Who is Ivan Ilyich?

Who is Ivan Ilyich? What is his professional and personal life like up to the move to Petersburg. What are his motives? How does he make decisions? What is the narrator’s attitude toward him?

Ivan Ilyich was a well-mannered and intelligent man with a pleasant disposition. He was the middle child of a family of three boys and one girl. He was unlike his older brother in that he was not as meticulous or formal and unlike his younger brother in that he was not as presumptuous. Ivan was a member of the court justice up until his death at the age of forty-five and he completed his duties mercifully. He was a well-liked and respectable man—never one to incite or stir arguments and never one to fulfill his tasks without optimum effort and caution. Ivan was always one to use the proper decorum in the proper setting. He had good judgment, especially when it came to his job. He always fully examined the case in order to not miss any crucial details and to maintain a fair investigation. Tolstoy made reference to how Ivan liked to dance, displaying to readers that he was also fun loving and did not take everything too seriously. In fact, it is through dancing, Tolstoy said, that Ivan Ilyich won the heart of Praskovya Fyodorovna. They danced together at nighttime, and eventually he asked her to marry him, not because he had fallen madly in love with her but because she was a woman of good fortune and good looks therefore, both he and society proved it to be a worthy union. The narrator comments on Ivan’s reasons for marrying Praskovya. He says he “did what people of the highest standing considered correct (49)”. With these words, the narrator eludes to a very important aspect of Ivan’s character: he is strongly influenced by the judgments and thoughts of the people around him and high societies’ social standards. This makes Ivan a man of conformity rather than insubordination and noncompliance.

Ivan Ilyich’s marriage to Praskovya Fyodorvna was pleasant and seemed to be going very well until not long after Praskovya became pregnant with their first child. At this time, she began to want more from Ivan, but all he wanted was to go on living his simple, carefree life in accordance with societies’ standards. So Ivan did the only thing he could do, immerse himself in his work. The narrator explains, “. . . his need to fence off a world for himself outside the family became even more imperative (50)”. Ivan saw marriage as another job, one that he had to work at just as hard as he did at any other job. He, “realized that married life, though it offered certain conveniences, was in fact a very complex and difficult business, and that to do one’s duty to it—that is, to lead a proper, socially acceptable life—one had to develop a clearly defined attitude to it, just as one did with respect to work (50)”. Ivan does not care about whether his marriage will work out for his families’ sake but rather, he selfishly only cares about how a failed marriage will look and affect his social status in life. He longed for the respect and attention from society that society gives to those with lives worthy of being respected and praised. For this he held the display of a perfect family and a perfect marriage. Most importantly, Ivan cared about his work more than any other aspect of his life and it basically ran his life for the next seven years.

In 1880, Ivan Ilyich fell to his breaking point. Trying to keep up with the standards he had set for himself, he fell in to debt and was unable to get a higher paying job when he most needed it. He and his wife then moved in with his wife’s brother in the country in an effort to save money. Left with no work, Ivan found himself with nothing to do but think about his current situation. He realized he was in a bad place and so he decided the best thing to do was to go to Petersburg and look for a job. Ivan got extremely lucky, and with help from his friend, Zakhar Ivanovich, he was able to be placed back in his former ministry, but this time, ranked above his colleagues. He was ecstatic and sent letters back to his wife in the country informing her about his new position. He received money for relocating, which he quickly used to buy a new apartment and furnish it extravagantly. Everything was working out for Ivan and his marriage was even better than it had been since their first year together. Once he started work and he and his family had settled into their apartment, things began to fall in to place perfectly. It seems that Ivan did not learn anything from his past experience of almost losing everything he had worked for and instead, he has taken his new luck for granted. He still possesses the same selfish and unimportant goals of achieving attention for his successes in life and he still undermines the wishes of his wife. Although we learn that Ivan is a hard-working man, we discover that he is blind to what is really important in life.
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