How strange everything is. And this hole in the canvas depicts the moon. And this girl, first white, then blue. And these people, chasing after her with daggers, instead of dragging her through the long dark panels on the sides, for some reason sang with this girl for a long time. And most importantly, why do people sitting in the dark looking at this artificial life so often shouting bravo and sometimes even interrupting the action with these shouts?
And if the whole thing is such a playful lie, you could probably do the same? And now Natasha Rostova, introduced to Anatole Kuragin, no longer feels the bullshit and lies going on on stage, but feels that it is getting hard to breathe. She is even afraid that when she turns her back, she will take his bare neck and kiss it. Sin has already infiltrated this hut.
But until the poison penetrated her soul, the opera seemed to Rostova some kind of big and heavy lie.
Strange thing: Ivan Ilyich from another famous text by Tolstoy, only when the poison got into the body, or rather, he was born in it, only then all the life around him seemed to him a big and heavy lie. It’s like he’s lying and watching a clumsy opera that never ends. True, they do not sing there. However, this theater no longer has a chance to leave its box.
Another oddity: there is no definitive diagnosis in the text, as Ivan Ilyich died.
“What exactly was it? “The doctors couldn’t tell.”
“Something strange”, “how strange everything”, “another strange thing”. This is called elimination. One such technique: highlighting an object or event from a familiar context. Now the whole world seems strange to Ivan Ilyich.
Ivan Ilyich is now watching an “opera” called “Illness”. A disease that no one in the story mentions by name. But we can almost certainly say that Ivan Ilyich died of cancer somewhere in the abdominal cavity, in the area of the cecum or right kidney.
February 4 is World Cancer Day. This is a global problem, but there are now many methods and practices on how to solve it in each particular case. Ivan Ilyich does not have such an opportunity. He hit his side once, fussed and decorated a new apartment, thought it would hurt, hurt, and stop. But something great and majestic within him emerged stronger than his hopes and himself. Be anonymous.
The envious Eduard Limonov will one day say (by the way, he also later got cancer): “I once carefully read The Death of Ivan Ilyich. There was nothing but tedious curiosity. The truth is that the glorification of an ordinary person can never be successful. There is nothing interesting in him in an ordinary person. It deserves neither pity nor admiration. That’s why it’s a failure.”
I reread this story before I wrote my text. This, of course, is a text about victory.
But this time, for some reason, I drew attention to the theater theme. Everything is “sewn” by him.
The forensic inspector Petrishchev looks at Lizonka (his daughter), and the first thing that appears in connection with her appearance in the story is Ivan Ilyich’s conversation with his wife: “Should we not embark or set them on troikas? yield.”
Or, Ivan Ilyich goes to his office to stay with the death growing inside him (and we know his name), lays down and “is alone with him again, eye to eye with him, but there’s nothing to do with him”. “Just look at it and cool.” But even here the theater will not leave him alone.
After dinner, at seven o’clock, Praskovya Fyodorovna, dressed as she was in the evening, with her plump breasts and traces of powder on her face, entered her room. In the morning she reminded him of their trip to the theater. Sarah Bernhardt was coming, and there was a box she insisted they get. She has now forgotten that and her outfit bothered her. But she hid her insult when she remembered that she had insisted that they take a box and go, because it is an educational aesthetic pleasure for children.
Sarah Bernard won’t help.
Why? – the first question that a person who has heard of a terrible diagnosis asks himself. “Have you ever asked yourself the question: why me?” – they ask in an interview with our contemporary. He answers: “We all ask ourselves this question.”
Another, who has an oncological disease (the same diagnosis, by the way, was given to Ivan Ilyich), and this time happily overcame it, confirms: “I went out and smoked three cigarettes in a row, although the doctors forbade it. This. My hysteria started later. My mother died of cancer. And there was more anger than anger inside of me. I cried a lot and asked questions: “Why me? What is this for me?”
My cecum? Kidney, he told himself. “It’s not about the cecum, it’s not about the kidney, it’s about life and… death.” Yes, life was like that and now it goes, goes and I can’t hold it. Yes. Why are you kidding yourself? Isn’t it obvious to anyone but me that I’m dying, and the only question is the number of weeks, days – now, maybe. There was light, but now there is darkness. I was here and now I am there! Where?” He was cold, gasping. He only heard his heartbeat.
Ivan Ilyich looks like a man who is not used to the stage but is pushed into the narrow corridor backstage by the will of fate, whispers to him “your exit is near”, and he sees through the gap a huge, terrible dark hall on the screen, hears the hum of voices, comes out soon but does not know the games, they did not give him the text, his mouth is dry (or rather, a nasty metallic taste), soon everything will begin, that is, it will end. Life is gone and death is coming. And now the life gone, think it was never lived.
… My friend recently told me about a funny incident that happened to him when he came to the old apartment that he inherited from his relatives a long time ago and had to be “smashed”.
During the day there is an incredible silence in the area: deep courtyards, impassable dead ends, as if you are behind the scenes of life.
And now he separates cabinets and cupboards, and there is a constant feeling of the presence of relatives who are now dead. Fragrances are preserved, some other perfumes, clothes. Books with scent. And he remembers how I told him about the laminality of space. About how the abandoned dwelling or the large empty corridors and halls affect us (here, of course, about the abandoned dwelling). And so he wanders from room to room, walking back and forth, and then opens the dressing room door and almost gives his soul to God.
“Because instead of going into the closet, in front of me is a black, messy, disfigured, glowing-in-the-dark window with a hideous, devilish look that leaps at me. Naturally I scream and feel a cramp from my knees to my top … Usually there was a mirror on the floor, a sliding door. I wouldn’t usually close it there but here I apparently moved it mechanically. And so I jumped myself out of the twilight. Basically, I almost scared myself to death.
This is what Ivan Ilyich lived on himself.
From a dark, mirrored room, death suddenly leapt upon himself, and all his life lies and nonsense sprang out, but he did not disappear.
And for the last three days of his life he screams with a long and terrible cry, but black, disheveled, his eyes glow in the dark, do not crumble and do not go away.
“From that moment on, that incessant crying began for three days, so terrible that it was impossible to hear it from behind two doors without horror. The moment he answered his wife, he realized that he was lost, there was no return, the end had come, the end had come, and the doubt remained a doubt.
– Wow! Wow! Wu! shouted in different tones. “I don’t want!” she started shouting. – and so he continued to shout at the letter “u”.
But Leo Tolstoy would not have been Leo Tolstoy, if he had left his hero here, Daniil Andreev, Zinaida Gippius, would have been another sharp and intelligent deca.
NO. The abyss does not consume it.
What Ivan Ilyich is experiencing is like enlightenment. All of a sudden everything becomes clear to him. Open and transparent. All phenomena reveal their true meaning. the curtain opens. The light floods the whole of Ivan Ilyich. And surprisingly, that’s when the drama ends.
No more drama, no tricks – just light and meaning.
“What happened to him happened to him the moment you thought you were going forward in a carriage but thought you were going backwards and suddenly you saw the right direction.”
And then, perhaps for the first time, Ivan Ilyich suddenly took pity on his wife and son, who entered the dying man’s room to kiss his hand.
He wanted to say “I’m sorry again” but said “Forget it” and waved his hand knowing that when he couldn’t recover he would understand that those who needed it.
And here the most surprising thing happens. From that moment on, Ivan Ilyich loses his name and surname. “She”, “she”, “she”, “she”, but now they call him in the text – and there is no longer the universal disheveled dark fear. He feels that there is no death. There is light in the place of death.
The dazzling light we all long to see.
“Jump.” And the nameless man, who had suffered so much, who promised no samurai Eduard Limonov that he would become superman, is finally released.
The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the editors’ position.