What It Is
The position in which Ivan Ilyich Golovin, ill, feels least pain: lying on the sofa, with his legs raised, first on a chair and a cushion, then on the shoulders of the servant Gerasim, who holds them for whole nights. It is the physical image of the book's only relationship without a lie, and it is also, for the household, a sick man's whim.
Where It Appears
In chapter VII, after the chamber pot, Gerasim takes the master to the sofa and, at his request, puts his legs on a chair; Ivan Ilyich says he feels better with his legs higher, asks for a cushion, and while Gerasim holds them the pain almost disappears. From then on he calls him to hold his legs on his shoulders and to talk, and Gerasim spends nights like this, saying he sleeps afterward. The phrase he says then explains the position:
Все умирать будем. Отчего же не потрудиться?, We will all die. Why shouldn't I make the effort?
In chapter VIII Praskovya Fyodorovna Golovina complains to the doctor that her husband does not obey and lies in a position that surely harms him, with his legs up, and tells how he makes Gerasim hold them. The doctor smiles with affectionate contempt: sick people invent these things.
In chapter IX the wife wants to send Gerasim away and the sick man does not let her. After the opium and the black bag (The Black Bag), he wakes with Gerasim dozing at the foot of the bed, calm and patient, and his thin legs, in stockings, on the servant's shoulders. He sends him away, takes his legs down and only then, alone, weeps:
Он плакал о беспомощности своей, о своем ужасном одиночестве, о жестокости людей, о жестокости Бога, об отсутствии Бога., He wept for his helplessness, for his terrible loneliness, for the cruelty of people, for the cruelty of God, for the absence of God.
What It Means
The position is Compassion and Charity reduced to a gesture of the body, without words of consolation and without a lie. The physical and moral relief arrive together in chapter VII: with his legs raised he barely feels pain, and it is only with Gerasim that he feels well. The wife and the doctor of chapter VIII see a caprice in the same position, and so the scene separates the two ways of caring that the book opposes: that of those who treat the illness and that of those who accompany the death.
The weight of the legs, which Gerasim carries without complaint, is the very thing the family avoids: the body that smells, that soils, that does not improve. Two readings of the position fit the text. In one, it is only a nursing measure that relieves a real pain, and the symbol lies only in the one who agrees to hold it up. In the other, it is the inverted image of Ivan Ilyich's life, which climbed the slope in the eyes of others and went down inside, as he says in chapter IX: in the end, the one who holds him up is the servant of the humblest standing in the house. The weeping of chapter IX comes when he takes his legs off the shoulders and is left alone.
Relationships
- Standard themes: Compassion and Charity, Truth and Lies.
- Themes of the work: Compassion and Charity, Truth and Lies.
- Characters: Ivan Ilyich Golovin, Gerasim, Praskovya Fyodorovna Golovina.
- Neighboring symbols: the black bag, the opium dream from which he wakes with his legs on Gerasim's shoulders.