Empathy vs. Resentment Theme Analysis

In many ways, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a story about failures of empathy. As Ivan’s health deteriorates, his family members come to see him as a burden, viewing his illness as an impediment to their everyday happiness. Rather than genuinely caring for him, his wife Praskovya only checks in on him every once in a while, relying on expensive doctors and servants to do the real work of caring for him. As Praskovya continues to lead a rather lavish life, Ivan begins to resent her and the rest of his family. In turn, readers see that Praskovya’s lack of true empathy for Ivan has pushed him away from her, interfering with their relationship in ways that would likely continue even if he were to recover. At the same time, though, Ivan eventually regrets the fact that he resents his family members so much, recognizing that a large amount of his scorn has to do with nothing other than his awareness that they’re healthy and he isn’t. In turn, readers see that his family’s lack of empathy has inspired a lack of empathy in him, too, as he unjustly criticizes them. In this regard, Tolstoy intimates that resentment often perpetuates itself, estranging loved ones from each other and making it nearly impossible for them to support one another in times of hardship.  

The Death of Ivan Ilyich begins after Ivan has already died, giving readers a glimpse of his funeral before jumping back in time to outline the details of his long and painful death. In an interaction at his funeral between Ivan’s longtime friend Pyotr Ivanovich and Ivan’s wife, Praskovya, readers sense the extent to which Praskovya failed to empathize with her husband as he went through his illness. As she tells Pyotr about Ivan’s death, she explains her husband’s suffering “only in terms of the distressing effect [it] had” on her, not on Ivan himself. This emphasis on her own experience underlines her failure to consider what it must have been like for Ivan to die such a harrowing death. Instead of focusing on Ivan’s feelings, she fixates on how his deterioration affected her life—the exact mindset that Ivan himself senses and comes to resent when he’s still alive. Indeed, as Ivan’s health declines, he develops bitter feelings toward Praskovya. At first, this bitterness arises because Praskovya and Liza, their daughter, go on with their social lives without paying much attention to his health, acting annoyed that he isn’t “much fun” and that he wants so much from them. In keeping with this, he begins to feel as if he’s a mere nuisance to his own family members. Worse, Praskovya adopts a self-centered attitude toward Ivan’s illness, one in which she implies that his ailments are his fault and that he’s doing nothing but making her miserable. Of course, Ivan thinks that she’s adopting this mindset unknowingly, but Tolstoy goes out of his way to remark that Praskovya’s lack of ill intent doesn’t make the relational dynamic any easier for Ivan to bear. After all, it’s clear that Praskovya can’t bring herself to empathize with her husband, thereby leaving him to deal with the emotional difficulties of his illness all by himself.

Even when Praskovya tries to show Ivan compassion, her kindness does nothing but upset him. This is because he has sensed that neither she nor any of his family members or friends actually want to empathize with him. To that end, nobody fully pities him because nobody has even “the slightest desire to understand his situation.” This sentiment suggests that a person has to fully understand someone else’s hardship in order to show legitimate empathy. The only person in Ivan’s life who is capable of doing this, it seems, is Gerasim, a kind young peasant who works for him. Unlike Ivan’s family members and friends, Gerasim is willing to try to understand what it must be like to be so sick. This is because Gerasim recognizes that everyone dies, so he’s comfortable showing others the empathy that he hopes he himself will receive when he’s on his deathbed. People like Pyotr Ivanovich, on the other hand, can’t empathize with Ivan because they refuse to admit that what he’s experiencing will one day befall them, too. Instead, they distance themselves from Ivan, reminding themselves that this illness has happened to him, not to them. As a result, Ivan begins to resent everyone except Gerasim, who is singularly capable of making him feel less alone with his illness. 

Because Ivan feels that Gerasim is the only person willing to understand his pain, Ivan becomes so hateful toward his family that he stops masking his contempt when they come to visit him in his final days of life. As Praskovya enters his room, he looks at her with unconcealed bitterness and recoils from her touch, deciding that he hates her. Not only has she failed to empathize with him in this time of hardship, but she has continued to lead a life that only a healthy, happy person can lead, effectively rubbing his face in his own suffering. Consequently, he “hate[s] her with every fibre of his being.” In this manner, then, he fails to empathize with the fact that she is about to lose her husband and thus her stability. To be fair, this is arguably a minor loss compared to what he is about to lose (his entire life), but it still illustrates the ways in which one person’s lack of empathy only spawns animosity, alienating loved ones from one another simply because they’re unwilling to inhabit each other’s perspectives. Finally, though, Ivan sees just before his death that he’s harming his family members by resenting them so vehemently in the last moments of his life. Accordingly, he tries to say, “Forgive me,” in an effort to reach across the gulf of misunderstanding between him and his loved ones, which has estranged him from them and left him even more isolated in his illness than necessary.