Staring Into the Abyss: Tolstoy's "A Confession" and the Search for Faith

When Leo Tolstoy wrote A Confession, he had everything a person could want. He had written War and Peace and Anna Karenina, two of the greatest novels ever made. He had fame, wealth, a large family, good health, and the respect of the world. And he was on the verge of suicide. This short, brutally honest book is his account of the crisis that struck him in middle age, when a single question rose up and would not let him go: if I am going to die, and everything I do will be forgotten, what is the meaning of any of it? It is one of the most fearless descriptions of a spiritual collapse I have ever read.

Here is what A Confession taught me about the question that money and success cannot answer, and about where Tolstoy finally went looking for a reason to live.

Key takeaways

• Success cannot silence the question of meaning; Tolstoy had everything and still despaired.
• The fact of death threatened to make all his achievements meaningless.
• Reason alone could not answer him; science describes how, not why.
• He found meaning among ordinary believers, in the simple faith of working people.
• Faith, for Tolstoy, is the force that makes life livable in the face of death.

The question that stops everything

Tolstoy describes how the crisis crept up on him. At first it was just occasional moments of bewilderment, a sense of not knowing why he was doing what he was doing. Then the questions grew until he could not function. What will come of my whole life? he asks. Is there any meaning in it that will not be destroyed by the death that awaits me? He could find no answer, and without an answer he could not see why to go on. What strikes me most is that this happened at the height of his powers and good fortune. The crisis was not caused by failure or loss. It was caused by success that suddenly seemed to point at nothing.

What reason could not give

Tolstoy turned first to knowledge, to science and philosophy, hoping they would supply the meaning he had lost. They could not. Science could tell him in endless detail how the world works, the motion of atoms, the evolution of species, but it was silent on the only question he was actually asking, which was why any of it mattered, and what he should live for. Philosophy, he found, mostly restated the question in more elaborate language without answering it. I appreciate his honesty here. He is not anti-intellectual; he was one of the great minds of his age. He is simply reporting that the rational knowledge he trusted had nothing to say about meaning, and that this terrified him.

Looking down, not up

Where Tolstoy finally found a thread of meaning surprised him, and it surprised me. He looked at the vast mass of ordinary people, the peasants, the laborers, the poor and uneducated, and saw that they did not suffer his crisis. They worked, suffered, loved, and died without despairing, sustained by a simple faith that gave their lives a meaning his sophistication had stripped from his. He concluded that they knew something he had lost, and that the answer to his question lay not in cleverer reasoning but in faith, in a trust that connects a finite life to something infinite. He does not pretend this was easy or fully rational. He presents it as the only thing that let him live.

What I’m taking with me

A Confession is a humbling book, especially coming from a man of Tolstoy’s genius. What I am taking from it is a sober warning and a quiet hope. The warning is that achievement, wealth, and even great work cannot, by themselves, answer the question of why we live; a person can have everything and still stand at the edge of the abyss. The hope is that meaning may be found in unexpected, humble places, and that the people we are tempted to look down on may understand something about living that all our knowledge has caused us to forget.

Frequently asked questions

What is Tolstoy’s A Confession about?

It is an autobiographical account of the spiritual crisis Tolstoy faced at the height of his fame, when the certainty of death made his life feel meaningless, and his search for an answer that finally led him toward faith.

Why did Tolstoy fall into despair despite his success?

Because success could not answer the deeper question of meaning. Faced with the inevitability of death, he could find no reason why any of his achievements ultimately mattered.

How did Tolstoy resolve his crisis?

He found that rational knowledge could not provide meaning, but that the simple faith of ordinary working people gave their lives meaning, and he turned toward faith as the force that makes life livable.

References & further reading

1. Tolstoy, Leo. A Confession. (Translated by Aylmer Maude, 1921.)
2. Wilson, A. N. Tolstoy. Hamish Hamilton, 1988.
3. Bayley, John. Tolstoy and the Novel. Chatto & Windus, 1966.