"God! Oh, look at him, God!"
The drama gains quite a special artistic flavour by the use of the peasant dialect.
"I ransacked my notebooks in order to write The Power of Darkness," Tolstoy told M. Paul Boyer.
The unexpected images, flowing from the lyrical yet humorous soul of the Russian people, have a swing and a vigour about them beside which images of the more literary quality seem tame and colourless. Tolstoy revelled in them; we feel, in reading the play, that the artist while writing it amused himself by noting these expressions, these turns of thought; the comic side of them by no means escapes him,[15] even while the apostle is mourning amidst the dark places of the human soul.
While he was studying the people, and sending into their darkness a ray of light from his station above them, he was also devoting two tragic romances to the still darker night of the middle classes and the wealthy. At this period the dramatic form was predominant over his ideas of art. The Death of Ivan Ilyitch and The Kreutzer Sonata are both true dramas of the inner soul, of the soul turned upon itself and concentrated upon itself, and in The Kreutzer Sonata it is the hero of the drama himself who unfolds it by narration.
The Death of Ivan Ilyitch (1884-86) has impressed the French public as few Russian works have done. At the beginning of this study I mentioned that I had witnessed the sensation caused by this book among the middle-class readers in the French provinces, a class apparently indifferent to literature and art. I think the explanation lies in the fact that the book represents, with a painful realism, a type of the average, mediocre man; a conscientious functionary, without religion, without ideals, almost without thought; the man who is absorbed in his duties, in his mechanical life, until the hour of his death, when he sees with terror that he has not lived. Ivan Ilyitch is the representative type of the European bourgeoisie of 1880 which reads Zola, goes to hear Bernhardt, and, without holding any faith, is not even irreligious; for it does not take the trouble either to believe or to disbelieve; it simply never thinks of such matters.
In the violence of its attacks, alternately bitter and almost comic, upon the world in general, and marriage in particular, the Death of Ivan Ilyitch was the first of a new series of works; it was the forerunner of the still more morose and unworldly Kreutzer Sonata and Resurrection. There is a lamentable yet laughable emptiness in this life (as there is in thousands and thousands of lives), with its grotesque ambitions, its wretched gratification of vanity, "always better than spending the evening opposite one's wife"; with its weariness and hatred of the official career; its privileges, and the embitterment which they cause; and its one real pleasure: whist. This ridiculous life is lost for a cause yet more ridiculous—a fall from a ladder, one day when Ivan wished to hang a curtain over the drawing-room window. The lie of life. The lie of sickness. The lie of the well-to-do doctor, who thinks only of himself. The lie of the family, whom illness disgusts. The lie of the wife, who professes devotion, and calculates how she will live when her husband is dead. The universal lie, against which is set only the truth of a compassionate servant, who does not try to conceal his condition from the dying man, and helps him out of brotherly kindness. Ivan Ilyitch, "full of an infinite pity for himself," weeps over his loneliness and the egoism of men; he suffers horribly, until the day on which he perceives that his past life has been a lie, and that he can repair that lie. Immediately all becomes clear—an hour before his death. He no longer thinks of himself; he thinks of his family; he pities them; he must die and rid them of himself.
"Where are you, Pain? Here.... Well, you have only to persist.—And Death, where is Death? He did not find it. In place of Death he saw only a ray of light. 'It is over,' said some one.—He heard these words and repeated them to himself. 'Death no longer exists,' he told himself."
In The Kreutzer Sonata there is not even this "ray of light." It is a ferocious piece of work; Tolstoy lashes out at society like a wounded beast avenging itself for what it has suffered. We must not forget that the story is the confession of a human brute, who has taken life, and who is poisoned by the virus of jealousy. Tolstoy hides himself behind his leading character. We certainly find his own ideas, though heightened in tone, in these furious invectives against hypocrisy in general; the hypocrisy of the education of women, of love, of marriage—marriage, that "domestic prostitution"; the hypocrisy of the world, of science, of physicians—those "sowers of crime." But the hero of the book impels the writer into an extraordinary brutality of expression, a violent rush of carnal images—all the excesses of a luxurious body—and, by reaction into all the fury of asceticism, the fear and hatred of the passions; maledictions hurled in the face of life by a monk of the Middle Ages, consumed with sensuality. Having written the book Tolstoy himself was alarmed:
"I never foresaw at all," he said in the Epilogue to the Kreutzer Sonata,"[16] that in writing this book a rigorous logic would bring me where I have arrived. My own conclusions terrified me at first, and I was tempted to reject them; but it was impossible for me to refuse to hear the voice of my reason and my conscience."