doctor and told him loudly, 'Ich sterbe' ('I am dying'). The doctor tried to calm him and went away. Chekhov ordered a bottle of champagne, drank a glass, lay down on his bed, and passed away.132
For Tolstoy, death was no such easy thing. Terrified of his own mortality, he attached his religion to a mystical conception of death as a spiritual release, the dissolution of the personality into a 'universal soul'; yet this never quite removed his fear. No other writer wrote so often, or so imaginatively, about the actual moment of dying - his depictions of the deaths of Ivan Ilich and of Prince Andrei in War and Peace are among the best in literature. But these are not just deaths. They are final reckonings - moments when the dying re-evaluate the meaning of their lives and find salvation, or some resolution, in a spiritual truth.133 In The Death of Ivan Ilich (1886) Tolstoy shows a man, a senior judge, who comes to realize the truth about himself as he lies on his deathbed looking back on his life. Ivan Ilich sees that he has existed entirely for himself and that his life has therefore been a waste. He has lived for his career as a judge, but he cared no more for the people who appeared before him than the doctor treating him cares for him now. He has organized his life around his family, but he does not love them, and nor does it appear that they love him, for none of them will recognize the fact that he is dying and try to comfort him. The only real relationship which Ivan Ilich has is with his servant Gerasim, a 'fresh young peasant lad' who looks after him, sits with him at night and brings him comfort by holding up his legs. Gerasim does all of this as a simple act of kindness for a man who, he knows, is about to die, and his recognition of this fact is itself of immense comfort to the dying man. 'The awful, terrible act of his dying was', Ivan Ilich sees,
reduced by those about him to the level of a fortuitous, disagreeable and rather indecent incident (much in the same way as people behave with someone who goes into a drawing-room smelling unpleasantly) - and this was being done in the name of the very decorum he had served all his life long. He saw that no one felt for him, because no one was willing even to appreciate his situation. Gerasim was the only person who recognized the position and was sorry for him. And that was why Ivan Ilich was at ease only when Gerasim was with him… Gerasim alone told no lies; everything showed that he alone understood the facts of the case, and did not consider it necessary to disguise
them, and simply felt sorry for the sick, expiring master. On one occasion when Ivan Ilich was for sending him away to bed he even said straight out:
'We shall all of us die, so what's a little trouble?' meaning by this that he did not mind the extra work because he was doing it for a dying man and hoped someone would do the same for him when his time came.134
A simple peasant has given to this judge a moral lesson about truth and compassion. He has shown him how to live and how to die - for the peasant's acceptance of the fact of death enables Ivan Ilich, at the final conscious moment of his life, to overcome his fear.
The Death of Ivan Ilich was based upon the death of Tolstoy's friend, Ivan Ilich Mechnikov, an official in the judicial service, whose brother furnished Tolstoy with a detailed account of his final days.135 It was not uncommon for the Russian upper classes to draw comfort from their servants' presence at the moment of their death. From diaries and memoirs it would seem that, far more than the priest who came to take confession and administer last rites, the servants helped the dying overcome their fears with their simple peasant faith which 'enabled them to look death in the face'.136 The fearless attitude of the peasant towards death was a commonplace of nineteenth-century Russian literature. 'What an astonishing thing is the death of a Russian peasant!' wrote Turgenev in Sketches from a Hunter's Album. 'His state of mind before death could be called neither one of indifference, nor one of stupidity; he dies as if he is performing a ritual act, coldly and simply.'137 Turgenev's hunter encounters several peasants at the point of death. One, a woodcutter called Maxim who is crushed by a falling tree, asks his team-mates to forgive him, and then, just before he breathes his last, asks them to make sure that his wife receives a horse for which he has put down money. Another is informed in a country hospital that he has only a few days to live. The peasant thinks about this for a bit, scratches the nape of his neck and puts his cap on, as if to depart. The doctor asks him where he is going.
'Where to? It's obvious where to - home, if things are that bad. If things are like that, there's a lot to be put in order.'
'But you'll do yourself real harm, Vasily Dmitrich. I'm surprised that you even got here at all. Stay here, I beg you.'
'No, Brother Kapiton Timofeich, if I'm going to die, I'll die at home. If I died here, God knows what a mess there'd be at home.'138
The same peasant attitudes were noted by Tolstoy in Three Deaths (1856), by Leskov in The Enchanted Pilgrim (1873), by Saltykov-Shchedrin in Old Days in Poshekhonie (1887) and by practically every major Russian writer thereafter, so that in the end the stoicism of the peasants assumed the status of a cultural myth. This was the form in which it was repeated by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Cancer Ward (1968), in the scene in which Yefrem remembers how 'the old people used to die back home on the Kama'.
They didn't puff themselves up or fight against it or brag that they were going to die - they took death calmly. They didn't shirk squaring things up, they prepared themselves quietly and in good time, deciding who should have the mare, who the foal, who the coat and who the boots, and they departed easily, as if they were just moving into a new house. None of them would be scared by cancer. Anyway, none of them got it.139
But attitudes like this were not just literary invention. They were documented in the memoir sources, medical reports and ethnographic studies of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.140 Some put down the peasants' resignation to a serf-like fatalism in which death was viewed as a release from suffering. When they talked about their lot, the peasants often referred to the afterlife as a 'kingdom of liberty' where their ancestors lived in 'God's freedom'.141 This was the idea behind Turgenev's Sketches, in the story 'Living Relic', where a sick peasant woman yearns for death to end her suffering. Like many of her class, she believes that she will be rewarded for her suffering in Heaven and this makes her unafraid to die. Others explained such peasant fatalism as a form of self-defence. Death was such a common fact of village life that, to a degree, the peasant must have become hardened towards it. In a society where nearly half the children died before the age of five there had to be some way of coping with the grief. Doctors often noted that the parents of a village child would not react emotionally to its death, and in many of the poorest regions, where there were too many mouths to feed, women would even thank
God for taking it away.142 There were peasant proverbs to advance the view that 'It's a good day when a child dies'.143 Infanticide was not uncommon, especially at times of economic hardship, and with children who were illegitimate it was practically the norm.144
The desperate peasant woman in The Brothers Karamazov who has lost her boy is told by Zosima that God has taken him and given him the rank of an angel. In peasant Russia it was generally believed, in the words of a villager from Riazan province, that 'the souls of little children go straight up to heaven'.145 Such thoughts must have been of real comfort. For the peasantry believed in a universe where the earth and spirit worlds were intimately linked in one continuum. The spirit world was a constant presence in their daily lives, with demons and angels at every turn. The fortunes of the souls of their kin were a matter of the highest importance. There were good and bad spirits in the Russian peasant world, and how a person died determined whether his spirit would also be good or bad. The peasant thought it was essential to prepare for death, to make the dying comfortable, to pray for them, to end all arguments with them, to dispose properly of their property, and to give them a Christian burial (sometimes with a candle and a bread ladder to help them on their way) in order that their souls could rise up peacefully to the spirit world.146 Those who died dissatisfied would return to haunt the living as demons or diseases. Hence, in many places it became the custom to bury murder victims, those who died by suicide or poisoning, deformed people and sorcerers and witches outside the boundaries of the cemetery.