Condemned people, lifers, and those with long prison sentences can easily relate to the protracted demise of the main character in Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
Ivan Ilyich’s death from a seemingly insignificant fall was neither sudden nor believable to him, his friends or family.
The months it took him to accept he was dying created the tension in this novel. Tolstoy “took a man to the brink of having to leave the world much as he had entered it, kicking and screaming,” through Ivan Ilyich’s anxiety-filled downfall, as he couldn’t evade death.
Similarities are drawn to the men and women confined to prison cells who don’t accept that they will have to serve extremely long prison terms and will possibly die in prison. These lifers fight tooth and nail, looking for some type of loophole that will negate what their trial has determined – guilty, sentenced to life. For all intended purposes, the life they knew is over.
The characters Tolstoy creates in Ivan Ilyich’s wife, children and friends don’t seriously consider his illness, and begin to dismiss his complaining and feelings about his injury. The family eventually laments the loss of Ivan for selfish and materialistic reasons. However, he is not truly mourned until he’s dead.
Prisoners who serve long sentences have an expression: “out of sight, out of mind.” It means many families of lifers give up on connecting with them after decades of imprisonment. For the lifer, this feels like death.
The truth in Tolstoy’s novel is that Ivan Ilyich “saw that no one pitied him because no one even cared to understand his situation.” Confined men and women also are largely seen through the misunderstood eyes of the public, so empathy or sympathy is not expected.
“One of Tolstoy’s themes is about the inability of the dying to communicate and of the sick to remain inside the old circle of relationships,” writes Ronald Blythe in his introduction to the novel.
Ivan Ilyich could not understand how death could creep on him. At first, he dismissed the thought of dying as “false, unsound, and morbid.” He tried “to force it out of his mind with other thoughts that were sound and healthy,” Tolstoy writes.
Similarly, many people living on Death Row do not want to accept their destinies. Some even fabricate fantastic stories in order to stay alive within themselves.
At the moment Ivan Ilyich accepts his impending death, he learns much about himself, his family, and his friends — as do prisoners serving long sentences, once they accept their fates.
Juan’s Book Review