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A Confession
1882 · 96 pages
A Confession
by Leo Tolstoy
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.
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.
Banned in Russia and first printed abroad, 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.
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?
- It uses the translation by Aylmer Maude, published before 1931 and in the public domain, which is generally regarded as the standard English version of the text.
A note on the text. A Confessionis in the public domain. What you're buying is our edition — the careful typesetting and design. The original text is also available free here.