Just like that Character in Dostoevsky

Lots of people feel they resemble the underground man,
as this blog post attests.

When I was in graduate school, my friend and I used to laugh about one of her high school classmates, a kind of black-wearing, photography-loving poseur who came to her h.s. graduation party, looked at her bookshelf, and declared: "Oh, Dostoevsky's Underground Man. I'm just like that character."

An odd thing to declare, given that the "underground man" (whose name we never learn) is spiteful, vindictive, and lives in a dank basement room where he obsesses about his lack of social status. But maybe if you're a Goth-wannabe 17-year-old boy, it makes sense.

In fact, of course, we are sometimes surprised at how spot on a literary description of a person or an experience can be. This week I taught Chekhov's classic short story "Let Me Sleep" about a 14-year-old nanny who works as a servant all day and desperately tries not to fall asleep all night while singing to the baby and rocking its cradle -- sounds and actions that make her even sleepier. In the classroom, I was having visceral memories of the first evening I was alone with my two children (with no helpful husband at my side, and the "divide and conquer" method of dealing with them thus not available to me). I was singing to the 18-month old in her crib and rocking and nursing the baby, and my song kept trailing off as I began to doze.

Sleeplessness. A part of parenting, and I suppose a part of being a 14-year-old peasant servant. Suddenly Varya's experience was mine -- the efforts to keep my eyelids open, the aggravation at the way sounds meant to soothe a child inevitably soothed me right off to sleep, while the child remained upright in her crib, demanding another song. One of Chekhov's contemporaries found the story to lack verisimilitude -- but he must have been the only one.

Earlier in the term another classic story, translated as "Grief" or "Misery," about the man who longs to tell someone about how his son died, hoping to somehow alleviate the pain of his loss, caused one of my students to declare that she too had lost someone close to her. Chekhov's description, she said, exactly matched her own feelings of grief. (More about "Misery" here.)

This week I am teaching Tolstoy in my other class, and so I reached that point in the term when I return to The Death of Ivan Ilych. I wrote about Tolstoy's short novel in a post not long after my mother's death this spring, and I anticipated that the next time I read the novel, I would feel differently about it.

And I did. My students asserted that the novel is about the fear of death, but from their perspective of late teens and early 20s, that fear is as abstract as it had been for Ivan Ilych.

The syllogism he had learnt from Kiezewetter's Logic: "Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal," had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. That Caius -- man in the abstract -- was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others. [...] "Caius really was mortal, and it was right for him to die; but for me, little Vanya, Ivan Ilych, with all my thoughts and emotions, it's altogether a different matter. It cannot be that I ought to die. That would be too terrible."

As I read Tolstoy's novel, and even as I discussed it with my students, I did have a very vivid sensation: Not my mom. It isn't right that my mother had to die. It is just too terrible.

Tolstoy has a larger point to make, that Ivan Ilych hasn't lived rightly, or righteously. My students agreed that Ivan Ilych was a hypocrite, that he was focused on material goods and not on the state of his soul. And this is certainly true. My favorite student years ago announced that Ivan Ilych was the first case in literature of death-by-interior-decorating. He knocked his side while adjusting a curtain, thinking about the effect his drawing room would have on visitors, and from that point developed the floating kidney, or cancer of the spleen, or whatever physical disease eventually carried him off.

But if we apply Kiezewetter's logic to the case, we realize that Tolstoy is wrong.

Ivan Ilych had to die, whether or not he had lived a righteous life. That's just the way it is. Tolstoy's description of the symptoms -- metallic taste in the mouth, discomfort after meals, wasting thigh muscles and general exhaustion -- sound very much like cancer. But just as one doesn't get cancer from adjusting a curtain, one also cannot beat death by living rightly. Nor by eating more leafy green vegetables. Nor by maintaining a rigorous exercise regimen.

I'm not sure that Tolstoy himself was able to conquer his fear of death merely by writing about it. He did shift the focus for his readers -- it's not really how you die, but how you live, that is important. Tolstoy convinces us, if we didn't know this already. Ivan Ilych spends his entire life deluding himself, and his process of dying involves emerging from those delusions into the light.

Dostoevsky's underground man might have emerged into the light too, given a long enough life. Here's hoping my friend's high school classmate gets there.