The book begins at the end: in the first chapter Ivan Ilyich is already in his coffin, and from the first page the reader knows how the life to be recounted ends. The protagonist is Ivan Ilyich Golovin, a member of the Judicial Chamber, who dies at forty-five in February 1882, and what drives the story is the question the illness opens: whether the correct, agreeable, and decorous life he led was good for anything in the face of death. The frame is the wake, seen by a colleague; the rest is the life of the dead man, told in order, from the School of Jurisprudence to the last hour, in a time that shrinks along with the sick man: years, months, a day, a night, weeks, three days, and an instant.
Chapters I to III: The Wake and Life
In the great courthouse building, during the break in a session, Pyotr Ivanovich reads the death notice for Ivan Ilyich in the Gazette, and each colleague first thinks of promotions; at the wake, Pyotr crosses himself, hears a question from the widow about the pension, attends the mass without looking at the dead man, receives from Gerasim the only frank sentence about death, and goes off to play Vint (chapter I). The narrator goes back to the beginning: the son of a privy councillor, Ivan Ilyich studies at the School of Jurisprudence, becomes an examining magistrate when the new institutions arrive, marries Praskovya Fyodorovna for agreeableness and propriety, and when the marriage ceases to be agreeable, takes refuge in his work, while losing three children in seventeen years (chapter II). Passed over in 1880, he secures in Petersburg a post paying five thousand rubles, sets up the new house on his own, falls from the little stepladder while showing the upholsterer the drape of the curtains, and life again runs lightly, between the court, Vint, and his daughter's courtship with Petrishchev (chapter III).
Chapters IV to VII: The Illness and the Lie
A strange taste in his mouth and a weight in his side spoil his mood and the family table; the famous doctor treats the case the way he used to treat defendants, his wife tells acquaintances that he does not follow the treatment, and one night at Vint he loses at Slam without caring about his partner (chapter IV). The look of his brother-in-law leads him to the mirror, a night of hope about the appendix ends when he blows out the candle, and he understands that it is a matter of life and death; his wife kisses him, and he hates her (chapter V). The syllogism about Caius applies to Caius and not to him; the court and the decorated room no longer hide the pain, and before the curtain he thinks he has lost his life as in a robbery (chapter VI). In the third month, the greatest torment is everyone's lie, that he is only ill and not dying; only Gerasim does not lie, holds his legs up on his shoulders, and says that everyone will die (chapter VII).
Chapters VIII to XII: Death
A whole day of doctors ends with the family going to see Sarah Bernhardt; before leaving, everyone falls silent when they look at the patient, and Lisa breaks the silence by looking at her watch (chapter VIII). That same night, after the theater, under the effect of opium, he feels himself pushed into a black sack, wakes with his legs on Gerasim's shoulders, weeps over the cruelty and the absence of God, and the voice of the soul asks him whether he lived well; he dismisses the hypothesis that he has not lived as he should (chapter IX). Two weeks with his face to the wall, living only on memories that run back to childhood, life like a stone falling (chapter X). Before Gerasim's face the suspicion arises that his whole life was not that; Petrishchev asks for Lisa's hand; Ivan Ilyich confesses and takes communion at his wife's request, and her question, whether he does not feel better, gives him back his hatred (chapter XI). Three days of screaming in the black sack, where the certainty of a good life holds him; an hour before death he falls into the hole and sees the light, his son kisses his hand, he pities the boy and his wife, says "let it pass" instead of "forgive," looks for the fear of death and does not find it; for those present, the agony lasts another two hours (chapter XII).