Optina Pustyn

Optina Pustyn (Оптина пустынь) is a monastery that touches A Confession (1879–82) in three places in the sources: a draft about Tolstoy’s childhood, the PSS commentary on his return to church practice, and a letter of July 1881.

In a draft of the childhood chapter

Draft No. 23, headed “What am I?”, describes the household of the aunts who brought the children up: “The aunts received pilgrims and travelled to Optina Pustyn, and took the older ones there.” The boy did not know why, and saw in it “nothing either good or bad”.¹ The same draft records that Aleksandra Ilyinichna, his father’s sister, died at Optina Pustyn in the famine year 1840, when he was twelve.² The final text of A Confession does not keep this passage.

The journey with Strakhov

The PSS commentary, describing the years of the late 1870s when he kept the Church’s rules, lists among them that he “goes with N. N. Strakhov to Optina Pustyn”. The commentary gives no date for the journey; the next sentence turns to spring 1877.³ See Nikolai Strakhov.

The journey of 1881

In a letter to Strakhov dated 1–8 July 1881 (OS), from Yasnaya Polyana, he wrote: “I recently made a journey to Optina Pustyn and to Kaluga, and it was very good for me.” In the same letter he reported that the larger work was finished and that he had made an extract from the Gospels with a short preface.⁴ The dive ties the finished form of A Confession to this point.⁵

Open questions

• The year of the earlier journey with Strakhov in the commentary: NEEDS PRIMARY SOURCE. The July 1881 letter tells Strakhov of the 1881 journey as news, so he was not on it.
• The exact dates of the 1881 journey, and whom he met there: not in these sources.
• Location, coordinates and the nearest town are not in this dive’s sources.

Dive provenance

• 1879-1882-a-confession — draft variant No. 23, the PSS 23 commentary, and the letter to Strakhov of July 1881 (evidence conf-let-05); dossier entity “Optina Pustyn”, 2026-10-02.