A Confession

A short autobiographical work written in 1879–80, when Tolstoy was in his early fifties, famous and prosperous, with War and Peace and Anna Karenina behind him. Church censors removed it from a Russian journal in 1882, and it first appeared in full in Geneva in 1884. Tolstoy describes how his life came to a halt over one question: what will come of everything I do, given that I will die? He searched the sciences and found that they either ignored the question or answered that life is meaningless, a verdict he found confirmed by Solomon, the Buddha, Socrates and Schopenhauer. He retells an Eastern fable of a traveller hanging in a well above a dragon while two mice gnaw at his branch. Seeing four responses among people of his class, ignorance, pleasure-seeking, suicide and weak endurance, he turned instead to the faith of ordinary working people and to the Orthodox Church, before breaking with its doctrines while holding that faith is what makes life possible.

It is one of the most honest accounts of a crisis of meaning, and it puts in its plainest form the question of whether life has any meaning that death does not destroy.