 Chapter 8 of the Death of Yvonne Ilyich Balia Tolstoy. This Lubrovok's recording is in the public domain. It was morning. All that made it morning for Yvonne Ilyich was that Gerasim had gone away and Piotr the Footman had come in. He had put out the candles, opened one of the curtains, and begun surreptitiously setting the room to rights. Whether it were morning or evening, Friday or Sunday, it all made no difference. It was always just the same thing. Gnawing, agonizing pain, never ceasing for an instant. The hopeless sense of life always ebbing away, but still not yet gone, always swooping down on him that fearful, hated death, which was the only reality, and always the same falsity. What were days or weeks or hours of the day to him? Will you have tea, sir? He wants things done in their regular order. In the morning the family should have tea, he thought, and only said, No. Would you care to move on to the sofa? He wants to make the room tidy, and I'm in his way. I'm uncleanness, disorder, he thought, and only said, No, leave me alone. The servant still moved busily about his work. Yvonne Ilyich stretched out his hand. Piotr went up to offer his services. What can I get you? My watch. Piotr got out the watch, which laid just under his hand and gave it him. Half past eight. Are they up? Not yet, sir. Vladimir Yvonnevich, that was his son, has gone to the high school, and Preskovia Fyodorovna gave orders that she was to be waked if you asked for her. Shall I send word? No, no need. Should I try some tea, he thought. Yes, tea. Bring it. Piotr was on his way out. Yvonne Ilyich felt frightened of being left alone. How keep him? Oh, the medicine. Piotr, give me my medicine. Oh well, maybe medicine may still be some good. He took the spoon, drank it. No, it does no good. It's all rubbish deception, he decided, as soon as he tasted the familiar mawkish, hopeless taste. No, I can't believe it now, but the pain. Why this pain if it would only cease for a minute? And he groaned. Piotr turned round. No, go on, bring the tea. Piotr went away. Yvonne Ilyich left alone, moaned. Not so much from the pain, awful as it was, as from misery. Always the same thing again and again, all these endless days and nights. If it would only be quicker, quicker to what? Death, darkness. No, no, anything better than death. When Piotr came in with the tea on a tray, Yvonne Ilyich stared for some time absentmindedly at him, not grasping who he was and what he wanted. Piotr was disconcerted by this stare. And when he showed he was disconcerted, Yvonne Ilyich came to himself. Oh yes, he said. Tea. Good. Set it down. Only help me to wash and put on a clean shirt. And Yvonne Ilyich began his washing. He washed his hands slowly and then his face, cleaned his teeth, combed his hair, and looked in the looking glass. He felt frightened at what he saw, especially at the way his hair clung limply to his pale forehead. When his shirt was being changed he knew he would be still more terrified if he glanced at his body and he avoided looking at himself. But at last it was all over. He put on his dressing gown, covered himself with a rug, and sat in the armchair to drink his tea. For one moment he felt refreshed. But as soon as he began to drink the tea, again there was the same taste, the same pain. He forced himself to finish it and lay down, stretching out his legs. He lay down and dismissed Piotr. Always the same. A gleam of hope flashes for a moment and then again the sea of despair roars about him again and always pain, always pain, always heartache and always the same thing. Alone it is awfully dreary. He longs to call someone but he knows beforehand that with others present it will be worse. Morphine again. Only to forget again. I'll tell him, the doctor, that he must think of something else. It can't go on. It can't go on like this. One hour, two hours pass like this. Then there is a ring at the front door. The doctor, perhaps. Yes, it is the doctor. Fresh, hearty, fat and cheerful, wearing that expression that seems to say, you there are in a panic about something but we'll soon set things right for you. The doctor is aware that this expression is hardly fitting here but he has put it on once and for all and can't take it off like a man who has put on a frock coat to pay a round of calls. In a hearty reassuring manner the doctor rubs his hands. I'm cold. It's a sharp frost. Just let me warm myself. He says with an expression as though it's only a matter of waiting a little till he's warm and as soon as he's warm he'll set everything to rights. Well now, how are you? Yvonne Ilyich feels that the doctor would like to say, how's the little trouble? But that he feels that he can't talk like that and says, how did you pass the night? Yvonne Ilyich looks at the doctor with an expression that asks, is it possible you're never ashamed of lying? But the doctor does not care to understand this look. And Yvonne Ilyich says, it's always just as awful. The pain never leaves me, never ceases. If only there were something. Ah, you're all like that. All sick people say that. Come now, I do believe I'm thawed. Even Preskovya Fyodorovna, who's so particular, could find no fault with my temperature. Well now I can say good morning. And the doctor shakes hands. And dropping his former levity, the doctor, with a serious face, proceeds to examine the patient, feeling his pulse to take his temperature, and then the tapings and soundings begin. Yvonne Ilyich knows positively and indubitably that it's all nonsense and empty deception. But when the doctor, kneeling down, stretches over him, putting his ear first higher, then lower, and goes through various gymnastic evolutions over him with a serious face. Yvonne Ilyich is affected by this, as he used sometimes to be affected by the speeches of the lawyers in court, though he was perfectly well aware that they were telling lies all the while, and why they were telling lies. The doctor, kneeling on the sofa, was still sounding him when there was the rustle of Preskovya Fyodorovna's silk dress in the doorway. And she was heard scolding Piotr for not having let her know that the doctor had come. She comes in, kisses her husband, and at once begins to explain that she has been up a long while, and that it was only through a misunderstanding that she was not there when the doctor came. Yvonne Ilyich looks at her, scans her all over, and sets down against her her whiteness and plumpness, and the cleanness of her hands and neck, and the glossiness of her hair, and the gleam full of life in her eyes. With all the force of his soul, he hates her. And when she touches him, it makes him suffer from the thrill of hatred he feels for her. Her attitude to him and his illness is still the same. Just as the doctor had taken up a certain line with the patient which he was now not able to drop, so she too had taken up a line with him, that he was not doing something he ought to do, and was himself to blame, and she was lovingly reproaching him for his neglect, and she could not now get out of this attitude. Why, you know, he won't listen to me. He doesn't take his medicine at the right times. And what's worse still, he insists on lying in a position that surely must be bad for him, with his legs in the air. She described how he made Gerasim hold his legs up. The doctor smiled with kindly condescension that said, Oh, well, it can't be helped. These sick people do take up such foolish fancies, but we must forgive them. When the examination was over, the doctor looked at his watch, and then Praskavya Fyodorovna informed Ivan Ilyich that it must, of course, be as he liked, but she had sent today for a celebrated doctor, and that he would examine him and have a consultation with Mihail Danilevich. That was the name of their regular doctor. Don't oppose it now, please. This I'm doing entirely for my own sake, she said ironically, meaning it to be understood that she was doing it all for his sake, and was only saying this to give him no right to refuse her request. He lay silent, knitting his brows. He felt that he was hemmed in by such a tangle of falsity that it was hard to disentangle anything from it. Everything she did for him was entirely for her own sake, and she told him she was doing for her own sake what she actually was doing for her own sake as something so incredible that he would take it as meaning the opposite. At half past eleven, the celebrated doctor came. Again came the sounding and then grave conversation in his presence and in the other room about the kidney and the appendix, and questions and answers with such an air of significance that again instead of the real question of life and death, which was now the only one that confronted him, the question that came uppermost was of the kidney and the appendix, which were doing something not as they ought to do, and were for that reason being attacked by Mihail Danilevich and the celebrated doctor and forced to mend their ways. The celebrated doctor took leave of him with a serious, but not a hopeless, face, and to the timid question that Yvon Ilyich addressed to him while he lifted his eyes, shining with terror and hope up towards him, was there a chance of recovery? He answered that he could not answer for it, but that there was a chance. The look of hope with which Yvon Ilyich watched the doctor out was so piteous that seeing it, Praskovya Fyodorovna positively burst into tears as she went out of the door to hand the celebrated doctor his fee in the next room. The gleam of hope kindled by the doctor's assurance did not last long. Again, the same room, the same pictures, the curtains, the wallpaper, the medicine bottles, and ever the same, his aching, suffering body. And Yvon Ilyich began to moan. They gave him injections and he sank into oblivion. When he waked up it was getting dark. They brought him his dinner. He forced himself to eat some broth. And again, everything the same. And again, the coming night. After dinner at seven o'clock, Praskovya Fyodorovna came into his room, dressed as though to go to a soiree, with her full bosom laced in tight and traces of powder on her face. She had, in the morning, mentioned to him that they were going to the theater. Sarah Bernhardt was visiting the town, and they had a box which he had insisted on their taking. By now he had forgotten about it, and her smart attire was an offense to him. But he concealed this feeling when he recollected that he had himself insisted on their taking a box and going, because it was an aesthetic pleasure, beneficial and instructive for the children. Praskovya Fyodorovna came in satisfied with herself, but yet with something of a guilty air. She sat down, asked how he was, as he saw simply for the sake of asking, and not for the sake of learning anything, knowing indeed that there was nothing to learn, and began telling him how absolutely necessary it was, how she would not have gone for anything, but the box had been taken, and Ellen, their daughter, and Petrishev, the examining liar, the daughter's suitor, were going, and that it was out of the question to let them go alone, but that she would have liked much better to stay with him, if only he would be sure to follow the doctor's prescription while she was away. Oh, and Fyodor Dmitrievich, the suitor, would like to come in. May he, and Liza? Yes, let them come in. The daughter came in, in full dress, her fresh young body bare, while his body made him suffer so. But she made a show of it. She was strong, healthy, obviously in love, and impatient of the illness, suffering, and death that hindered her happiness. Fyodor Dmitrievich came in, too, in evening dress. His hair curled ala capul, with his long, sinewy neck tightly fenced round by a white collar, with his vast expanse of white chest and strong thighs displayed in narrow black trousers, with one white glove in his hand, and a crush opera hat. Behind him crept in, unnoticed, the little high school boy in his new uniform, poor fellow, in gloves, and with that awful blue ring under his eyes that Ivan Ilyich knew the meaning of. He always felt sorry for his son, and pitiable indeed was his scared face of sympathetic suffering. Except Gerasim, Ivan Ilyich fancied that the laudio was the only one that understood and was sorry. They all sat down. Again they asked how he was. A silence followed. Liza asked her mother about the opera glass. An altercation ensued between the mother and daughter as to who had taken it and where it had been put. It turned into an unpleasant squabble. Fyodor Dmitrievich asked Ivan Ilyich whether he had seen Sara Bernhardt. Ivan Ilyich could not at first catch the question that was asked him, but then he said, No, have you seen her before? Yes, in Adrienne Lecavre. Praskovia Fyodorovna observed that she was particularly good in that part. The daughter made some reply. A conversation sprang up about the art and naturalness of her acting, that conversation that is continually repeated and always the same. In the middle of the conversation Fyodor Dmitrievich glanced at Ivan Ilyich and relapsed into silence. The others looked at him and became mute too. Ivan Ilyich was staring with glittering eyes straight before him, obviously furious with them. This had to be set right, but it could not anyhow be set right. This silence had somehow to be broken. No one would venture on breaking it and all began to feel alarmed that the decorous deception was somehow breaking down and the facts would be exposed to all. Liza was the first to pluck up courage. She broke the silence. She tried to cover up what they were all feeling, but inadvertently she gave it utterance. If we are going, though, it's time to start. She said, glancing at her watch, a gift from her father, and with a scarcely perceptible meaning smile to the young man, referring to something only known to themselves. She got up with a rustle of her skirts. They all got up, said goodbye, and went away. When they were gone Ivan Ilyich fancied he was easier. There was no falsity. That had gone away with them, but the pain remained. That continual pain, that continual terror, made nothing harder, nothing easier. It was always worse. Again came minute after minute, hour after hour, still the same and still no end, and ever more terrible the inevitable end. Yes, send Gerasim, he said, in answer to Piotr's question. End of chapter 8, read by Larianne Walden. Chapter 9 of The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy. This Librivox recording is in the public domain. Late at night his wife came back. She came in on tiptoe, but he heard her, opened his eyes, and made haste to close them again. She wanted to send away Gerasim and sit up with him herself instead. He opened his eyes and said, no, go away. Are you in great pain? Always the same. Take some opium. He agreed and drank it. She went away. Till three o'clock he slept a miserable sleep. It seemed to him that he and his pain were being thrust somewhere into a narrow, deep, black sack, and they kept pushing him further and further in, and still could not thrust him to the bottom. And this operation was awful to him and was accompanied with agony. And he was afraid, and yet wanted to fall into it, and struggled, and yet tried to get into it. And all of a sudden he slipped and fell and woke up. Gerasim, still the same, is sitting at the foot of the bed, half-dosing peacefully, patient. And he is lying with his wasted legs clad in stockings raised on Gerasim's shoulders, the same candle burning in the alcove, and the same interminable pain. Go away, Gerasim, he whispered. It's all right, sir. I'll stay a bit longer. No. Go away. He took his legs down, lay sideways on his arm, and he felt very sorry for himself. He only waited till Gerasim had gone away into the next room. He could restrain himself no longer and cried like a child. He cried at his own helplessness, at his awful loneliness, at the cruelty of people, at the cruelty of God, at the absence of God. Why hast thou done all this? What brought me to this? Why, why torture me so horribly? He did not expect an answer, and wept, indeed, that there was, and could be, no answer. The pain grew more acute again, but he did not stir, did not call. He said to himself, Come, more than. Come, strike me. But what for? What have I done to thee? What for? Then he was still, ceased weeping, held his breath, and was all attention. He listened, as it were, not to a voice uttering sounds, but to the voice of his soul, to the current of thoughts that rose up within him. What is it you want? Was the first clear idea able to be put into words that he grasped? What? Not to suffer. To live, he answered. And again he was utterly plunged into attention, so intense that even the pain did not distract him. To live? Live how? The voice of his soul was asking. Why, live as I used to live before, happily and pleasantly. As you used to live before, happily and pleasantly, queried the voice. And he began going over in his imagination the best moments of his pleasant life. But strange to say, all these best moments of his pleasant life seemed now, not at all, what they had seemed then. All except the first memories of childhood. There, in his childhood, there had been something really pleasant in which one could have lived if it had come back. But the creature who had this pleasant experience was no more. It was like a memory of someone else. As soon as he reached the beginning of what had resulted in him as he was now, Yvonne Ilyich, all that had seemed joys to him then now melted away before his eyes and were transformed into something trivial and often disgusting. And the further he went from childhood, the nearer to the actual present, the more worthless and uncertain were the joys. It began with life at the school of jurisprudence. Then there had still been something genuinely good. Then there had been gaiety. Then there had been friendship. Then there had been hopes. But in the higher classes these good moments were already becoming rarer. Later on during the first period of his official life at the governor's, good moments appeared. But it was all mixed, and less and less of it was good. And further on, even less was good, and the further he went, the less good there was. His marriage, as gratuitous as the disillusion of it and the smell of his wife's breath, and the sensuality, the hypocrisy, and that deadly official life and anxiety about money, and so for one year and two and ten and twenty, and always the same thing. And the further he went, the more deadly it became. As though I had been going steadily down hill, imagining that I was going uphill. So it was, in fact. In public opinion I was going uphill, and steadily as I got up it, life was ebbing away from me. And now the work's done. There's only to die. But what is this? What for? It cannot be. It cannot be that life has been so senseless, so loathsome. And if it really was so loathsome and senseless, then why die and die in agony? There's something wrong. Can it be I have not lived as one ought? Suddenly came into his head. But how not so when I've done everything as it should be done? He said. And it once dismissed this only solution of all the enigma of life and death as something utterly out of the question. What do you want now? To live? Live how? Live as you live at the corpse when the usher booms out, the judge is coming. The judge is coming. The judge is coming. He repeated to himself. Here he is, the judge. But I'm not to blame. He shrieked in fury. What's it for? And he left off crying, and turning with his face to the wall, felt a pondering always on the same question. What for? Why all this horror? But however much he pondered, he could not find an answer. And whenever the idea struck him, as it often did, that it all came of his never having lived as he ought, he thought of all the correctness of his life and dismissed this strange idea. End of chapter nine, read by Larianne Walden. Chapter ten of the death of Yvonne Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Another fortnight had passed. Yvonne Ilyich could not now get up from the sofa. He did not like lying in bed and lay on the sofa. And lying almost all the time facing the wall, in loneliness he suffered all the inexplicable agonies, and in loneliness pondered always that inexplicable question. What is it? Can it be true that it's death? And an inner voice answered, Yes, it is true. Why these agonies? And a voice answered, For no reason. Beyond and besides this, there was nothing. From the very beginning of his illness, ever since Yvonne Ilyich first went to the doctors, his life had been split up into two contradictory moods which were continually alternating. One was despair and the anticipation of an uncomprehended and awful death. The other was hope and an absorbed watching over the actual condition of his body. First there was nothing confronting him but a kidney or intestine which had temporarily declined to perform their duties. Then there was nothing but unknown awful death which there was no escaping. These two moods had alternated from the very beginning of the illness, but the further the illness progressed, the more doubtful and fantastic became the conception of the kidney, and the more real the sense of approaching death. He had but to reflect on what he had been three months before and what he was now. To reflect how steadily he had been going downhill, for every possibility of hope to be shattered. Of late in the loneliness in which he found himself, lying with his face to the back of the sofa, a loneliness in the middle of a populous town and of his numerous acquaintances and his family. A loneliness than which none more complete could be found anywhere, not at the bottom of the sea, not deep down in the earth. Of late in this fearful loneliness Yvonne Ilyich had lived only in imagination in the past. One by one the pictures of his past rose up before him. It always began from what was nearest in time and went back to the most remote, to childhood, and rested there. If Yvonne Ilyich thought of the stewed prunes that had been offered him for dinner that day, his mind went back to the damp wrinkled French plum of his childhood, of its peculiar taste and the flow of saliva when the stone was sucked. And along with his memory of a taste there rose up a whole series of memories of that period, his nurse, his brother, his playthings. I mustn't, it's too painful, Yvonne Ilyich said to himself, and he brought himself back to the present. The button on the back of the sofa and the creases in the Morocco. Morocco's dear, and doesn't wear well, there was a quarrel over it. But the Morocco was different. And different to the quarrel when we tore father's portfolio and were punished, and mama brought us the tarts. And again his mind rested on his childhood. And again it was painful, and he tried to drive it away and think of something else. And again at that point, together with that chain of associations, quite another chain of memories came into his heart of how his illness had grown up and become more acute. It was the same there, the further back the more life there had been. There had been both more that was good in life and more of life itself. And the two began to melt into one. Just as the pain goes on getting worse and worse, so has my whole life gone on getting worse and worse, he thought. One light spot was there at the beginning of life, and then it kept getting blacker and blacker and going faster and faster. An inverse ratio to the square of the distance from death, thought Yvonne Ilyich. And the image of a stone falling downwards with increasing velocity sank into his soul. Life, a series of increasing sufferings, falls more and more swiftly to the end, the most fearful sufferings. I am falling. He shuddered, shifted himself, would have resisted, but he knew beforehand that he could not resist. And again with eyes weary with gazing at it, but unable not to gaze at what was before him, he stared at the back of the sofa and waited, waited expecting that fearful fall and shock and dissolution. Resistance is impossible, he said to himself, but if one could at least comprehend what it's for, even that's impossible. It could be explained if one were to say that I hadn't lived as I ought, but that can't be alleged, he said to himself, thinking of all the regularity, correctness, and propriety of his life. That really can't be admitted, he said to himself, his lips smiling ironically as though someone could see his smile and be deceived by it. No explanation. Agony. Death. What for? End of Chapter 10, read by Laurie Ann Walden. Chapter 11 of the death of Yvonne Ilyich Balio Tolstoy. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. So past a fortnight. During that fortnight an event occurred that had been desired by Yvonne Ilyich and his wife. Petrus Jeff made a formal proposal. This took place in the evening. Next day Prescovia Fyodorovna went into her husband, revolving in her mind how to inform him of Fyodor Dmitrievich's proposal. But that night there had been a change for the worse in Yvonne Ilyich. Prescovia Fyodorovna found him on the same sofa, but in a different position. He was lying on his face, groaning, and staring straight before him with a fixed gaze. She began talking of remedies. He turned his stare on her. She did not finish what she had begun saying. Such hatred of her in particular was expressed in that stare. For Christ's sake, let me die in peace, he said. She would have gone away, but at that moment the daughter came in and went up to say good morning to him. He looked at his daughter just as at his wife. And to her inquiries how he was, he told her dryly that they would soon all be rid of him. Both were silent, sat a little while, and went out. How were we to blame? said Liza to her mother. As though we had done it. I'm sorry for Papa, but why punish us? At the usual hour the doctor came. Yvonne Ilyich answered, Yes? No. Never taking his exasperated stare from him. And towards the end he said, Why, you know that you can do nothing, so let me be. We can relieve your suffering, said the doctor. Even that you can't do. Let me be. The doctor went into the drawing room and told Prescavia Fyodorovna that it was very serious, and that the only resource left them was opium to relieve his sufferings, which must be terrible. The doctor said his physical sufferings were terrible, and that was true. But even more terrible than his physical sufferings were his mental sufferings, and in that lay his chief misery. His moral sufferings were due to the fact that during that night, as he looked at the sleepy, good-natured, broad-cheeked face of Gerasim, the thought had suddenly come into his head. What if in reality all my life, my conscious life, has been not the right thing? The thought struck him that what he had regarded before as an utter impossibility that he had spent his life not as he ought, might be the truth. It struck him that those scarcely-detected impulses of struggle within him against what was considered good by persons of higher position scarcely-detected impulses which he had dismissed, that they might be the real thing, and everything else might be not the right thing. And his official work, and his ordering of his daily life and of his family, and these social and official interests, all that might be not the right thing. He tried to defend it all to himself, and suddenly he felt all the weakness of what he was defending, and it was useless to defend it. But if it's so, he said to himself, and I am leaving life with the consciousness that I have lost all that was given me and there's no correcting it, then what? He lay on his back and began going over his whole life entirely anew. When he saw the footmen in the morning, then his wife, then his daughter, then the doctor, every movement they made, every word they uttered, confirmed for him the terrible truth that had been revealed to him in the night. In them he saw himself, saw all in which he had lived, and saw distinctly that it was all not the right thing. It was a horrible, vast deception that concealed both life and death. This consciousness intensified his physical agonies, multiplied them tenfold. He groaned and tossed from side to side and pulled at the covering over him. It seemed to him that it was stifling him and weighing him down, and for that he hated them. They gave him a big dose of opium. He sank into unconsciousness, but at dinner time the same thing began again. He drove them all away and tossed from side to side. His wife came to him and said, Jean, darling, do this for my sake. For my sake? It can't do harm, and it often does good. Why, it's nothing, and often in health, people. He opened his eyes wide. What, take the sacrament? What for? No, besides. She began to cry. Yes, my dear, I'll sin for our priest. He's so nice. All right, very well, he said. When the priest came and confessed him, he was softened, felt as it were a relief from his doubts and consequently from his sufferings, and there came a moment of hope. He began once more thinking of the intestinal appendix and the possibility of curing it. He took the sacrament with tears in his eyes. When they laid him down again after the sacrament for a minute, he felt comfortable and again the hope of life sprang up. He began to think about the operation which had been suggested to him. To live, I want to live, he said to himself. His wife came in to congratulate him. She uttered the customary words and added, It's quite true, isn't it, that you're better. Without looking at her, he said, Yes. Her dress, her figure, the expression of her face, the tone of her voice, all told him the same. Not the right thing. All that in which you lived and are living is lying, deceit, hiding life and death away from you. And as soon as he had formed that thought, hatred sprang up in him. And with that hatred agonizing physical sufferings. And with these sufferings the sense of inevitable approaching ruin. Something new was happening. There were screwing and shooting pains and a tightness in his breathing. The expression of his face as he uttered that Yes was terrible. After uttering that Yes, looking her straight in the face, he turned onto his face with a rapidity extraordinary in his weakness and shrieked, Go away, go away, let me be. End of chapter 11 read by Larry Ann Walden. Chapter 12 of The Death of Yvonne Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. From that moment there began the scream that never ceased for three days and was so awful that through two closed doors one could not hear it without horror. At the moment when he answered his wife, he grasped that he had fallen, that there was no return, that the end had come. Quite the end, while doubt was still as unsolved, still remained doubt. Ooooo. Ooooo. He screamed in varying intonations. He had begun screaming, I don't want to. And so had gone on screaming on the same vowel sound. Ooooo. All those three days during which time did not exist for him, he was struggling in that black sack into which he was being thrust by an unseen resistless force. He struggled as the man condemned to death struggles in the hands of the executioner, knowing that he cannot save himself. And every moment he felt that in spite of all his efforts to struggle against it, he was getting nearer and nearer to what terrified him. He felt that his agony was due both to his being thrust into this black hole and still more to his not being able to get right into it. What hindered him from getting into it was the claim that his life had been good. That justification of his life held him fast and would not let him get forward, and it caused him more agony than all. All at once some force struck him in the chest, in the side, and stifled his breathing more than ever. He rolled forward into the hole, and there at the end there was some sort of light. It had happened with him as it had sometimes happened to him in a railway carriage, when he had thought he was going forward while he was going back, and all of a sudden recognized his real direction. Yes, it has all been not the right thing, he said to himself. But that's no matter. He could, he could do the right thing. What is the right thing? He asked himself, and suddenly he became quiet. This was at the end of the third day, two hours before his death. At that very moment the school boy had stealthily crept into his father's room and gone up to his bedside. The dying man was screaming and waving his arms. His hand fell on the school boy's head. The boy snatched it, pressed it to his lips, and burst into tears. At that very moment Yvonne Ilyich had rolled into the hole and caught sight of the light, and it was revealed to him that his life had not been what it ought to have been, but that that could still be set right. He asked himself, what is the right thing, and became quiet listening. Then he felt someone was kissing his hand. He opened his eyes and glanced at his son. He felt sorry for him. His wife went up to him. He glanced at her. She was gazing at him with open mouth, the tears unwiped streaming over her nose and cheeks, a look of despair on her face. He felt sorry for her. Yes, I'm making them miserable, he thought. They're sorry, but it will be better for them when I die. He would have said this, but had not the strength to utter it. Besides, why speak? I must act, he thought. With a glance to his wife, he pointed to his son and said, take away, sorry for him, and you too. He tried to say forgive, but said forgo, and too weak to correct himself, shook his hand, knowing that he would understand whose understanding mattered. And all at once it became clear to him that what had tortured him and would not leave him was suddenly dropping away all at once on both sides and on ten sides and on all sides. He was sorry for them, must act so that they might not suffer, set them free and be free himself of those agonies. How right and how simple, he thought. And the pain, he asked himself. Where's it gone? Eh, where are you, pain? He began to watch for it. Yes, here it is. Well, what of it? Let the pain be. And death. Where is it? He looked for his old accustomed terror of death and did not find it. Where is it? What death? There was no terror, because death was not either. In the place of death there was light. So this is it. He suddenly exclaimed aloud. What joy! To him all this passed in a single instant, and the meaning of that instant suffered no change after. For those present, his agony lasted another two hours. There was a rattle in his throat, a twitching in his wasted body. Then the rattle and the gasping came at longer and longer intervals. It is over, someone said over him. He caught those words and repeated them in his soul. Death is over, he said to himself. It's no more. He drew in a breath, stopped midway in the breath, stretched and died. March 25, 1886. End of chapter 12. This concludes the death of Yvonne Ilyich Balio Tolstoy, translated by Constance Garnett. Read by Laurie Ann Walden.