The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories · Chapter
There Are No Guilty People explained
The chapter opens with a vignette of peasant life, detailing the hardships of Mitri Sudarikov after the death of his horse.
What happens
The chapter opens with a vignette of peasant life, detailing the hardships of Mitri Sudarikov after the death of his horse. It then shifts to a first-person narrative from an elderly man who feels intense anguish over the injustice and oppression of the poor by the rich, but feels trapped within the very society he condemns. He resolves to use his unique position to expose the truth of these social relations. The final section introduces Alexander Ivanovich Volgin, a comfortable bank clerk staying at a wealthy landowner's estate.
Themes in this chapter
Social Class and Hierarchy
The chapter's core contrast: the detailed misery of peasant Mitri versus the detached comfort of clerk Volgin and the anguished confession of the wealthy narrator, explicitly analyzing the 'artificial and criminal relations' between classes.
Fate, Injustice, and Suffering
Centered on the narrator's acute, painful awareness of the 'injustice, cruelty, and horror' of oppression and the 'grinding humiliation' of workers. Mitri's misfortune with his horse exemplifies the precarious suffering of the poor.
Hypocrisy and Social Pretense
The narrator condemns the 'depravity and sins of rich society' from within it, feeling shame and detesting its attitudes but being unable to leave, embodying a trapped consciousness of societal falsehood.
Characters to notice
- Mitri Sudarikov
A peasant whose horse has died; he bargains for its skin, borrows a cart to bury it, drinks to console himself, and goes to the squire to seek money, highlighting the precariousness of rural life.
- The Master
Implied as the 'squire' from whom Mitri seeks and receives three roubles, representing the landowning class upon which the peasant depends.
- Alexander Ivanovich Volgin
A bank clerk staying at a wealthy country house; his comfortable routine and possessions contrast sharply with the peasant's struggles introduced earlier in the chapter.
- Nicholas Petrovich
Another figure, likely a landowner, from whom Mitri also receives three roubles, further illustrating the peasant's reliance on the gentry.
Key passages
“Mine is a strange and wonderful lot! The chances are that there is not a single wretched beggar suffering under the luxury and oppression of the rich who feels anything like as keenly as I do either the injustice, the cruelty, and the horror of their oppression of and contempt for the poor...”
The narrator claims to feel the injustices of the class system more acutely than the oppressed themselves, yet remains trapped within the oppressive class.
Highlights the paradox of enlightened guilt within the privileged class.
“I am so placed that I not only have no desire to vindicate myself; but, on the contrary, I find it necessary to make an effort lest I should exaggerate the wickedness of the great among whom I live...”
The narrator believes his position allows him to tell the truth about social relations without bias, neither defending the rich nor idealizing the poor.
Positions the narrator as a potentially objective expositor of social truth.
“Mitri woke up before dawn as usual. He groaned as the memory of the day before broke in upon him—how the horse had struggled and struggled, and then fallen down. Now there was no horse, and all he had was the price of the skin, four roubles and eighty kopecks.”
Mitri's morning begins with the crushing reality of his economic loss—his essential work animal is gone, reduced to a small sum of money.
Conveys the material and emotional impact of poverty and misfortune.