Confession by Leo Tolstoy

by Leo Tolstoy

Excellent Book

Paperback

Published January 1, 1796

About the author

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Николаевич Толстой; most appropriately used Liev Tolstoy; commonly Leo Tolstoy in Anglophone countries) was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist fiction. Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world's greatest novelists. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker and social reformer.

His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Reviews

[Bob Edwards · Rating 4 out of 5]

In his work Confession, Tolstoy writes about his experience transitioning from despair:

I really wished for nothing. I could not even wish to know the truth, because I guessed what the truth was. The truth lay in this, that life had no meaning for me. Every day of life, every step in it, brought me nearer the edge of a precipice, whence I saw clearly the final ruin before me. To stop, to go back, was impossible; nor could I shut my eyes so as not to see the suffering that alone awaited me, the death of all in me, even to annihilation. Thus I, a healthy and a happy man, was brought to feel that I could live no longer, that an irresistible force was dragging me down into the grave. I do not mean that I had an intention of committing suicide. The force that drew me away from life was stronger, fuller, and concerned with far wider consequences than any mere wish; it was a force like that of my previous attachment to life, only in a contrary direction. The idea of suicide came as naturally to me as formerly that of bettering my life. It had so much attraction for me that I was compelled to practise a species of self-deception, in order to avoid carrying it out too hastily. I was unwilling to act hastily, only because I had determined first to clear away the confusion of my thoughts, and, that once done, I could always kill myself. I was happy, yet I hid away a cord, to avoid being tempted to hang myself by it to one of the pegs between the cupboards of my study, where I undressed alone every evening, and ceased carrying a gun because it offered too easy a way of getting rid of life. I knew not what I wanted; I was afraid of life; I shrank from it, and yet there was something I hoped for from it.

To finding meaning in life and peace:

What was this discouragement and revival? I do not live when I lose faith in the existence of a God; I should long ago have killed myself, if I had not had a dim hope of finding Him. I only really live when I feel and seek Him. “What more, then, do I seek?” A voice seemed to cry within me, “This is He, He without whom there is no life. To know God and to live are one. God is life.” Live to seek God, and life will not be without Him. And stronger than ever rose up life within and around me, and the light that then shone never left me again.
The shore is God, the course tradition; the oars are the free will given me to make for the shore to seek union with the Deity. And thus the vital force was renewed in me, and I began again to live.

Though I don’t profess that God has saved me from despair, I acknowledge and accept that my evolution from falling into the bottomless abyss of depression and self loathing to a healthier version of myself has followed a spiritual journey - to rise up rather than to hold myself down! I accept Tolstoy’s five commandments of Jesus Christ while rejecting the church institutions that have bastardized these commandments into something unrecognizable - something that suits their own lust for power and money! They live a lie, while like Tolstoy, I seek the truth! I am inclined to believe that this can be a long, lonely pursuit that includes rejection and exclusion from society but peace and alignment with oneself!