Who He Is
Pyotr Ivanovich is a colleague of Ivan Ilyich Golovin at the Judicial Chamber and the first to learn of the death: in chapter I, leafing through the newly arrived Gazette during a break in a session, he reads the death notice and announces it to the others. He had been the dead man's classmate at the School of Jurisprudence, had known him as a cheerful schoolboy and later as a card partner, and considered himself in his debt. The whole wake, the longest part of chapter I, is told through his eyes, and that is why he is the reader's doorway into the book: the first to look at the dead man is a living person who does not want to think about death.
Trajectory
In his office, his first thought is to ask for a transfer for his brother-in-law in Kaluga, which would please his wife; aloud he says he had expected it and that it is a pity. The narrator generalizes what the whole group feels:
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.
He tells his wife the news at dinner, puts on his tailcoat and goes to the dead man's house. On the stairs, Schwartz winks at him, as if to say the dead man had made a poor arrangement, and stops at the top to set up the game of Vint. In the dead man's room he does not know what to do, crosses himself and bows slightly, looks at the face and reads there a rebuke to the living, which seems out of place to him; he crosses himself again, too quickly for decorum, and leaves. The sight of Schwartz refreshes him. Praskovya Fyodorovna Golovina leads him to the pink room (The Decorated Room), where he struggles with an ottoman with broken springs, and, on hearing that the dead man screamed for three days, feels fear for himself, a fear that soon passes:
ему на помощь пришла обычная мысль, что это случилось с Иваном Ильичом, а не с ним и что с ним этого случиться не должно и не может, the usual thought came to his aid: that this had happened to Ivan Ilyich, and not to him, and that it neither should nor could happen to him.
Calmed, he asks about the details of the agony with interest, answers the widow's question about the pension in the same tone in which she asks it, and leaves. In the dining room he meets Lisa, who greets him as if he were guilty of something, and Vasya, so like his father that he reminds him of the Ivan Ilyich of the School of Jurisprudence. He attends the mass without looking at the dead man and is among the first to leave. In the anteroom, Gerasim tells him that everyone ends up there. Outside, he breathes the clean air with pleasure and reaches Fyodor Vasilyevich's house in time to sit in as the fifth player.
After chapter I he appears only in passing. In chapter IV, Praskovya Fyodorovna tells acquaintances that her husband stays at vint until one in the morning, and he retorts that it happened only once, at Pyotr Ivanovich's house. In chapter V, after the brother-in-law's look, Ivan Ilyich decides to go to his house, because he has a doctor friend, and it is through this friend that he hears the explanation about the appendix that gives him a night of hope before the discovery.
Themes Embodied
Pyotr Ivanovich embodies Death seen from outside, through the living man who does not want to think about it. Each of his gestures in chapter I is a form of decorum that shields him: the brother-in-law's calculation, the cross at the right angle, the hand pressed at the right moment, the customary idea that returns death to Ivan Ilyich, the card game that is not canceled. It is the same defense the dead man will use against Caius's syllogism in chapter VI, and the book shows it first in a healthy man so that the reader will recognize it later in the sick one.
What he wants is to fulfill his obligations without their costing him the evening; what he fears appears in an instant, when death stops belonging to someone else; what he knows is the script of each situation, and the narrator insists that he knows it (crossing oneself never hurts, pressing a hand, sighing, saying "believe me"). Where he errs, the text leaves to the reader: he thinks fear is resolved by the customary idea, and the whole book that follows is the story of a man in whom that idea has stopped working.
Divergent Readings
He can be read as a caricature of the indifferent colleague or as the ordinary man the narrator does not condemn, and chapter I sustains both. There is the brother-in-law's calculation, the ottoman, the pension and the card game; but there is also the debt he feels to the dead man, the trip to the wake, the real fear before the account of the screams, and the averted gaze during the mass, which is uncomfortable rather than contemptuous. The narrator puts him inside the "as always" that covers everyone who learned of the death, and with that it covers the reader too.
Relationships
- Ivan Ilyich Golovin: colleague from the School of Jurisprudence and the Chamber, vint partner (chapter I, chapter IV), who seeks him out because of the doctor friend (chapter V).
- Schwartz: the colleague with whom he arranges the game at the wake and on whom he leans against the gloom (chapter I).
- Praskovya Fyodorovna Golovina: the widow who asks him for advice about the pension (chapter I).
- Gerasim: the servant who answers him about death on the way out (chapter I).
- Lisa and Vasya: the dead man's children, whom he meets before the mass (chapter I).