Myth Or Truth: The Apollonian And Dionysian In The Death Of Ivan Ilyich

Abstract

In The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche uses Classical Greek tragedies to break down the human experience into two dichotomic cultures: the Apollinian and the Dionysian. The Apollinian culture represents humanity’s tendency toward order, pattern, and rationalism, while the Dionysian culture represents humanity’s simultaneous urge toward chaos and emotional intuition. Whereas Classical Greece allowed for both to coexist and augment one another through Greek Tragedies, Western thinking and culture allows for no such fruition; instead, Western society heavily emphasizes the Apollinian over the necessity or acknowledgement of the Dionysian. In The Death of Ivan Illyich, Leo Tolstoy takes this cultural practice a step further, giving readers a glimpse into a society that denies the Dionysian entirely. Through the demoralizing decline and eventual death of Ivan Illyich, Tolstoy suggests that rejecting the Dionysian not only obstructs society’s true understanding of human nature, but makes it wholly unprepared to handle humanity’s most essential truth: its mortality.