For Honors JSEM LLTM
“Death of Ivan Ilych”:
‘one of the most ruinous, false ideas implanted in me by my upbringing and society’ (1, 312).
I remember once, after much arduous and vain labor on my nails, I asked Dubkov, whose nails were always unbelievable neat, whether his nails were always like that and how me managed to make them so. Dubkov answered: “So long as I have been aware of myself, I have never done anything to make them this way and I cannot imagine how a decent man’s nails could possibly be any different.” This answer greatly irritated me, for I had not yet learned that one of the chief conditions for comme ii faut was the secrecy concerning the labor by which comme ii faut was attained.
The narrator only now understands what he failed as a youth to grasp: Dubkov toiled ceaselessly on his nails. His friend was perceptive enough, though, to know that the for becoming is complete insouciance about one’s Becoming demands careful observance of demanding and meticulous rules for behavior, the most important of which is the rule against revealing that one is carefully following a set of rules. The irony here is that a individual must carefully contrive the illusion of being unaffected and genuine. What prevented the young Nikolenka from ever successfully becoming was that he missed this essential requirement: he wanted too much to be and his obvious exertions and frustrations made him We encounter, in short, the Toлstoyan paradox of effortful effortlessness and contrived naturalness, though rather than pertaining to the city or art, it is applied to the creation of an individual’s public persona.
Escher’s drawing is of a piece of paper pinned to a table with drawing pins. On the paper is a sketch, and this drawing within a drawing initiates the theme of self- reference that is likewise the theme of the drawing within the drawing: A right hand sketches a sleeve which is, at this point, a mere outline. A little further to the right the drawing is more or less complete, a left hand emerging from the outlined sleeve in such detail that this drawn hand has come right up out of the flat surface of the paper. In its turn, this finished left hand is sketching the cuff from which the right hand is emerging, obscuring any clear distinction of which hand is the original and real and which is the product of art. The viewer vainly tries to establish which hand has given rise to which, which is the artist’s hand and which is the hand created.
The viewer can find no “high” and “low” in the work, it’s a “strange loop” in which the viewer returns over and over to the starting point. The work of self-creation entails an autonomous part or domain of the self that can act on and alter the whole, in other words it depends on the divisibility of the individual into an “original” self and a separated and objectified “new” self. The “divided individual” is, however, a logical and etymological contradiction. Self-creation and self-fashioning are inherently paradoxical and problematical concepts because they lapse into the infinite regress suggested by Escher’s 1948 print, (see fig. 1).’
Tolstoy critiqued what was, in his day and in his circle, the reigning assumption about human personality, viz., that it was a fluid process that could be artfully changed and used instrumentally to achieve a desired end. This critique of working on the self is a subtle variation on the discussion above of the hazards of consciously acting in the world, and expands and refines further the concept of Tolstoy’s doctrine of nonresistance to evil. We are masters of our fate by dint of being masters of our personality, capable of willfully creating a public self designed to further our aims. EVERYTHING IS FOR SHOW, FOR OTHERS TO SEE, NOTHING SINCERE, NOTHING AUTHENTIC
Most critics miss, I think, the real meaning of the line from “Death of Ivan Ilych” that assures the reader that ‘the past story of the life of Ivan Ilych was the most simple and common and the most horrible.’ Judging by the story, Ivan’s ordinariness and simplicity are manifestations of his life-long devotion to the ideals of, as the story repeats over and over, “принято и приятно ‘properness and pleasantness” — or, in a second macaronic formulation, “comme ii faut’-ность” ‘comme-il-faut-ness’ (12, 68). Of course, these words are intensely ironic since we are meant to understand that what is “proper and pleasant” or “simple and ordinary” to society is essentially improper and unpleasant in God’s eyes. Ivan’s life is a sham produced by his incessant attempts to alter himself to suit his ends and to please his peers and superiors.
The story of his life is really the story of a series of selves, each perfectly suited to the latest requirements of society. For instance, p.5301 in LLTM: