What It Is
The card game of the circle of Ivan Ilyich Golovin: whist (вист) of youth in the provinces, in chapter II, and vint (винт) of maturity, from chapter I to chapter IV, played by four, with partners who do not shout, and to which the narrator gives the status of the only true joy of his life. It is also what his colleagues do not cancel on the day of the funeral mass held with the body present, and the first pleasure the illness takes from him.
Винт also means screw, and the verb of the game, повинтить (to play a round of vint, in chapter I), shares the root of the verb that chapter XI uses for the new pain: стало винтить, it began to screw (our translation).
Where It Appears
In chapter I, on the stairs of the dead man's house, Schwartz winks at Pyotr Ivanovich as if to say the dead man made a poor arrangement, and stops at the top because he wants to settle where they will play that night; when the widow takes Piotr with her, Schwartz's look laments the lost vint and proposes that they play five-handed. Piotr leaves the wake straight for Fyodor Vasilyevich's house and sits in as the fifth player by the end of the first rubber.
In chapter II, an examining magistrate in a new city, Ivan Ilyich begins to play whist, at which he is skilled and almost always wins; the game, the conversations and the dinners fill his life along with his work.
In chapter III, in the new house, he is bored only in the evenings, when he could be playing, and the narrator places the game at the top:
Радости служебные были радости самолюбия; радости общественные были радости тщеславия; но настоящие радости Ивана Ильича были радости игры в винт., The joys of service were joys of self-regard; social joys were joys of vanity; but Ivan Ilyich's true joys were the joys of playing vint.
In chapter IV the game marks the illness. Praskovya Fyodorovna Golovina tells acquaintances that he stays at vint until one in the morning (he retorts that it happened only once, at Piotr Ivanovich's house, and she recalls the evening before, with Shebek), and any bad card knocks him down. One night, with seven diamonds and his partner Mikhail Mikhailovich backing him, everything calls for a slam; the pain and the taste in his mouth make it absurd to rejoice over it, the partner sweeps the tricks toward him to spare his arm, Ivan Ilyich gets distracted and loses the slam by three tricks, and sees that his partner suffers without it mattering to him.
In chapter XI the word of the game comes back to describe pain: something new begins to screw in, to shoot, to squeeze the breath.
What It Means
The game is the purest form of the agreeable and the decorous: fixed rules, good partners, small gains, no surprises. That is why it serves the living in chapter I to keep the colleague's death out of the evening, and why it is the first screen to fall in chapter IV, when pain sits down at the table with him.
The slam lost in chapter IV is the first scene in which Ivan Ilyich's indifference turns against him: the partner suffers and it makes no difference to him, and he realizes with horror that it makes no difference. It is the same indifference of the colleagues who, in chapter I, play on the night of the mass, and the one he will find in the doctor and the family. Two readings of the game fit here. In one, vint is innocent, a measured pleasure that only the illness spoils. In the other, it is the image of the life the narrator condemns, because it is a joy that requires partners and not persons, and the absence of pity he feels at the table is already a symptom, and not only an effect, of the illness.
Relationships
- Standard themes: Appearance and Reality, Compassion and Charity.
- Themes of the work: Appearance and Reality, Compassion and Charity.
- Characters: Ivan Ilyich Golovin, Pyotr Ivanovich, Schwartz, Praskovya Fyodorovna Golovina.
- Neighboring symbols: the decorated room, the other decorous pleasure of the new house.