light and turned on his side ... "The appendix is getting better,

absorption is occurring." Suddenly he felt the old, familiar,
dull, gnawing pain, stubborn and serious. There was the same

familiar loathsome taste in his mouth. His heart sand and he felt
dazed. "My God! My God!" he muttered. "Again, again! And it

will never cease." And suddenly the matter presented itself in a
quite different aspect. "Vermiform appendix! Kidney!" he said to

himself. "It's not a question of appendix or kidney, but of life
and...death. Yes, life was there and now it is going, going and I

cannot stop it. Yes. Why deceive myself? Isn't it obvious to
everyone but me that I'm dying, and that it's only a question of

weeks, days...it may happen this moment. There was light and now
there is darkness. I was here and now I'm going there! Where?" A

chill came over him, his breathing ceased, and he felt only the
throbbing of his heart.

"When I am not, what will there be? There will be nothing.
Then where shall I be when I am no more? Can this be dying? No,

I don't want to!" He jumped up and tried to light the candle, felt
for it with trembling hands, dropped candle and candlestick on the

floor, and fell back on his pillow.
"What's the use? It makes no difference," he said to himself,

staring with wide-open eyes into the darkness. "Death. Yes,
death. And none of them knows or wishes to know it, and they have

no pity for me. Now they are playing." (He heard through the door
the distant sound of a song and its accompaniment.) "It's all the

same to them, but they will die too! Fools! I first, and they
later, but it will be the same for them. And now they are

merry...the beasts!"
Anger choked him and he was agonizingly, unbearably miserable.

"It is impossible that all men have been doomed to suffer this
awful horror!" He raised himself.

"Something must be wrong. I must calm myself -- must think it
all over from the beginning." And he again began thinking. "Yes,

the beginning of my illness: I knocked my side, but I was still
quite well that day and the next. It hurt a little, then rather

more. I saw the doctors, then followed despondency and anguish,
more doctors, and I drew nearer to the abyss. My strength grew

less and I kept coming nearer and nearer, and now I have wasted
away and there is no light in my eyes. I think of the appendix --

but this is death! I think of mending the appendix, and all the
while here is death! Can it really be death?" Again terror seized

him and he gasped for breath. He leant down and began feeling for
the matches, pressing with his elbow on the stand beside the bed.

It was in his way and hurt him, he grew furious with it, pressed on
it still harder, and upset it. Breathless and in despair he fell

on his back, expecting death to come immediately.
Meanwhile the visitors were leaving. Praskovya Fedorovna was

seeing them off. She heard something fall and came in.
"What has happened?"

"Nothing. I knocked it over accidentally."
She went out and returned with a candle. He lay there panting

heavily, like a man who has run a thousand yards, and stared
upwards at her with a fixed look.

"What is it, Jean?"
"No...o...thing. I upset it." ("Why speak of it? She won't

understand," he thought.)
And in truth she did not understand. She picked up the stand,

lit his candle, and hurried away to see another visitor off. When
she came back he still lay on his back, looking upwards.

"What is it? Do you feel worse?"
"Yes."

She shook her head and sat down.
"Do you know, Jean, I think we must ask Leshchetitsky to come

and see you here."
This meant calling in the famous specialist, regardless of

expense. He smiled malignantly and said "No." She remained a
little longer and then went up to him and kissed his forehead.

While she was kissing him he hated her from the bottom of his
soul and with difficulty refrained from pushing her away.

"Good night. Please God you'll sleep."
"Yes."

VI
Ivan Ilych saw that he was dying, and he was in continual

despair.
In the depth of his heart he knew he was dying, but not only

was he not accustomed to the thought, he simply did not and could
not grasp it.

The syllogism he had learnt from Kiesewetter's Logic: "Caius
is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal," had always

seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as
applied to himself. That Caius -- man in the abstract -- was

mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an
abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others.

He had been little Vanya, with a mamma and a papa, with Mitya and
Volodya, with the toys, a coachman and a nurse, afterwards with

Katenka and will all the joys, griefs, and delights of childhood,
boyhood, and youth. What did Caius know of the smell of that

striped leather ball Vanya had been so fond of? Had Caius kissed
his mother's hand like that, and did the silk of her dress rustle

so for Caius? Had he rioted like that at school when the pastry
was bad? Had Caius been in love like that? Could Caius preside at

a session as he did? "Caius really was mortal, and it was right
for him to die; but for me, little Vanya, Ivan Ilych, with all my

thoughts and emotions, it's altogether a different matter. It
cannot be that I ought to die. That would be too terrible."

Such was his feeling.
"If I had to die like Caius I would have known it was so. An

inner voice would have told me so, but there was nothing of the
sort in me and I and all my friends felt that our case was quite

different from that of Caius. and now here it is!" he said to
himself. "It can't be. It's impossible! But here it is. How is

this? How is one to understand it?"
He could not understand it, and tried to drive this false,

incorrect, morbid thought away and to replace it by other proper
and healthy thoughts. But that thought, and not the thought only

but the reality itself, seemed to come and confront him.
And to replace that thought he called up a succession of

others, hoping to find in them some support. He tried to get back
into the former current of thoughts that had once screened the

thought of death from him. But strange to say, all that had
formerly shut off, hidden, and destroyed his consciousness of

death, no longer had that effect. Ivan Ilych now spent most of his
time in attempting to re-establish that old current. He would say

to himself: "I will take up my duties again -- after all I used to
live by them." And banishing all doubts he would go to the law

courts, enter into conversation with his colleagues, and sit
carelessly as was his wont, scanning the crowd with a thoughtful

look and leaning both his emaciated arms on the arms of his oak
chair; bending over as usual to a colleague and drawing his papers

nearer he would interchange whispers with him, and then suddenly
raising his eyes and sitting erect would pronounce certain words

and open the proceedings. But suddenly in the midst of those
proceedings the pain in his side, regardless of the stage the

proceedings had reached, would begin its own gnawing work. Ivan