A Confession, and What I Believe

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…