A Confession, and What I Believe
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~140,000 words · 661 passages
Cite this work
- APALeo Tolstoy. (n.d.). A Confession, and What I Believe. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/leo-tolstoy/a-confession-and-what-i-believe
- MLALeo Tolstoy. "A Confession, and What I Believe." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/leo-tolstoy/a-confession-and-what-i-believe.
- ChicagoLeo Tolstoy. A Confession, and What I Believe. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/leo-tolstoy/a-confession-and-what-i-believe.
What it is about
The account of the crisis that brought Tolstoy, already the author of 'War and Peace' and 'Anna Karenina', to ask whether his life had any meaning, followed by a statement of what he came to believe.
Context and history
'A Confession' is from around 1880 and is one of the barest things he wrote. It describes a man who had everything — fame, family, land, health — and who at fifty could not answer why he should not kill himself. He looks for an answer in science, in philosophy and in the Church, and finds it in none; he finds it, he says, in the way the peasants live who do not ask the question. 'What I Believe' is the second half and is more doctrinal: it sets out the literal reading of the Sermon on the Mount that would lead him to pacifism and to a break with orthodoxy. It is the way into the later Tolstoy, and what makes the rest intelligible.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
pletion of Anna Karenina , early in 1877, and the resumption of his literary activity in the year 1885, with his popular Tales, Tolstoy devoted himself to religious reflection and to a close study of the Gospels and of dogmatic theology, although the latter subject repelled him. Apart from a retranslation of the Gospels with voluminous notes, the works contained in this volume are almost the only literary productions of his that appeared between his forty-ninth and fifty-seventh year, that is to say during eight of the years when his powers were at their zenith. An attempt was made in Russia to suppress these books, but they circulated clandestinely in large numbers, in hectographed copies and also in volumes printed abroad and smuggled into the country. No adequate reply to Tolstoy's terrific onslaughts upon Church and State was produced, and within a single genera- tion, in Russia, the institutions he attacked had crumbled to dust. These books have been translated into all civilized languages and have circulated far and wide. Nowhere have the views they contain vii viii INTRODUCTION been adequately met. On the contrary they have now become part of the air we breathe, and denunciations of Church and State, Parlia- mentary Government, Capital, and the institu- tion of property, as well as of law and order in general, have become commonplaces of democratic rhetoric, and those institutions are now in some circles regarded as offences against the people which must be swept away as a prelude to putting down the mighty from their seats, exalting the humble and meek, filling the hungry with goo