Death is coming for Vasili, and it’s nothing personal. This is just what Death does. But now, Vasili, of the charmed life, finds himself in its path. Although he knows and accepts that everything must, in time, pass from the earth, he finds himself having trouble accepting that he’s included in that “everything.” In his novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy writes, of the terminally ill Ivan: “The syllogism…‘Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal,’ had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself….He was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others. He had been little Vanya, with a mamma and a papa….What did Caius know of the smell of that striped leather ball Vanya had been so fond of?”

The wormwood is a brilliant and crazy “symbol” that represents several things at once. It’s a marker of futility (Vasili would like the wormwood to be a village, but it isn’t; he’d like to not keep circling back to it, but he does). It’s a physical reminder of the chillingly egalitarian nature of death and the impossibility of avoiding it (no matter where he goes, there it is, not hostile, just indifferent). He identifies with it, sees himself and the wormwood as being in similar straits (like him, it is being “tormented by the pitiless wind”; like it, he has been “left alone” and is “awaiting an inevitable, speedy, and meaningless death”).

But, of course, it’s also real wormwood: swaying in the moonlight, the only dark patch in a world of white, being looked at by…well, me. Whenever I read this section I feel the cold and the dead-end panic (there is literally nowhere I can go where I won’t freeze to death) and see the black-blue Russian sky overhead and hear the crunching of my pathetic, familiar boots on the snow, boots soon to be full of (horrors!) my frozen, dead feet.