Currently I am making my way through a book of novellas by Leo Tolstoy, the War and Peace dude. (I tried reading War and Peace once a couple of years ago but didn't make it very far.) The novellas number four: there's the early work Family Happiness (1859), the rather well-known The Death of Ivan Ilych (1886), The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), and Hadji Murad (1904). With the exception of Ivan Ilych, which I read in my senior year of high school, the stories are new to me.
As I recall, I sought out Ivan Ilych because that same year I had also read a bunch of Kafka short stories in the Complete Stories. John Updike wrote an introduction to that volume drawing a parallel between Kafka's The Metamorphosis and Tolstoy's novella; the parallel, if I recall correctly (that very same volume of Kafka still sits on my bookshelf and I could go doublecheck, but I'm more enthusiastic about exercising my memory than about accurate reportage), was that both stories are about men stricken suddenly and mysteriously, lying afflicted in the midst of their obliviously scornful families. And so I tracked down Ivan Ilych in the high school library, and read it, and liked it. At least, it stuck with me enough that when I read (for a class) the Epic of Gilgamesh a few months later, I found exceedingly marvelous the parallels between the ancient encounter with the fear of death and the (relatively) modern encounter with the same, so much so that I even attempted feebly to elaborate on these parallels by writing two fragments of a Gilgamesh short story. (As I recall, I was also deeply under the influence of Faulkner's Light in August at that time, having read that novel that year as well, and the Gilgamesh fragments were also intended to be an exercise in Faulknerian style. I came upon said fragments a few years back and am sad to report that in the latter regard they were more long-winded and repetitive than Faulknerian; and as to the former concern, they didn't express much about anything at all.)
Beyond making that connection with Gilgamesh, I don't particularly recall the specifics of my reaction to the novella when I read it fourteen years ago; which in itself suggests that it didn't make a terribly deep impression. Oh, callow youth: what could you possibly have seen in this story? The Death of Ivan Ilych tells the tale of a judge in Czarist Russia, a petty-minded regular schmoe, who falls ill and takes a good while to die, which gives him time to think things over and decide that he's wasted his life on trivialities. A substantial portion of the novella is given over to a recounting of the incidents of Ivan Ilych's life; the incidents, such as they are, being utterly ordinary: moving, decorating a house, not getting a promotion, getting a promotion, etc. Depending on outlook, this material is either a) incredibly petty and boring, or b) very fine-toothed satire by Tolstoy. (I'm puzzled here: I'm relatively sure that I didn't pick up on the possibility of satire back in high school, but neither was I bored. So what was I?) My modern self definitely thinks it's the latter option: how else to explain sentences, rare but potent, like the following, which introduces the recounting: "The previous history of Ivan Ilych was the simplest, the most ordinary, and the most awful." When Ivan Ilych is delighted about how proper and classy his new house looks -- he's been arranging and supervising the furnishing and decoration thereof himself -- Tolstoy breaks away from Ivan Ilych's point of view suddenly to point out how, "in reality," the interior of the house just looks like every other upper-middle-class home striving to keep up with the Joneses.
So in other words, how can the story be anything but almost completely meaningless to the innocence of youth, uncorrupted and uncompromised? There's nothing like accepting the indubitable compromise of spending eight or more hours per day in a cubicle farm helping to administer governmental bureaucracy to make Ivan Ilych hit you where it hurts. Here, have some satire:
People with petitions, inquiries in the office, the office itself, the sittings -- public and preliminary. In all this the great thing necessary was to exclude everything with the sap of life in it, which always disturbs the regular course of official business, not to admit any sort of relations with people except the official relations... A man would come, for instance, anxious for certain information. Ivan Ilych, not being the functionary on duty, would have nothing whatever to do with such a man. But if this man's relation to him as a member of the court is such as can be formulated on official stamped paper -- within the limits of such a relation Ivan Ilych would do everything, positively everything he could, and in doing so would observe the semblance of human friendly relations, that is, the courtesies of social life. But where the official relation ended, there everything else stopped too. (translation by Constance Garnett)
I haven't yet read the last and longest of the novellas in the Tolstoy volume, Hadji Murad, but the other two stories, Family Happiness and The Kreutzer Sonata, deal with matters similar to that of Ivan Ilych. Family Happiness is a rather dissatisfactory piece of fiction; mostly it depicts the evolution of a married couple's love as it cools over the course of a couple of years. This it rendered in great psychological detail and I quite liked it; but for some reason the novella has a tacked-on "happy" (or at least I am presuming that this is the desired effect) ending in which the protagonist (the wife) learns, very suddenly and without exploration of any whatsoever implications, to accept love of children and family as a substitute for her youthful passion for her husband. The Kreutzer Sonata begins as something of a prolonged harangue on the consequences of the society-wide confusion between lust and love, delivered by a man who killed his wife in a fit of jealous passion. Much of the harangue remains applicable to our modern and supposedly more enlightened society; a great deal of the material here reminded me of a class I took in my last semester at college, "Problems in Western Civilization." It deals with so many of that class's themes and preoccupations that I'm surprised I'm only encountering the novella now: why didn't the professor have us read it then? Eventually the harangue is replaced by narrative, the story of how and why the wife-murderer did the deed, and the narrative is quite involving, gripping, and intense.
As I understand it, Hadji Murad is about bandits, or something, adventuring in the Caucasus Mountains. Something of a departure, then, it seems like; we'll see. Until next time, keep the pages turning...
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