Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/36



Iván Ilích's life had run for seventeen years from the time of his marriage. He was now an old prosecuting attorney, who had declined several transfers in the expectation of a more desirable place, when suddenly there happened a disagreeable circumstance which completely upset the calm of his life. Iván Ilích was waiting for the place of presiding judge in a university city; but Góppe somehow got ahead of him, and received that place. Iván Ilích was annoyed at this, began to make reproaches, and quarrelled with him and with the nearer authorities; they grew cold to him, and at the next appointment he was again left out.

That happened in the year 1880. That year was the most difficult one in Iván Ilích's life. In that year it appeared that, on the one hand, the salary was not large enough to live on, and that, on the other, all had forgotten him, and that what in relation to him appeared to him as the greatest and most cruel injustice, to others appeared as an entirely common affair. Even his father did not consider it his duty to help him. He felt that all had abandoned him, considering his situation with thirty-five hundred roubles salary most normal and even fortunate. He alone knew that, with the consciousness of those cases of injustice which had been done him, and with the eternal nagging of his wife, and with the debts which he had begun to make, since he was living beyond his means,—he alone knew that his situation was far from being normal.