Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play — and Kindle via Send to Kindle
- ✓ Choose your format — EPUB or PDF
- ✓ Instant download after purchase
- ✓ Yours to keep — no subscription
A Confession
1882 · 94 pages
A Confession
by Leo Tolstoy
Why our edition. The free text is a proofread transcription from Standard Ebooks rather than a page scan, so there is no scanning damage to report. What ours adds is the typesetting: one clean file, in three formats, without the boilerplate. The full text is public domain and free — linked below.
On this page: a summary of A Confession, which translation this edition uses, and our clean edition as a PDF or EPUB.
Leo Tolstoy’s first-person account of the crisis that overtook him in middle age — wealthy, celebrated, and yet driven to the brink of suicide by the question of whether life had any meaning. A Confession traces his youthful loss of faith, his years as a skeptic and rationalist, and his eventual return to belief in God, told with the same searching honesty that made him one of the world’s greatest writers.
The changed life
Raised Orthodox but an unbeliever from his youth, Tolstoy spent decades as a rationalist at the summit of literary fame before a suicidal crisis over life’s purpose turned him back toward faith in God — though a faith of his own radical, non-Orthodox making.
What it cost
Nothing you could count. He turned his back on the outlook of his own class, made himself go through rites he did not understand, and in the end broke with the Church he had come back to.
ch. X, XIII, XV–XVI
Tolstoy’s crisis, in his own words
At the height of his fame — Anna Karenina just finished, his place in literature secure — Tolstoy found he could not answer why he should live, and by his own account hid the rope from himself. A Confession (1882) is his firsthand record of that crisis and of the long reasoning that led him back to faith.
Our edition presents Aylmer Maude’s translation — Tolstoy’s friend and authorized translator — unaltered, with a few notes drawn from Tolstoy’s Russian original where a single word carries a resonance English cannot hold. The free public-domain text is linked as well.
Summary
A Confession, written between 1879 and 1882, is Leo Tolstoy’s account of the spiritual crisis that overtook him in middle age. By then the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, wealthy and world-famous, he found himself unable to answer a single question that had come to consume him: what meaning does life have that is not destroyed by death? The book records how that question grew until it brought him to the edge of suicide.
Tolstoy recounts his youthful abandonment of the Orthodox faith he was raised in, his years of skepticism, rationalism, and worldly ambition, and his failed attempts to find an answer in science, philosophy, and the company of learned men. He finally turns to the faith of ordinary working people, whose simple belief seemed to give them the strength to live and die without despair — and through them he returns to a belief in God.
Stopped by the church censor when a Moscow journal printed it in 1882, and first issued as a book in Geneva in 1884, A Confession launched the last three decades of Tolstoy’s life as a Christian moral philosopher whose writings would later influence Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. It remains one of the most famous accounts in literature of a mind moving from unbelief back toward faith.
Who was Leo Tolstoy?
Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) was a Russian count and novelist, the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest writers in world literature. Raised in the Russian Orthodox Church, he abandoned religious belief as a young man and spent decades as a skeptic and rationalist while achieving worldwide fame, before the crisis described in A Confession turned him back toward God.
Readers should understand that Tolstoy’s Christianity was heterodox. He rejected the divinity of Christ, the miracles, and the authority of the institutional church, and in 1901 he was excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church. A Confession is best read not as the story of an orthodox conversion but as one of literature’s most famous unbelief-to-faith crises — the beginning of the idiosyncratic moral Christianity of his final years.
Which translation of A Confession is this?
Our edition presents Aylmer Maude’s translation — Maude knew Tolstoy personally and is the standard English translator of his religious writing — unaltered, with a few brief notes drawn from Tolstoy’s Russian original where a single word carries a resonance English cannot hold. We link the free public-domain Maude text as well.
This is a clean reading edition of Leo Tolstoy's A Confession (written 1879–1882), in the English translation of Aylmer Maude — Tolstoy's friend, and the translator he himself authorized. Maude's rendering is faithful and vivid, and we have not altered it. The text is in the public domain.
What we have added are a few brief notes drawn from Tolstoy's Russian original (his Полное собрание сочинений, vol. 23). Maude's translation carries the book's great images — the traveller in the well above the dragon, the two mice gnawing the branch, the drops of honey, the concluding dream over the abyss — faithfully into English. But in a handful of places a single Russian word holds a resonance that no English word can carry alone. Where that happens, we mark the phrase and give the Russian sense in a short note, so a reader can feel what Tolstoy's first readers felt. The notes illuminate the original; they never correct the translation.
The free source is linked from this book's page — the same public-domain Maude text, beautifully typeset by Standard Ebooks.
Common questions
- Was Tolstoy an orthodox Christian by the end of A Confession?
- No. Although the book describes his return to belief in God, Tolstoy’s faith was heterodox — he rejected the divinity of Christ, the miracles, and the institutional church, and was excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901. It is best read as a famous unbelief-to-faith crisis rather than a creedal conversion.
- Which translation is this edition based on?
- Aylmer Maude’s — he was Tolstoy’s friend and authorized translator, and his rendering is faithful and vivid. Our clean edition presents the Maude translation with added notes from Tolstoy’s Russian original, and we link a free public-domain source as well.
- What is Tolstoy’s A Confession about?
- It is Tolstoy’s own short account of his midlife spiritual crisis: raised Orthodox but an unbeliever from youth, he found at the height of his fame that he could not answer why he should live, contemplated suicide, and records here the search that led him back to faith in God.
- What is the best translation of A Confession?
- Aylmer Maude’s is generally regarded as the standard — he was Tolstoy’s friend and authorized translator. Our clean edition presents the Maude translation with added notes from Tolstoy’s Russian original, and we link a free public-domain source as well.
- Is A Confession free to read?
- Yes — the text is in the public domain. We link a free source, and our edition adds clean, readable typesetting of the Maude translation.
A note on the text. A Confession is in the public domain. What you’re buying is our edition: the careful typesetting and correction. The original text is also available free here.
Related reading
The answer to it
War, Progress and the End of History
Vladimir Solovyov · 1900
Solovyov’s last book takes direct aim at the Tolstoyan position that evil can be met by non-resistance, and closes with the Tale of the Antichrist.
His great contemporary
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1880
Dostoevsky’s last novel, written out of four years in a Siberian prison with only the Gospels to read — and the strongest statement of the case against God in Russian literature.
From the same generation
Niyaz Nama: An Open Letter to the People of Islam
Safdar Ali · 1876
Published in 1876, within a generation of this one.
More like this
We publish first-person accounts of changed lives, and translate works into English that have never been in it. Pick what you want to hear about — nothing is pre-selected, and every email carries a one-click unsubscribe.