Describe the interview between the widow and Peter Ivanovich in section one.

Include responses to the questions below in your (at least) one (1) page discussion (double spacing) on Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich.
Include your ideas only – no information from critical sources.
To what social class does Ivan Ilyich belong? What have been the major values in his life? Does each of his immediate family members share these same values? 2. What are the similarities between Gerasim and Ivan’s own remembered childhood? 3. What advantage is gained by presenting the funeral scene at the beginning of the story? 4. Describe the interview between the widow and Peter Ivanovich in section one (1). 5. What do the various doctors contribute to the story? Why does Ivan Ilyich compare them to himself and other lawyers? What is his wife’s attitude toward them? 6. What are Ivan Ilyich’s varying attitudes toward his pain? What is the relationship of his physical suffering to his mental states? Does his pain have any positive effects? 7. Is there any meaning to Ivan Ilyich’s screaming incessantly for three days? How does his son’s final visit cause him to stop? Does his feeling sorry and trying to ask forgiveness at the end reveal a new attitude? 8. What is the meaning of Ivan’s falling through the bottom of the “black sack” into the “light” and “joy” at the moment of death? What had hindered him from falling through?

Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the story of a Russian judge who contracts an illness from an accidental fall while climbing a ladder to fix a curtain. This illness results in a lingering, painful death. While dying, Ivan Ilyich realizes that he has led the wrong kind of life, yet he feels he defeats death at the end of his life. There is a light that symbolizes hope in the form of another life at the bottom of the black sack into which he is being forced. “Ivan Ilyich’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.” What is so “simple and ordinary” about his life is that he has lived it according to unquestioned principles of amiability and decorum, conforming to the values of his father and the whole middle-class social world in which he has been identical to all the others in his desire for professional and social status, materialism, sense of power, proper appearance, and self-effacing pleasures. Peter Ivanovich emulates Ivan’s social and professional life. Ivan’s wife Praskovya Fedorovna defines the values of Ivan Ilyich’s home life. She combines her self-interest with the observance of all correctness and politeness: weeping at the right time, grieving and accepting sympathy, while she is really concerned with the cost of the gravesite and the possibility of obtaining from the government more than her widow’s pension. The house itself, an extension of Ivan Ilyich at one point in his life, is so stuffed with his treasured possessions that the private scene between the widow and Peter Ivanovich amusingly sets the two of them in opposition to the furniture; for example, the springs in the pouf force Peter into motion while the elaborate carving of the tabletop tugs at Praskovya’s shawl as if the lifeless material things are taking revenge against those who cherish them. The two of them discuss the three days of Ivan Ilyich’s suffering and screaming. There is a vast difference between what these hypocrites seem to be and what they really are. Peter admits this to himself. Although Praskovya narrates Ivan’s suffering, her interest is really in herself. Ivan’s death actually brings him “joy” and “light,” an insight of which the others are not capable because they continue to lead the wrong kind of life. Like Praskovya, Ivan’s daughter is concerned only for herself. Ivan’s suffering leads him to consider his previously unexamined life and to reach a spiritual truth that his obsession with his own modest pleasures, his approval of the values of his society, and especially his resultant inability or reluctance to feel love or pity for others have all been part of the cause of an existence that is really death-in-life. Ivan’s physical suffering leads to his mental suffering; he then reaches a redeeming truth. Ivan desires to reconcile himself to his family and to God, but he cannot speak; his plea to his wife and son for forgiveness sounds like “forgo.” Too late, Ivan realizes the value of the pleasure and self-satisfaction of his childhood, symbolized for him by the truly simple life of Gerasim.

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