Death Scenes

I recently went to a friend's funeral and beforehand I was thinking about Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich. It was my first funeral in many years and I expected to experience something like what Tolstoy describes: the mourners go through the motions of grieving but feel a secret sense of satisfaction that it is not they who have died. They are blithely ignorant of the proximity of their own deaths and seek any distraction--in this case cardplaying--to avoid its reality.

This isn't what I felt at all though. The significance of mortality struck me like it never has before. This had something to do with a series of gruesome accounts related by acquiantances of my friend's illness and death. Of course, this made me consider that there is something uniquely Russian about a truly horrifying end, whether in fiction, on the battlefield, or in czarist or soviet prisons.

So I'm wondering what incidents in Russian life and literature best communicate this morbid ability to portray the betrayal of our flesh? Dostoevsky has to be considered the master. But there is a great death scene in The Oblomovs by Saltykov-Schedrin; Tolstoy's own death was fascinating; the death of Dostoevsky's father at the hands of his own peasants was awful; and obviously there are scenes in The Gulag Archipelago that defy all description.

By contrast English and American literature have little to offer: the pathetic death of Little Nell is characteristic of the Anglo-American discomfort with the topic. Does their familiarity with death mean that the Russians are more attuned to the full range of the life cycle, or is it merely the product of an unhinged social system that has produced far too many meaningless deaths? By contrast does our optimistic preoccupation with the future help our democracy function more or less smoothly, or is it a symptom of a deeper inability to engage with life?

Non-Existence

Two days ago I had a brief debate with my co-author about the pros and cons of existence. My friend said he feared non-existence above all else and thought that it would be better to live a life of at least mild suffering than never have existed at all. I disagreed. In fact, the debate arose over the question of abortion rights. This passage from Tolstoy, quoted by his friend and biographer Steiner in Tolstoy the Man, seems to capture my friend's position, and almost (but not quite) convinces me. After bearing witness to his brother's death from consumption he wrote:

"He literally died in my arms. Nothing in my life has made such an impression on me. He was right when he said, "Nothing is worse than death" and when one remembers that is the end of everything, then there is nothing worse than life. Why should one work and worry when nothing of that which was Nikolai Tolstoy nothing remains?... He was beginning to feel his absorption into nothing; and if he found nothing on which to take hold, what shall I find? Much less than he; and assuredly I shall struggle with death as he has struggled. To the last minute he held on to life... [T]he truth which I have discovered in my thirty-two years is, that life is terrible. You write, "Take life as you find it, because you yourself are to blame for the position you find yourself." I take life as I find it, but as soon as man has reached the highest plane of his development, the truth which he loves above everything else is awful. When one comes to see that clearly and plainly, he wakes, and says like my brother, "What is that?"