Death is Funny

Death is funny. Not "ha-ha" funny, as we used to say when I was a kid, but funny odd, strange.

I spend a lot of time thinking about death.

That seems like a fairly obvious statement. After all, I teach Russian literature. When my now-sister-in-law heard that her brother was dating a Russian lit specialist, she famously asked: "Is she deep, or just depressed?" The answer is: neither. But even so, death is a big part of my life.

Felix Lembersky, "Dusk: Matryona's House"
Staraya Ladoga 1960-63

Writing my final exam bonus questions for my intro "Masterpieces of Russian Lit" course this spring -- questions about works we hadn't gotten to in class, but which I'd encouraged students to read anyway -- I began to wonder about my syllabus and the readings I choose. Here are the questions.

Extra credit points:  

1.     How and why does Mitya die in the story “Mitya’s Love”? (1+2) 

2.     How and why does Matryona die in the story “Matryona’s Home”? (1+2)

And here are the answers:

1. Suicide. He shoots himself, partially because he finally receives a letter from his beloved in which she admits that she has left him for a dissolute life in the theater, is sleeping with her acting mentor, and no longer loves him. Partially because he has sworn that he will kill himself if he doesn't hear from her, and his "body memory," as Saul Morson calls it in reference to Anna Karenina, compels him to pull the gun out of the drawer of the bedside table. Partially because he is disillusioned and has indulged in a crass sexual encounter that sullied his romantic view of love forever and took away his will to live.

2. She is hit by a train at a railroad crossing while trying to help her drunken relatives move a part of her house which they have disassembled.

Daniil Kharms, early 1930s
Photo credit: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images

After my revelation (that virtually every text we read in Masterpieces included suicide or murder or ended in death), I decided to change up my syllabus for the autumn semester and use some of the new translations of Daniil Kharms stories that have been getting such good press. After all, his stories are supposed to be humorous.

But then I remembered that in the story "The Old Womаn," old women keep falling out of the window. Absurd, maybe, but the old women tend to die when they hit the pavement. And try as you might not to read his other story, the one about people disappearing from their rooms, as political allegory, you can't help thinking about that awkward historical episode of mass arrests, murders, and deportations known as "the Great Terror." Absurdist literature, or realism?

I'm not so sure about Kharms for next year.

I will admit that as a professor of Russian lit, I sometimes feel self-conscious. One time this autumn I was standing in the front of the classroom, and I noticed that I was wearing all black. Again. And I made an offhand comment: "it's not that I'm in mourning or anything. This is just my wardrobe."

Less than six weeks later, my mother was diagnosed with leukemia, and last week she died. Now I am in mourning.

It's kind of handy -- among other things, many of the black items of clothing in my closet were given to me by my mother, so I can honor her memory while also following convention. And given my usual attire, anyone who doesn't know that I've lost my mother doesn't even think twice when they see me.

The fiction I teach includes the famous Tolstoy story The Death of Ivan Ilych. I tell my students that Tolstoy has given us the punch line in the title, so that as we are reading, we think more about the process, his life, than we do about the protagonist's death.

We also have very little respect for his family members as Ivan Ilych lies in his sickbed -- they are annoyed with him for interfering with their social calendars, and for not following his doctors' orders, and in the end for moaning a lot. As readers, we judge the family for being insensitive -- but then we realize that before he became ill, Ivan Ilych was as shallow as they were. And we also wonder how we ourselves would act in the face of a terminal illness -- or we remember how we have acted, if we've had a similar experience.

Tolstoy wants us to think about how one should live, and how one should die. But his negative example of how to handle the process of dying, and the death itself, is not really helpful in real life. My literary sources don't tell me how to prepare for death. Is it even possible? Tolstoy was terrified of death, and I don't blame him. It is messy, and frustrating, and even when expected, it is sudden. And then it is over, and there is a hole in your life. And how do you fill that hole?

One thing I know. When I became a mother, I perceived Tolstoy's Anna Karenina very differently. Teaching that novel as a woman with children was just different than teaching it as a woman without. My feelings about the novel changed, too, when a beloved relative committed suicide.

Literature may portray the human condition, but we also live the human condition, and it seems like I understand more and more about it the longer I live and the more I teach. I imagine that The Death of Ivan Ilych, and other texts as well, will feel different in the coming academic year.

In 2012, my colleague and I dedicated a volume we published about Chekhov to our mothers, who both loved the theater. We quoted from a February 1893 letter from Anton Chekhov to his friend Aleksei Suvorin. Chekhov was definitely deep (and probably depressed), but he has a way of describing things that can really make you feel. In that letter to Suvorin, he writes:

Солнце светит вовсю. Пахнет весной. Но пахнет не в носу, а где-то в душе, между грудью и животом. 

 The sun is shining brightly. It smells of spring. You sense it not in your nose, but somewhere in your soul, between your chest and your belly. 

It's good to think of springtime, of growth, of that sensation of life that goes on. That, maybe, is what literature teaches you -- to look for the soul somewhere within, to listen and to smell and to feel the rays of the sun and the way the seasons progress. Even in the face of death.