Rousseau and Tolstoy A Comparison of Rousseau's Confessions and Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilych

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions opens more brazenly than the other Confessions of antiquity (those belonging to Augustine); the latter were zealously religious in nature and humbling in tone; the former were proud in tone and primarily secular. If Rousseau's Confessions can be called a celebration of a life burnished in the fires of the Romantic/Enlightenment era, Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilych may be called a meditation on death -- or more accurately still it may be called a depiction of the spiritual conversion of the "natural" man, as embodied by Rousseau a century earlier. This paper will compare and contrast the two works and show how the Russian's serves as a kind of humbling argument against the self-serving ideals of the Frenchman.

The two characters present a similar outlook on life: both Rousseau in his Confessions and Ivan Ilych (at least initially) are extraordinarily boastful and filled with esteem for themselves. Yet while the fictional Russian...

(Of course, Rousseau is not given the opportunity to chronicle any such experience as the "deathbed conversion," an event that clearly distinguishes Tolstoy's novel from Rousseau's memoir.) Therefore, any comparison of the two men must at a certain point cease.
Up to that point, however, the men think in accordance with one another. Rousseau gives numerous examples of this thought, but none more eloquent than this: "I have begun on a work which is without precedent, whose accomplishment will have no imitator. I propose to set before my fellow-mortals a man in all the truth of nature; and this man shall be myself" (Rousseau, 1782, p. 1). Rousseau proceeds to imagine his launch into the afterlife, Confessions in hand, all of his "virtues" and "failings" recorded therein, as though God Himself could not have done a better…