Philosophy of Religion

A Confession

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Leo Tolstoy

1882

Written in the years following Tolstoy's great creative success — Anna Karenina had just been completed — A Confession records the spiritual crisis that overtook him in his early fifties: a sudden conviction that everything he had achieved, believed, and built his life upon was meaningless. Fame, wealth, family, artistic mastery — all of it dissolved under a single question he could not answer: why live? The pamphlet traces his search through science, philosophy, and the religions of educated Europe, each of which he found wanting, until he turned to the peasant faith of ordinary Russian people and discovered in it something that rational inquiry could not provide. A Confession is one of the most honest documents of modern spiritual despair — and of the unconventional faith that unexpectedly emerged from it.