Book description
Describing Tolstoy's crisis of depression and estrangement from the
world, A Confession (1879) is an autobiographical work of exceptional
emotional honesty. By the time he was fifty, Tolstoy had already written
the novels that would assure him of literary immortality; he had a wife,
a large estate and numerous children; he was 'a happy man' and in good
health - yet life had lost its meaning. In this poignant confessional
fragment, he records a period of his life when he began to turn away
from fiction and aesthetics, and to search instead for 'a practical
religion not promising future bliss, but giving bliss on earth'.
Count Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born in 1828 and educated
privately. He studied Oriental languages and Law at the University of
Kazan, then led a life of pleasure until he joined an artillery
regiment in the Caucasus in 1851. He served during the Crimean War and
after the defence of Sebastopol wrote The Sebastopol Sketches, which
established his reputation. He continued to write while developing
educational projects, writing War and Peace and Anna Karenina between
1865 and 1876. A Confession marked an outward change in his life and
works: he became an extreme rationalist and moralist, and his theories
led to his excommunication from the Russian Holy Synod in 1901. He
died in 1910.
Jane Kentish is a lecturer in Byzantine and early Russian History
and Art at the University of Sussex.
