My Religion

My Religion (1884) is the central statement of Tolstoy's mature religious thought — the book in which the great Russian novelist, having passed through the spiritual crisis recorded in his Confession, sets out what he came to believe after that crisis was over.

Tolstoy's conclusion was that the essential teaching of Christ — found chiefly in the Sermon on the Mount — was a clear, practical, and revolutionary set of moral instructions that the institutional church had spent eighteen centuries explaining away. The book works through Christ's central commands one by one and argues that the actual practice of them would transform individual and social life beyond recognition.

The book was banned in Russia, was distributed in clandestine copies, and shaped Mahatma Gandhi profoundly. This edition reproduces Huntington Smith's classic English translation.