“The Death of Baldassare Sylvande”, an Inverted Pastiche of The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Abstract

We propose to study Marcel Proust’s text ‘The Death of Baldassare Silvande’ included in his early work The Pleasures and the Days (1896) in the light of his reading of Lev Tolstoy’s nouvelle The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886). Some scholarship has already recognised the direct relationship between the two published works and argues that Proust, through his early literary writings, imitated Tolstoy’s narrative. However, in the present study, from an aesthetic-hermeneutic reading and with a comparative methodology, we will focus on the approach to illness in these works, written within a context of décadence. We will thus argue that Proust’s story, rather than functioning as an imitation of Tolstoy’s, is in fact an ‘inverted pastiche’ that adopts the mirror modality of The Death of Ivan Ilyich. This pastiche superimposes Proustian aesthetic theory on Tolstoy’s aesthetic theory and, despite this superimposition, we will also give an account of how Tolstoyan aesthetics lays the foundations for Proust’s work. We will therefore seek not only to broaden and deepen studies of Proustian pastiche, but also to contribute to illuminating the important relations between the French and Russian literary traditions and how the works of both authors can be read through the lens of style.