failed to understand. After the
conversion begins to ripen, Ivan Il'ich is able to overcome his original, privileged position of staying securely above things. He loses his "divinity" as if
losing his innocence. The illusion that the show of life must go on no matter
what is bitterly shattered as Ivan Il'ich, thrown into loneliness, is forced to
face his own hermeneutical situation. Only now can he see well what he u s e s
to do with respect to others, by seeing what others are now doing with respect
to him. Conversion in the case o f Ivan Il'ich, therefore, means the newly
gained ability to look at life from a vantage point different from average
everydayness. The conversion is a radical change, not in terms of knowledge,

but in terms of understanding, that is, meaning, and the context for this understanding is furnished precisely by death. Hence, there can be no meaning in
life unless death has presented itself, for only death gives totality and thus the
context indispensable for understanding, without which death is a fact that
signifies nothing, as Heidegger has shown. The gradual fermentation of Ivan
Il'ich's thought is captured in the following collage:
'
Ivan Il'ich's main interest in life became human ailments in human
health. (p. 2 6 3 ) . . . Formerly he had bravely withstood misfortune; confident that he would overcome it, he had put up resistance, certain that
he would be successful and at last have his "grand slam." Now every
mishap knocked the ground out from under his feet and threw him into
a state of despair. (p. 263)
"I will no longer exist. What will exist? Nothing. Where will I be
when I cease to exist? Is this really death? Oh, I don't want to die!" (p.
2 7 0 ) . . . "Death. Yes, death. And they don't know it. And don't want to
know it, and have no pity. They are p l a y i n g . . . It is all the same to
them now. But soon they will die too. The fools. I shall go first, then
they; it will come to them, too." (p. 71)
.
"Something is wrong; I must calm myself and think it through from
the beginning." (p. 271) . . . The doctor said his physical suffering must
be dreadful, and so it was; but more dreadful than his physical suffering
was his moral suffering; in this lay his real torment. (p. 296)
c. The later Ivan II 'ich: Beyond average everydayness
What is here referred to as the later Ivan Il'ich is rather a projection than a
narratological presence. This is an attempt to extrapolate and augment the
new existential topology of Ivan Il'ich that is chartered by the conversion, although the novel does not pursue this perspective. The later Ivan Il'ich is the
foil against which the absurdity of the early Ivan Il'ich can be highlighted and
appreciated. Already well into it, the early Ivan Il'ich still has a hard time believing that what in fact is almost over is happening at all. This is how average everyday existence .has fatally dulled his faculty of understanding and
held him captive in a self-guarded prison. Ivan Il'ich's life so far provides no
context for comprehending the new order and phenomenology o f experience
he has entered, which has been engendered by death. So, what Ivan Il'ich actually fails to understand, as Heidegger enables us to see, is the temporality
and finitude of existence. The early Ivan Il'ich has never encountered the
temporality of time, being instead trapped in a mechanical chain o f perpetual
"nows," which is empirically infinite but not tantamount to eternity. Temporality, as Heidegger explains, means to know the future as an authentic
possibility of one's life and to know the past as something that has been a part
of one's existence, or appropriated by it; thereby both the past and the future

one's existence, or appropriated by it; thereby both the past and the future are
always already there in the present. All three modalities of time (referred to
by Heidegger as "ek-stases of temporality") amount to temporality only if
gathered together in a perpetual convergence.
Ultimately, Ivan Il'ich dies with a victory over death. In this gesture we see
a shift in Tolstoy's own thinking. This might have been a factor that influenced the way Heidegger worded some of his own propositions on death.
Life, the story infers, is living with death or living on a death row, a dead man
walking. Without the realization of that, there is no life, just as much as there
is no death. Incidentally, in Dostoevsky, the death sentence is a model to understand human life and its fmitude (especially as depicted in The Idiot).
Something of this sort. is played out in The Death o f Ivan Il'ich in Tolstoy's
own tonality.
But one of the biggest enigmas of The Death o f Ivan Il'ich is captured by
the rhetorical question: Where is God in this private and silent pandemonium?
Written after Tolstoy's conversion, The Death o f Ivan Il'ich presumably displays the acquisitions of his famous crisis, the main finding of which was
supposedly the discovery of God. However, God is conspicuously absent
from the story. This fact could be explained away as being actually the inconspicuous presence of God, if captured as a sort of a post-Kantian vision of
God, or elaborated in terms of a kind of a negative-theology commitment.
The main significance o f the God issue in the story may be seen in its being
the horizon beyond everydayness. But as such it loses its conventional theological force. In this regard, Tolstoy does not seem interested in emphasizing
a religious agenda, especially a conventional one, but rather accommodates
the problematic of the novel that one should live in a non-average way. God is
rendered immanent through and as the "institution" of conscience. So, in the
final analysis, God remains employed and instrumental to the story, featured
in the mode of an internal human voice professing the standpoint of authentic
existence. In conscience, the difference between man and God is collapsed, so
God's presence is at once existentially powerful yet theologically problematic. A God collage of the text summarizes the God question, revealing the
rebellion of Ivan Il'ich as well as God's interference via Ivan Il'ich's awakening to the voice of conscience:

,
. '.
"

He cried because of his helplessness, because of his dreadful loneliness, because of the heartlessness of people and of God, and because of
the absence of God. "Why hast Thou done all this? Why didst Thou
bring me into the world? What, oh what have I done that Thou shouldst
torture me so?" He did not expect an answer and he cried because there
was no and could not be any answer. The pain began again, but he did
not stir, did not call anyone. He merely said to himself, "Very well, hit

me again. Harder! But what for? What have I ever done to Thee?" Then
he grew quiet and not only stopped crying, but stopped breathing as
well and was all attention: he seemed to be listening not to the speaking
voice, but to the voice o f his soul, to the stream of thoughts flowing
through him. "What do you want?" was the first concept sufficiently lucid to express in words. "What do you want? What d6 you want?" he
repeated to himself. "Not to suffer. To live," he replied. (pp. 290-91) . .
. And once more he was all attention, such strained attention that even
his pain could not distract him. "Live? Live how?" asked the voice o f
his soul. "Live as I lived before; a good pleasant life." "And was your
life so good and pleasant before?" asked the voice. And he began to go
over in his mind the best moment of his pleasant life, but strange as it
may seem, all the best moments of his pleasant life no longer seemed to
be what he had considered them. All, except the earliest memories o f
his childhood. In his childhood there had been something really pleasant, something worth living for, if it could have been brought back
again. But the person who had experienced this pleasantness was no
more. He seemed to be calling up memories of someone else. As soon
as his memories involved the person who turned out to be the. present
Ivan Il'ich, all that had once seemed joyful dissolved under his fixed attention and turned into something worthless and even disgusting. (p.
91)

Tolstoy expects the reader to gain awareness and ask of himself the questions of Ivan Il'ich. Clearly, the main question is recognizably Tolstoyan: If
life is to end with death, what is its meaning? A semantic collage reiterates
that very question and shows emphatically that the question of death is a
question of meaning, and for that matter a question of life:
"There is no resistance," he said to himself. "If I could only understand why it should be so!" But that, too, was impossible. "It might
make some sense if I had not lived as I ought to have. But such an admission is impossible," he said to himself remembering all the correctness, the decorum, the property of his life. "I cannot admit such a
thing," he said to h i m s e l f . . . "There is no sense to it. Agony. Death.
Why?" (p. 295) "If that is the case," he said to himself, "and I am taking leave of life with the realization that I have squandered all that was
given to me, and that it is too late to do anything about it - what then?"
He lay on his face and began reviewing his life from an entirely different point of view. (p. 297) He struggled as one who is condemned to
death and knows there is no hope o f escape struggles in the arms of the
executioner. (p. 299)

As we have already seen, the problem of everydayness is not easy to identify, for it is by no means to be automatically ascribed to the meaninglessness
of life in everydayness. Disposing o f everydayness is in fact disposing of life.
Life and everydayness are both camouflaged by Sorge, which seems to be the
radical reason for their even more radical confusion. They are not capable of
dialog, for ultimately they are the copy and the original. The problem of
everydayness is that man, for example Ivan Il'ich, never succeeds in seeing
everydayness qua average everydayness, whereby it becomes impossible to
i d e n t i f y the non-everydayness in everydayness and thus to be able to interrogate and master everydayness. Here is a marvelously presented rundown of
Ivan Il'ich's entire life, done in an act of hermeneutical openness:

The further away he went from his childhood and the closer he came
to the present, the more worthless and dubious became his joy. This began with the school of jurisprudence. He had no things that were genuinely good there: he had no gaiety, friendship and hope. But these good
things grew more rare as he reached the higher classes. Later, during his
first years of service . . . he had again known some good things; most of
them had been connected with being in love. Then his life had grown
complacent and the good things had decreased. Later on there was even
less of the good and the further he went, the less there was. His marriage - such a chance marriage, and the disillusionment, and the odor of
his wife's breath, and the sensuality, and the pretense! And that lifeless
profession of his, and the worry over money - year after year, one year, '
two, ten, twenty, without any change. And the longer it lasted the more
lifeless everything became. "As if I had been going steadily downhill,
while I fancied I was going uphill. Yes, that is how it was. In the opinion of my fellows I was going uphill, but only to the extent that life itself was crumbling away under my feet. And now here I am, dying" . . .
"But it cannot be that I did not live as I ought to have, for I did everything as it ought to have been d o n e . . . What do you want now, to live?
To live how? As if you were in court and the usher was crying out, 'The
judge is coming' . . . Here he is, the judge. But I am not to blame!" he
cried out indignantly. "What am I to blame for?" And he stopped crying, and turning his face to the wall went on thinking of the same thing
over and over: "Why, for what reason, must I go through all this horror?" (p. 292) "What is it? Can it really be death?" And the inner voice
answered, "Yes, it really is." "But why this suffering?" And the inner
voice answered, "For no reason at all." That was as far as it went. (p.
293) . . . "Just as my sufferings are growing worse and worse so my
whole life has grown worse and worse." (p. 294)
,

And here is the clandestine principle of the vision behind the account of
Ivan ll'ich's life:
"In inverse ratio to the square of the distance separating me from
death," thought Ivan Il'ich. And the metaphor of a stone falling with increasing velocity flashed in his mind. Life, a series of increasing sufferings, is falling faster and faster toward its goal, which is unspeakable
suffering. (pp. 294-95)
Grasping the phenomenon of duplicating, "cloning," and mimicking life by
average everydayness should be granted as an independent discovery of Tolstoy. The hope is for the reader to be able to gain this perspective as a result
of an encounter with Tolstoy's work. To that effect, Tolstoy does not allow
either Aristotle's syllogistic or the Buddhist Nirvana, recommended to him by
Schopenhauer, to provide an easy comfort or virtually obviate and cover over
the question of death, for death is a matter neither of logic nor of passivity but
of active and meaningful existence lived every day away from averageness.
Here is a relevant passage from chapter 6, which certainly deserves a rereading, about how man's fmitude is lost by way of logic, while logic operates
perfectly:
All his life he had regarded the syllogism he had learnt while studying Kiesewetter's Logic: "Caius is a man, men are mortal, and therefore
Caius is mortal," as being true only in respect to Caius, not to himself.
Caius, was a man, a man in the abstract sense, and so the syllogism applied to him; but Ivan Il'ich was not Caius, and not a man in the abstract
sense; he had always been quite, quite different from all other men. He
had been little Vania to his mama and papa, to his brothers Mitia and
Volodia, to the coachman and the nursemaid and to his toys, and to
Katia; Vania, who had lived through all the joys and sorrows and ecstasies o f childhood, boyhood, and youth. Had Caius ever known the
leathery smell of a football that Vania had loved so dearly? Had Caius
ever kissed his mother's hands with such feeling, or so loved the rustle
of her silk skirts? Had Caius ever made a row over the buns at the
school? Or ever been so in love? Or presided so brilliantly over a court
session? Caius was indeed mortal, and it was only right and proper that
he should die, but he, Vania, Ivan Il'ich, with all his thoughts and feelings - it was a quite different matter with him. And it could not be right
and proper that he should die. (pp. 272-73)

Now, what this meaningful existence is, is appropriately left for everyone
to figure out on one's own and for oneself, but doing so is professed as nonoptional and urgent, and crucial warning is emphatically issued.
P A R T T H R E E : Conclusion
Though far from comprehensiveness, we have already collected enough
observations to draw together the main conclusions and results. It is an established fact that death is a radical and persisting theme in any of Tolstoy's
works, from Childhood to Khadzhi Murat. Moreover, famously, the last project of Tolstoy was the project of his own death, as it were, and he came out
into the open to die, far from the vanity of average everydayness. Tolstoy,
that rustic and reclusive Russian Socrates, was preparing all life long to die in
the right way, so to speak, and he did die an extraordinary death, having lived
an extraordinary life, puzzling and fascinating posterity by the way he lived
and how he died. He died in an act of uniting with the world and curtailing
average everydayness. Thus, Tolstoy himself shows nothing short of sicknessunto-death, a sickness that was obviously contagious since so many of his
characters got it, too. He accepted this diagnosis and the condition, and tried
to live with the symptoms. Even though he may only have retold the story o f
his life from the vantage of death, Tolstoy seems to have been among the very
first to get the question of death right.
The reason why I claim here that Tolstoy made a powerful move toward
the authentic understanding of death, judged retroactively from the perspec- .
tive of twentieth-century philosophy, is sponsored by a set of features, but
foremost among them is probably, as Tolstoy relentlessly emphasizes, that the
logic of everydayness and the logic necessary to understand death are different and incompatible. Within the environment of everydayness, death is
bound to remain uncomprehended or, similarly, misunderstood, that is, understood inauthentically, but the trouble is that with it life remains misunderstood, too. As we have seen, the Ivan Il'ich story is about everydayness, its
topology and framework (the average family), as well as its "who" (the average man, referred to by Heidegger as das Man). Tolstoy performs a "blood
test" on kinship and finds it insufficiently strong to carry the cargo that man
loads on it. The story is also about the realization and reconsideration of
one's entire life, and how difficult this is to achieve, as well as the phenomenon of discovering existence, which ironically happens only when life is vir, tually gone. This paradox, from the standpoint of everydayness, is perhaps the
only nonparadoxical and certain characteristic of authentic existence, accord."
ing to which authentic human existence - not human life, as conventionally
known - begins not with birth but with death: since one is born only after one
has died, it is not an obstacle at all for one to be always already old enough to

die, once born. The discovery o f existence is mesmerizing, for it is so unconventional about something so conventional, when life is taken for granted. To
discover existence means not to discover things in life but life in things.
It should be noted that in The Death o f Ivan Il'ich there is no didactic or
sermonizing, Tolstoy's familiar narratological trademark; instead, there is describing and showing. Yet, everything ultimately is much clearer, for it admits
of understanding even richer than, or at least different from, Tolstoy's own
understanding. This is the artistic aspect of the secret of the work's hermeneutic energy. Tolstoy's pioneering grasp of death and average everydayness is to
be acknowledged, but should not be misunderstood. One must not forget that
if Tolstoy's stakes are high and snowballing, it is also owing to the brokerage
of other thinkers, and Heidegger has a crucial place among them. The latter's
mediation enhances Tolstoy's vision and facilitates its meliorated articulation,
enabling us to see in it a structure that even Tolstoy may not have seen. Thus,
Tolstoy comes across as hermeneutically "superdigitalized," so to speak, as
an improved quality o f something immortal in and of itself, yet with a surplus
value. This is precisely what it means to inherit a legacy. Interpreting is not
about conservation but rather preservation, and not only may we try to understand Tolstoy, we should understand him better than he understood himself.
The secret of this alleged gimmick - in fact the first law of hermeneutics, as it
were - is that the principal capital, as it circulates, accrues tremendous hermeneutical dividends. So Heidegger makes it possible for us to understand
Tolstoy better, if only in return for Tolstoy's inspiring Heidegger to create his
conception. The result o f our analysis is that Tolstoy, in The Death o f Ivan
II 'ich, has indeed succeeded in anticipating the main features of what Heidegger calls the authentic understanding of death, being-toward-death. And while
it would be indeed problematic, on a variety of counts, to claim that Tolstoy
constitutes a precedent to Heidegger's existential analytic, the comparison
should underscore and make conspicuous Tolstoy's merits as regards his subtle, highly original, and in many ways "precocious," in spite of his age, or perhaps because of it, fashion of relating to the question of death. One has to be
aware of the chronological seduction, which regrettably does not take into
consideration the added, value of hermeneutical augmentation and reads the
final result back into the beginning while losing the entire process of mediation between the two. Consequently, what is obliterated is the historicity of
understanding, which some claim is the essential mechanism of human
awareness and cognition.6 The entire analysis of this essay seems to warrant

6. This common and recalcitrant mistake seems characteristic of what is perhaps the most
comprehensive study of the Heidegger-Tolstoy relation on the matter of death, by Zoltan Hajnady ("Ivan Ilyich and Existence Compared to Death: Lev Tolstoy and Martin Heidegger," in
Acta Litteraria Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 27 [1-2], 3-IS [1985]), who seems to suc-

the conclusion that it is Tolstoy's uniquely sophisticated understanding of

death that maintains readers' interest in this particular work, considered important even today on philosophical, not only artistic, grounds. To that effect,
however, Heidegger's interpretation of death is essential in that it mediates,
accommodates, and augments Tolstoy's philosophical relevance, for the former may be viewed as both an inadvertent elucidation of the latter and an incentive to its reappropriation. This, then, is a possible version of what could
be retrieved from the reticence of Heidegger's footnote, of how its silence
may sound.
University o f Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

cumb to the illusion that Heidegger's analysis of death is already to be found in full-blown preysence in Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Il'ich. The truth appears to be to the contrary, that it was
Heidegger whose work made transparent the significance of Tolstoy's achievements by showing
the ripened version of it. Again, the problem lies in the mirror illusion of hermeneutics. '