COLUMN: What do you want to live for?

“‘Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done,’ it suddenly occurred to him. ‘But how could that be, when I did everything properly?’ he replied, and immediately dismissed from his mind this, the sole solution of all the riddles of life and death, as something quite impossible.” – Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Ilyich, The Death of Ivan Ilyich

The Death of Ivan Ilych is short novella by Leo Tolstoy that reveals it’s narrative in the title, it is in fact a story about the death of a man named Ivan Ilych. While the story itself is a story about a death, the true value from the novella comes from serving as a commentary on life and how to live.

Ivan Ilych lived a miserable life. The reason for it being as such is relayed in the following passage, “Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.” Ivan went through the motions of life, he was objectively successful as far as society defines success. He knew how to navigate the social sphere and worked his way into a prestigious position and was well compensated for his work. He married a woman, Praskovya Fedorovna, not because he actually loves her but because it was “what he was supposed to do” and because she seemed like a proper social fit. While his career was great, his friends and family spited him, and he really had no purpose outside of his career. The novella actually begins with a scene after Ivan’s death in which his closest “loved” ones show no sorrow over his death, but merely quarrel over how his inheritances were going to be divided. One day, Ivan fell on his side and began to experience more and more pain. Despite his efforts to remedy the malady, he became increasingly more ill. He eventually ended up not being able to work and spent his remaining days in bed, with nothing left to do but to think about death and the nature of his life. Right before his death, he realized that his life was not his. He had lived a life based off of the whims and expectations of others. A servant boy assigned to him, Gerasim, is one of very few people in the world that actually sympathized with Ivan and this sympathy enabled Ivan to come to terms with himself and live an authentic life, even if only briefly. At the moment of his death, Ivan transcends his self interest for the first time in his life, he pities his son, his family and feels guilt for all of the suffering he’s caused them.

The Death of Ivan Ilych forces us to question the standards placed on the society we have been socialized into. Ivan rejected his own life’s purpose to fulfill the expectations placed on him by society, and this rejection is what led to the misery of his death. Ivan realizes the true value of human relationships only on his deathbed, when he shows love for his son and family. On his deathbed, he realized the true value of those relationships he intentionally forsook in order to climb society and experienced ultimate regret when he was confronted by the finite nature of all he had worked to attain in his life. Tolstoy actually wrote another short story similar to this called How Much Land Does a Man Need? In which the main character is guaranteed as much land as he can walk around in a day. He eventually exhausted himself to death from running, and in the end the only amount of land he needed was a six foot grave, which conveniently answers the question the title presents. The message is clear in both narratives: do not let the temptation and illusion of materialism and finite goods distract you from what’s truly important.

Imagine having the realization on your deathbed that your life was not lived as it ought to have been lived. It’s arguably the worst realization that one could ever experience. It is the acknowledgement that not only is your opportunity over, your opportunity was wasted and there’s nothing that can be done to rectify that. Whether or not you agree with Tolstoy’s conclusion on what’s important in life, exemplified through Ivan’s final moments, that is not the important takeaway. The important takeaway is the question itself, what do you want to live for? Fortunately for most of us, we are not Ivan Ilych. We have life ahead of us and we can choose how to live. We must not forsake this opportunity to live according what’s truly valuable in life.

Kristian Fors is a student at Utah State University majoring in Finance and Economics and is an opinion columnist for the Utah Statesman. He can be reached at krfors@gmail.com.