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6 “The Death of Ivan Ilych”: Text vs. Author If Ivan Ilych is a tragic hero, then so potentially is everyone. A Negative Hero As we know, near the end of the Discourse on Inequality Rousseau observes that we socialized people “have only façades, deceptive and frivolous, honour without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness.” “Social man lives always outside himself; he knows how to live only in the opinion of others.”1 The hero of Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych” is portrayed in these terms exactly. His very existence seemingly a façade, Ivan Ilych squares all that he does with the opinions of others. On his deathbed he realizes, “I was going up in public opinion, but to the same extent life was ebbing away from me. And now it’s all over and there’s only death” (161). Fittingly if ironically, the tale opens with the hero’s colleagues coming upon his obituary. He who lives by public opinion dies in the newspapers. As though Tolstoy had dedicated the tale to Rousseau, Ivan Ilych’s world is one of “superiors and inferiors,” too (135). Only when he suffers the superiority of the physicians who pretend to treat him does he begin to awaken to his own pretense. Depicting as it does such one-sided relations as judge to defendant and physician to patient (and these are conceived as analogous), “The Death of Ivan Ilych” offers a study in inequality. Of it Isaiah Berlin once wrote that it cannot be understood without an appreciation of Tolstoy’s ideal of “a society of free and equal men, who live and think by the light of what is true and right, and so are not in conflict with each other or themselves.”2 A hero leading the false life anatomized by Rousseau—a life of imitation and inauthenticity, envy and emulation, quite opposed to the Tolstoyan ideal— stretches the meaning of “hero” itself. Even Ivan Ilych’s status as a hero in the modest sense of a protagonist is tenuous, for he possesses a kind of accidental central91 ity in his own story, a story that would never have been written had he not lost his footing momentarily on a stepladder. (A War and Peace equivalent of a minor mishap, scarcely even perceptible at the moment but full of fatal consequences, would be a pipe ash going astray in a city ripe for burning.) We might view “The Death of Ivan Ilych” as one in a line of Tolstoyan experiments in doing away with the institution of the hero. War and Peace drips irony on certain “special animals called ‘heroes’” (1143) and has no central character. From the title of Anna Karenina we might suppose Anna herself to be its central character, but that distinction could equally go to Levin, whose life is so completely independent of hers that the two meet but once over the course of the novel. In operatic terms Anna Karenina is certainly the heroine of Anna Karenina, but Tolstoy does not subscribe to those terms and does not credit the delusions of one who imagines herself at the center of things. As though Tolstoy had taken his campaign against the hero as a literary institution to the limits of the possible, in “The Death of Ivan Ilych” the hero lacks all the expected characteristics of the kind and acquires his central position purely by chance. Though filled with the acid of scorn, the tale is not as dogmatic an act of negation as a tract like What Is Art? where the author’s hatred of inauthenticity (and inequality) is released from the frame of fiction. And in elevating a nonentity to a genuinely tragic position, “The Death of Ivan Ilych” almost in spite of itself bears out the rising literary potential of commoners over the course of literature’s history. Tragedy with a Difference According to Aristotle, comedy is “an imitation of inferior people.”3 By the nineteenth century, however, it had become possible to portray commoners not only with high seriousness but even in a tragic light. Yet the same realism that brought commoners to the fore of literature in the first place also subjected these newly tragic figures to conditions undreamed of by Aristotle. The heroes of tragic drama suffer, but they do not suffer the encumbrances of material contingency. Where men speak verse, they are not prone to catching colds or suffering from indigestion. They do not...

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