Tolstoy And God's Cruelest Irony - Created With Brilliance, Man Shines For A Moment Then Is Summarily Dead

Konstantin Levin, a character in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina reflects on God's cruelest irony - having created Man, a brilliant, creative, insightful, imaginative, and ambitious person, he allows him to live for only a few, scant decades, then consigns him for all eternity to the cold, dark ground of the steppes. 

In A Memoir Tolstoy chronicled his lifelong search for an answer to the question, 'Why did God even bother?'  Was there some lesson in this seemingly cruel fate?  The promise of eternity was not enough to justify a short, brutish, and nasty life.  God could certainly have let the Garden of Eden stand, and let Adam and Eve's descendants prosper, express the beauty and genius of His Creation, and then join him in a celestial paradise.  But no, he did the opposite. 

 

Dostoevsky had the same concerns.  In The Brothers Karamazov Ivan tells his brother how Jesus betrayed the very humanity his Father had created - offering them only mystery, miracles, and authority but promising them heavenly rewards.  'Man does not live by bread alone', Jesus said, paving the way for the authoritarian rule of the Church. 

And so it is that dealing with God's greatest irony is what preoccupies - not so much the uncertainty, nor regret, but what was God up to? How could he have played such a cruel, irreversible trick?

Ivan Ilyich, the main character in Tolstoy's short story The Death of Ivan Ilyich is surprised when he realizes he is dying.  It wasn't supposed to happen to him, at least not now. He is proper, punctual, and dutifully responsible at work, but indifferent to his colleagues.  He is an equally dutiful husband, but one without love or affection.  Life is an intrusion, he feels, a nuisance, an unpredictable mess best kept simple and uninvolved.  Since he has ordered his life so completely, the prospect of intrusion, sickness or death are only possibilities. 

 

He had built his whole life around longevity, without regrets, and without the tiresome passions that always end up in stickiness and bad blood.  Yet, here he was, fading fast with no clue what his life had meant and worse what the eternal future would bring.

Christ dying on the cross shouted to his father אֵלִ֣י אֵ֖לִי לָמָ֣ה עֲזַבְתָּ֑נִי Eli, Eli, lama azavtani -  'My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?', and Ilyich, never before a religious man, asked the same question. Why, with so much promise and potential, so much richness to be enjoyed, so much to be done, had God so summarily and abruptly terminated his life. 

An acquaintance of Tolstoy's commenting on the slow death of a friend, remarked, “Well, he had a good life”.  Memories of what he accomplished, whom he had loved, where he had travelled will sustain him in his last moments, suggested the acquaintance.  Tolstoy disagreed.  

Not only do we face death entirely alone, but the successes, failures, loves, misfortunes, and adventures of the past have no relevance whatsoever.  Looking into the dark, unknowable abyss no memory – as meanspirited and hard-bitten as it might be – can pull Ivan Ilyich back from the dark hole of non-being.

Death not only extinguishes life but extinguishes the past.  The final lines of The Death of Ivan Ilyich are these:

“It is finished!” said someone near him.

He heard these words and repeated them in his soul.

“Death is finished,” he said to himself. “It is no more!”

He drew in a breath, stopped in the midst of a sigh, stretched out, and died.

Death is finished, he says.  His constant, frightful companion of the last months is no more.  He has settled his accounts with death, not with life.  He does not murmur prayers of contrition for his sins, does not beg forgiveness, nor beseech his family to think of him kindly.   There is no point in reconciliation with the past, no benefit, no salvation; for it has no relevance to nothingness to come.

Old age brings its creaks, groans, and cataracts; but anyone who sees the light fading at the end of the tunnel ponders the long and agonizing dying of Ivan Ilyich and his aha! moment as death finally approaches; or Andrei Bolkonsky’s near death epiphany on the field of Austerlitz; or Levin’s wondering at the cruel irony of fifty years of intelligence, insight, wit, passion, and creativity followed by an eternity in the cold, wet clay of the graveyard.

The corporate ex-Vice Presidents who dodder into the office every day and write memos on marketing and accounting that no one reads are at least trying their level best to validate what seem to be – in view of the dark eternity that faces them –  long lives of little meaning and even less joy.

Those who try to turn the clock back, go to noisy downtown bars frequented by glittery young things half their age, hang out with the young minions at the office, suit up in Italian-logoed Lycra for 60-milers at the back of the peloton; and ski the double-blacks at Aspen even though brittle bones rattle, are the ones who will die clueless. “What?”, they say as they hurtle to certain death over the precipice their bad eyes didn’t see.   “This wasn’t supposed to happen”. 

One has sympathy for the alte kocker who worries that his life has been meaningless, tallying numbers and measuring performance for years; who wonders what it all means, but continues defiantly adding things up until the end.  Not exactly Dylan Thomas, but still some measure of Job-like defiance

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

The ultimate irony – a cruel joke actually – is that men have powerful sexual urges until they can’t remember what sex is; and even then, in the dim, foggy evening of Alzheimer’s, something in them twinges when a beautiful woman walks by.

In his A Confession Tolstoy writes of his philosophical struggle and of his failed conviction that answers can be found in art, science, mathematics, and history.  Finally, exhausted and unsatisfied he realizes that tens of millions of people believe in God and that billions before him have had profound faith.  Maybe, he reckons, there is something to it. He backs into faith like Levin who admits that he has no answers but that doing good is the closest he can come to them. If so many people believe in God, Tolstoy reflects, why shouldn't he?