The Man Above My Mantle

Yes, it’s Leo Tolstoy. Although the replica portrait artist strayed from the original, I was thrilled to find it in excellent condition, four feet tall and befitting my Victorian house.

I am one of the brave who read “War and Peace”, but as impressive as that novel is, it is “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” that remained with me twenty years later. Standing before this painting at an auction, I knew it was mine before I made a bid. Leo would take a starring role in my living room, a daily reminder of Ivan Ilyich and his final thoughts.

Whatever you think of Tolstoy’s politics, religion, and revolutionary thinking (he was very much ahead of his time), and despite his Russian themes meant for the time that he lived, he captured a universal and timeless situation with Ivan Ilyich. The tragedy is that Ilyich only realized the mediocrity of his life as he waited to die.

“…he suddenly asked himself: ‘What if my entire life, my entire conscious life, simply was not the real thing?’
It occurred to him that what had seemed utterly inconceivable before–that he had not lived the kind of life he should have–might in fact be true. It occurred to him that those scarcely perceptible impulses of his to protest what people of high rank considered good, vague impulses which he had always suppressed, might have been precisely what mattered, and all the rest not been the real thing.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

I’ve wondered if Tolstoy knew as he wrote this novella that far into the future, people would still spend their lives seeking to camouflage themselves with the etiquette and material trappings of the middle class. Maybe he foresaw the waste of the identical houses in the suburbs with the regulated lawns, the silent but vicious competition of superior possessions, the pride of achieving respectability by achieving slightly above expectation.

Or maybe it is more disappointing that society and religion’s restraints have not changed in 120 years. Ilyich, by the standards of his time, did almost everything right. He obeyed the rules, and when he chose not to, he was careful to be discreet to save public embarrassment. He was accepted at the tables of the honorable of his class. He earned the esteem and respect of his peers, if not his family.

Tolstoy questions the wisdom of following the rules, living to please others, or blindly adhering to creeds that stifle those trivial impulses, begging to be expressed. Those impulses, so often reshaped, homogenized, or shamed into nonexistence, are what would bring individuality and diversity to our lives if only we could realize their value.

Ilyich’s “friends” and family seem to have little sentimentality for his life or his death. It is logical, following Tolstoy’s theory, because Ilyich suppressed his true self all of his life. No one knew him, so he could be neither truly loved nor missed. Tolstoy managed to seize the apathetic atmosphere of this death, reminding us that the people around us we strive to impress are mostly concerned with their own lives. Grief is an annoying duty they display while focusing on a future card game or visit to the theater.

Visitors to my home ask me why Tolstoy’s portrait is so prominent in my main living room. Of course, part of it is because it was auctioned off and fit the space so perfectly. Maybe if some other painting had been available, I would have found justification for its placement, too. However, I feel it was fate. I look at it daily and remember Ivan Ilyich, dying, and realizing doing the right thing was the ultimate wrong.