A Confession, and What I Believe
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~140,000 words · 661 passages
Cite this work
- APALeo Tolstoy. (n.d.). A Confession, and What I Believe. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/leo-tolstoy/a-confession-and-what-i-believe
- MLALeo Tolstoy. A Confession, and What I Believe. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/leo-tolstoy/a-confession-and-what-i-believe.
- ChicagoLeo Tolstoy. A Confession, and What I Believe. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/leo-tolstoy/a-confession-and-what-i-believe.
Reference to the reproduced edition. SigPhi is the digital reproduction, not the publisher. Year, publisher and translator are included when recorded; “n.d.” means the year is unknown. Responsibility for an introduction or note depends on the passage cited.
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.
of mind and that of those men (though there are thousands like them to-day), is sad and terrible and ludicrous, and arouses exactly the feeling one experiences in a lunatic asylum. We were all then convinced that it was neces- sary for us to speak, write, and print as quickly as possible and as much as possible, and that it was all wanted for the good of humanity. And thousands of us, contradicting and abusing one another, all printed and wrote — teaching others. And without remarking that we knew nothing, and that to the simplest of life's question : What is good and what is evil ? we did not know how to reply, we all, not listening to one another, talked at the same time, sometimes backing and praising one another in order to be backed and praised in turn, sometimes getting angry with one another — just as in a lunatic asylum. Thousands of workmen laboured to the extreme limit of their strength day and night, setting the type and printing millions of words which the post carried all over Russia, and we still went on teaching and could in no way find time to teach enough, and were always angry that sufficient attention was not paid us. It was terribly strange, but is now quite com- prehensible. Our real innermost concern was to A CONFESSION get as much money and praise as possible. To gain that end we could do nothing except write books and papers. So we did that. But in order to do such useless work and to feel assured that we were very important people, we required a theory justifying our activity. And so among us this theory was devised : 4 All that exists is reasonable. All that exists develops. And it all develops by means of Culture.…