The Death of Ivan Ilyich & Three Deaths: Between Meaning and Indifference

     

Reading The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Three Deaths last week, and reflecting on them now on the Monday after Easter, feels especially fitting. This season still carries a quiet invitation to think about death, renewal, and what truly matters in life. Tolstoy’s works felt strikingly close to these themes. In The Death of Ivan Ilyich, he shows the tragedy of a man who builds a “proper” life that never truly feels his own; even the carefully chosen curtains in his home become a sharp symbol of how the desire to belong to a certain social world can quietly turn destructive. What stayed with me most, however, was not simply a criticism of success, but a reminder that external achievements mean very little if one loses sight of what truly matters along the way. 

    Three Deaths, by contrast, feels even more unsettling in its rawness—stripped of comfort, interpretation, or moral resolution. The noblewoman resists, the peasant accepts, and the tree simply falls. Together, the two works offer two faces of death: one as a mirror exposing the emptiness of a life shaped too heavily by outward values, and the other as something bare, indifferent, and beyond human narrative. In the quiet after Easter, Tolstoy’s writing feels especially powerful in asking not only how we die, but how we live.

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    復活祭の後のこの時期に、先週読んだThe Death of Ivan IlyichとThree Deathsを改めて振り返ると、静かに生と死について考えさせられる。『イワン・イリイチの死』は、外的な成功そのものを否定するのではなく、それを追い求める中で内面的な真実を見失うことへの警鐘として響く。一方、『三つの死』は、解釈や救いを与えず、死そのものを淡々と描き出すことで、その無差別で自然な本質を浮かび上がらせる。両者を並べて読むことで、意味を求める人間の営みと、それとは無関係に訪れる死との対比が際立ち、限られた人生の中で何が本当に重要であるのかを静かに問いかけてくる。

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    在復活節後的這個時節回想上週閱讀托爾斯泰的《伊凡・伊里奇之死》與《三死》，特別讓人沉靜地思考生命與死亡的意義。《伊凡・伊里奇之死》所呈現的，不僅是對外在成就的反思，更提醒人們若在追求成功的過程中失去對內心真實的覺察，終將感到空虛；而《三死》則以更為冷靜而近乎無情的筆觸，呈現死亡本身的自然與無差別。兩者對照之下，一者指向生命應有的意義，一者揭示死亡的本質無所依附，在這樣的對比之中，也讓人重新思考，在有限的人生中，何者才是真正重要的。