Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/83



more weeks passed. Iván Ilích no longer rose from his divan. He did not want to lie in his bed, and lay on the divan. Lying nearly all the time with his face to the wall, he suffered in loneliness the same insoluble sufferings, and in loneliness thought the same insoluble thought. "What is this? Is this really death?" And an inner voice answered him: "Yes, it is." "What are these torments for?" and the voice answered: "For no special reason." After that and outside of that there was nothing.

From the very beginning of his sickness, from the first time that he went to see the doctor, his life was divided into two opposite moods which gave way to one another: now it was despair and the expectancy of incredible and terrible death, and now hope and an absorbing observation of the activity of his body. Now there was before his eyes nothing but his kidney or gut, which had for the time being deflected from the fulfilment of its obligations, and now it was the one incomprehensible, terrible death, from which it was impossible to be freed in any way whatever.

These two moods alternated from the very beginning of his sickness; but the farther his disease proceeded, the more doubtful and fantastic did his imagination grow in respect to the kidney, and the more real came to be the consciousness of impending death.

He needed but to recall what he had been three months before and what he now was, to recall how