Summary of the chapters
The novella begins at the end. In the first chapter Ivan Ilyich Golovin, a member of the Judicial Chamber, is already dead, and the colleagues who read the death notice think first of all of the promotions the vacancy opens. Only after the wake does the narrator tell the whole life, which he calls the simplest, most common and most terrible. What links the two halves is a pair of words that returns without end: agreeable and decorous. At the wake the living enact this decorum before a dead man, and in the biography the dead man builds it up year by year, up to the banal fall from a stepladder while he hangs the curtains of the new house.
Analysis
The novella was published in 1886, after the religious crisis in which Tolstoy came to reject his own novels, among them War and Peace and Anna Karenina.
Chapter I: The Notice and the Wake
Chapter summary
During a break in a court session, Pyotr Ivanovich reads in the Gazette the death notice signed by the widow, Praskovya Fyodorovna Golovina: Ivan Ilyich Golovin died on February 4, 1882. As he had been ill for weeks, each colleague's first thought is what the vacancy means for promotions; Pyotr thinks of having his brother-in-law transferred from Kaluga, to please his wife. Out loud, he says it is a pity.
Analysis
самый факт смерти близкого знакомого вызвал во всех, узнавших про нее, как всегда, чувство радости о том, что умер он, а не я
, the very fact of a close acquaintance's death aroused in everyone who learned of it, as always, a feeling of joy that it was he who had died, and not I.
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Chapter II: Career and Marriage
Chapter summary
The narrator returns to the beginning. Ivan Ilyich Golovin died at forty-five; he was the son of a senior official in Petersburg, the middle son and, as people said, the phoenix of the family.
Analysis
Chapter III: Promotion, House and Fall
Chapter summary
In 1880, passed over for the presidency of a court, Ivan Ilyich quarrels with his superiors, is passed over again in the next appointment, and lives through the hardest year: the salary is not enough, he falls into debt, and everyone forgets him. He spends the summer on his brother-in-law's estate to save money and, without work, feels for the first time an unbearable anguish; he decides to go to Petersburg in search of a post paying five thousand rubles, in any branch, outside the ministry that did not know how to value him.
The trip works out: a change of leadership favors his friend Zakhar Ivanovich, who gives him a post in the Ministry of Justice, two grades above his colleagues and with the five thousand. The anger disappears, the couple makes up, and Ivan Ilyich goes ahead to the new city, where he finds an apartment and sees to the decoration himself, with old furniture bought cheaply that gives everything a noble air; he thinks about it even during court sessions, and he himself hangs the curtains.
Analysis
Reading of the Chapter Block
Analysis