This essay offers a close reading of Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, examining the story's major characters and the religious and spiritual ideas that animate the narrative. The paper analyzes Peter Ivanovich, Gerasim, Praskovya Fyodorovna, and Vasya, showing how each figure contributes to Tolstoy's moral vision. It also connects Ivan Ilych's journey to Jewish spiritual parables, the biblical story of Elisha in Damascus, and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's five stages of dying. Together these frameworks illuminate how Tolstoy transforms a story of physical death into a tale of spiritual awakening.
Before interpreting some of the main religious ideas behind Tolstoy's story, it is useful to examine the major characters who surround Ivan Ilych — both during his life and during his long, tortuous death struggle. Each character functions not merely as a realistic portrait but as a moral lens through which Tolstoy focuses his deeper spiritual argument.
The reader first meets Peter Ivanovich at the very opening of the story. We soon learn that he works with Ivan Ilych in the Law Courts and that as youths they had studied law together. Tolstoy immediately casts a shadow over this assumed intimacy by making clear that the death of Peter Ivanovich's close friend does not engender pity or sadness, but rather speculation on "the changes and promotions it might occasion among themselves."
It is at Peter Ivanovich's side that we, the readers, first enter the death room of Ivan Ilych and first see his home, his family, and his body laid out in the coffin. We share his discomfort during the scene — not quite knowing the proper way to behave, the right actions to take, or the right things to say. However, our sympathy for him quickly fades when we see that his real interest is in arranging his card game for the evening. Even standing before his friend's dead body, he can think only of escaping the scene and sitting down to gamble.
We soon realize that his lifestyle is precisely the same as Ivan Ilych's was before his fateful fall. In a sense, Peter Ivanovich represents the life that the man in the coffin has given up — or transcended.
Gerasim is the faithful butler's assistant who remains constantly at Ivan Ilych's side during his long, slow descent toward death. Tolstoy idealized the Russian peasant, and Gerasim is clearly symbolic of all that the author found good in this "salt-of-the-earth" type. He is portrayed as strong, healthy, simple, helpful, and sincere — a direct contrast to the scheming, calculating "civilized" people who populate the rest of the book.
Ivan Ilych prefers Gerasim's company above all others and willingly accepts his pity and sympathy, while responding with hostility when anyone else attempts to show him similar emotions. It is telling that the only position in which Ivan finds relief is when he has his legs resting on Gerasim's shoulders. Tolstoy may be suggesting that the upper classes in Russia have built their cherished positions literally on the shoulders of the peasants — a striking image he returns to repeatedly toward the end of the story.
"Praskovya's selfishness and hollow marriage"
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"Jewish parables and biblical stories as framework"
"Five stages of death mapped onto Ivan's arc"
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