Question 1

What is A Confession about?

Accepted Answer

A Confession (1882) is Tolstoy's account of the spiritual crisis he experienced in his late forties — when he was at the height of his fame and his family's happiness and his literary success. He describes a period of profound depression in which he could see no reason to continue living, in which the question 'Why should I do anything? What is the point?' could not be answered by any of his previous beliefs or activities. He describes his unsuccessful search for answers in philosophy (the rational answer he found in Socrates, Schopenhauer, and the pessimist tradition was only that life has no meaning — which confirmed rather than resolved his despair), in science (which cannot address the question of meaning at all), and in the views of his own educated class (who avoid the question through entertainment or through suicide or through deliberate self-deception). He eventually found in the faith of the simple peasant people — their practical, unphilosophical, living faith — a way of living that sustained meaning even in the face of death.

Question 2

What is Tolstoy's critique of the educated class in A Confession?

Accepted Answer

A Confession is partly a critique of the Russian educated class — the class to which Tolstoy himself belonged — for the strategies they use to avoid confronting the question of life's meaning. He identifies four responses that the educated class typically makes: (1) ignorance — not seeing the problem; (2) Epicureanism — knowing the problem and using pleasure to avoid thinking about it; (3) strength — knowing the problem and having the courage to commit suicide; (4) weakness — knowing the problem, seeing that it has no solution, and going on living while recognizing the irrationality of doing so. Tolstoy says that he had been in the fourth category, and that none of the four responses was adequate. The only adequate response he found was the simple faith of the peasants, which did not engage with the philosophical problem at all but simply lived in a way that made the problem moot.

Question 3

What was the impact of A Confession on Tolstoy's subsequent work?

Accepted Answer

A Confession marks the decisive turning point in Tolstoy's career — the division between the novelist who wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina and the moral reformer who wrote What Is Art? and the Kreutzer Sonata and the religious tracts and the plays for the people. After A Confession, Tolstoy became primarily a religious and moral teacher rather than a novelist; he founded the Tolstoyan movement, distributed his estates among the peasants, wore peasant clothes, and tried to live as simply as possible. He continued to write fiction — The Death of Ivan Ilyich, The Kreutzer Sonata, Hadji Murat are the most important — but they were written under the post-Confession moral framework, which shaped what subjects he chose and how he treated them.

Question 4

How does A Confession compare to Dostoevsky's religious views?

Accepted Answer

A Confession and Dostoevsky's religious writings (particularly the sections of A Diary of a Writer that address religious questions and the portrayal of Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov) represent two very different versions of Russian Orthodox Christianity. Tolstoy's faith, as expressed in A Confession, is rationalist and ethical: he stripped away from Christianity everything he believed to be supernatural or miraculous, keeping only the ethical teaching of Christ as a practical guide to living. He rejected the church, the sacraments, the resurrection — all of which he regarded as later accretions that obscured the simple original teaching. Dostoevsky's Christianity was much more mystical and much more specifically Orthodox: for him the specific liturgical and theological tradition was essential, and the figure of Christ as a personal presence (not just an ethical teacher) was central. The two greatest Russian writers of the nineteenth century held incompatible religious views that both emerged from the same crisis of meaning.

Question 5

What should I read after A Confession by Tolstoy?

Accepted Answer

What Is Art? (1897) is the essential companion — his late aesthetic treatise applying the same religious framework to the question of art. The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) is the essential companion in fiction — the same questions about what makes a life meaningful. Hadji Murat (1912) is his final novella and the essential companion in the post-Confession fiction. Anna Karenina (1878) was written during the spiritual crisis — Levin's spiritual search is the autobiographical thread. The Kreutzer Sonata (1889) is the most extreme product of the post-Confession moral framework. Confessions by Augustine is the essential predecessor in the Western tradition of religious autobiography. A Diary of a Writer by Dostoevsky is the essential companion from the Russian tradition — a very different version of Russian religious thought.

A Confession Reading Order

Complete A Confession Book List

A Confession

What Is Art?

The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Hadji Murat

Anna Karenina

The Kreutzer Sonata

Confessions

A Diary of a Writer

A Confession — Frequently Asked Questions

What is A Confession about?

What is Tolstoy's critique of the educated class in A Confession?

What was the impact of A Confession on Tolstoy's subsequent work?

How does A Confession compare to Dostoevsky's religious views?

What should I read after A Confession by Tolstoy?

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