A Confession

He had everything a man is told to want — worldwide fame, a great estate, a family he loved, health, and the two novels that had made him immortal. And then, barely fifty, Leo Tolstoy found that his life had stopped making sense. The questions came at first like idle interruptions — Why? What for? What next? — and then would no longer be put off, until they gathered into one: is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy? He could find none, and he describes hiding a rope so that he would not hang himself, and giving up his gun lest the temptation prove too strong.

A Confession is the record of that crisis and the search for a way out of it. Tolstoy turns to the sciences and finds they answer questions he is not asking; he turns to philosophy and finds it honest enough to confirm his despair but powerless to lift it. At the center stands his famous parable of the traveler in the well — clinging to a twig above a waiting dragon while two mice gnaw the stem through, licking drops of honey that no longer taste of anything. The way out, when it comes, comes from an unexpected quarter: the simple, unjustifiable faith of the laboring peasants around him, who live and die without despair, and who possess the one thing all his learning could not give him.

Written between 1879 and 1882 and first published abroad after being suppressed in Russia, A Confession stands at the exact pivot of Tolstoy’s life — the close of the great novelist and the opening of the moral reformer of his last decades. Plain, candid, and relentlessly honest, it is one of the great first-person accounts of a crisis of meaning, set beside Augustine and Pascal among the classic confessions of the Western tradition.

This edition pairs the complete public-domain English translation by Aylmer Maude — one of the versions Tolstoy himself authorized — with an editor’s foreword on the work’s composition and meaning, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.