A study of existential anxiety and the call of conscience in the analysis of the novel The Death of Ivan Ilyich based on Heidegger's perspective

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1 Department of Philosophy and Islamic Wisdom, Faculty of Theology, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad

2 Department of Philosophy and Islamic Wisdom, Faculty of Theology, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran

10.22080/jepr.2026.30635.1310

Abstract

Leo Tolstoy’s novel The Death of Ivan Ilyich is one of the most significant literary narratives about the human confrontation with death and the crisis of life’s meaning. This study examines how existential anxiety and the call of conscience unfold in Ivan Ilyich’s awareness and relate to the fundamental concepts of Martin Heidegger’s thought. Through conceptual analysis and phenomenological interpretation, it rereads the protagonist’s lived experience confronting illness, death, and the collapse of everyday certainty in light of concepts such as being‑toward‑death, anxiety, and the call of conscience in Being and Time.

Findings indicate Ivan Ilyich’s anxiety corresponds to existential anxiety in Heidegger’s philosophy—an anxiety confronting human finitude and opening the possibility of authentic existence. Within this framework, the call of conscience functions as an awakening force, summoning the individual to reclaim the self from inauthentic living. The study also shows the limitation of empirical science in answering the meaning of being results from the structural link of anxiety and the call of conscience; anxiety marks a rupture with reliance on scientific understanding and initiates a turn toward existential conscience.

Nevertheless, comparative analysis reveals a fundamental difference between Tolstoy and Heidegger: in Tolstoy’s narrative, the call of conscience opens toward faith and the divine, whereas in Heidegger’s phenomenology it arises from Dasein itself. Hence, the novel’s final line—“there was no more death; instead there was light”—cannot be fully explained within a Heideggerian framework.

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