A Confession — tolstoy.life research

An autobiographical narrative written between about 1879 and 1882. Its Russian title is Confession («Исповедь») — though that title was not his own; in English it has appeared as My Confession and, in the standard Maude translation, A Confession. Source text: PSS Tom 23, pp. 1–59.

It tells the story of the overturning («переворот») — his own word — that he passed through around the age of fifty: how, at the height of everything counted as good fortune, every question of why to live went unanswered; how the thought that death would erase any meaning his life could hold brought him close to suicide; and how he found the will to live again in the faith of the labouring people — ending in a break with the Church he had returned to.

The question

The book stages one question and refuses every easy answer to it. The questions that began to arrest his life, it says, always came out the same: “What is it for? What does it lead to?” («Зачем? Ну, а потом?»). And they came not in adversity but at the summit — the arrest fell on him “at a time when all around me I had what is considered complete good fortune” («в то время, когда со всех сторон было у меня то, что считается совершенным счастьем»). Sharpened to its point, the whole book turns on one line: “Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?” («Есть ли в моей жизни такой смысл, который не уничтожался бы неизбежно предстоящей мне смертью?»).

Reason answers only that life is senseless; the answer that lets him live comes from elsewhere, and it is faith: “faith is a knowledge of the meaning of human life in consequence of which man does not destroy himself but lives. Faith is the strength of life” («Вера есть знание смысла человеческой жизни, вследствие которого человек не уничтожает себя, а живет. Вера есть сила жизни»).

What the book says

Sixteen short chapters move from autobiography to argument to a closing dream. The first are memory: a cradle Orthodoxy already gone by eighteen, and then a merciless account of the years that followed — “I killed men in war and challenged men to duels in order to kill them. I lost at cards, consumed the labor of the peasants, sentenced them to punishments, lived loosely, and deceived people” («Я убивал людей на войне, вызывал на дуэли, чтоб убить, проигрывал в карты, проедал труды мужиков, казнил их, блудил, обманывал»).

The middle chapters are the crisis. Life stops — one could still breathe, eat, sleep, but there was no life in it — and it is figured in the old parable of the traveller who hangs from a branch over a pit while a white mouse and a black, day and night, gnaw the branch through: “I tried to lick the honey which formerly consoled me, but the honey no longer gave me pleasure” («я пытаюсь сосать тот мед, который прежде утешал меня; но этот мед уже не радует меня»). Every branch of human knowledge is searched, and each only confirms that life is senseless.

The turn is not a new argument but a change of ground. The countless ordinary people who labour do live, and live as though life has meaning, on a knowledge that is not the reasoning kind — faith. The fault, he decides, was never in the logic: “I had erred not so much because I thought incorrectly as because I lived badly” («Я заблудился не столько оттого, что неправильно мыслил, сколько оттого, что я жил дурно»). The recovery is put plainly — “God is life” («Бог есть жизнь») — and he joins the faith of the people.

Then the last chapters break with the Church that faith had led him back to, over two things he cannot accept: its hostility to every other confession, and its blessing of war and executions — “And Russians, in the name of Christian love, began to kill their fellow men” («И русские стали во имя христианской любви убивать своих братьев»). The book closes not on argument but on a dream, lying on woven cords over a bottomless depth, held only by looking up: “The immensity below repels and frightens me; the immensity above attracts and strengthens me” («Бесконечность внизу отталкивает и ужасает меня; бесконечность вверху притягивает и утверждает меня»).

The title

Confession («Исповедь») was not the title he gave it. The manuscripts and proofs carry working titles instead — How I Lost the Meaning of Life and Where I Found It («Как я потерял смысл жизни и в чем нашел его») among them. Confession first appears in print in Mikhail Elpidin’s Geneva edition of 1884, and he accepted it only by about 1885. The English title has been as unsettled as the Russian: the piece first reached English readers in 1885 folded anonymously into a compilation under the heading “How I Came to Believe,” became My Confession through later editions, and settled as A Confession only with the Maude translation of 1921. A title that drifted this much was never a fixed choice.

The suppression

The work’s early history is a history of suppression. It was set in type for the May 1882 issue of the journal Russkaya Mysl (Russian Thought, «Русская мысль»), with an editorial preface and churchly footnotes added; the ecclesiastical censorship then forbade it, and the printed sheets were cut from the issue and sent to be destroyed. The journal printing never reached the public. From the surviving proofs the text spread illicitly — hectographed and lithographed copies sold across Russia at about three rubles each — and the first real edition appeared abroad, in Geneva in 1884. It was not legally printed in Russia until 1906, in the journal Universal Herald («Всемирный вестник»). The gap between writing and lawful publication ran a quarter of a century, and closed only just inside his own lifetime.

Not a sudden thing

The book is often read as the record of a sudden crisis that struck after Anna Karenina. Asked outright, years later, whether the change had come all at once, he corrected the premise. The change described in the Confession, he wrote, “did not happen all at once; the same ideas, expressed more clearly in my later works, are present in embryo in the earlier ones” («произошла не сразу, но что те же идеи, которые яснее выражены в моих последних произведениях, находятся в зародыше в более ранних»). The overturning was long in coming, not a single stroke.

Where it stands

A Confession is the threshold of the years that followed — the book in which the novelist becomes a religious writer, and the first panel of a four-part work (A Confession, a critique of dogmatic theology, a harmony of the Gospels, and What I Believe) that the Church would spend two decades keeping out of print. Its doctrinal sequel, What I Believe («В чём моя вера?»), stands in the same volume and opens exactly where this book ends: “Five years ago I came to believe in Christ’s teaching — and my life suddenly changed” («Пять лет тому назад я поверил в учение Христа — и жизнь моя вдруг переменилась»).