A Confession

 

 

 

                   by Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy

 

            Distributed by the Tolstoy Library OnLine

 

 

 

               First distributed in Russia in 1882

 

 

 

                                I

 

 

 

     I was baptized and brought up in the Orthodox Christian faith.

 

I was taught it in childhood and throughout my boyhood and youth.

 

But when I abandoned the second course of the university at the age

 

of eighteen I no longer believed any of the things I had been

 

taught.

 

     Judging by certain memories, I never seriously believed them,

 

but had merely relied on what I was taught and on what was

 

professed by the grown-up people around me, and that reliance was

 

very unstable.

 

     I remember that before I was eleven a grammar school pupil,

 

Vladimir Milyutin (long since dead), visited us one Sunday and

 

announced as the latest novelty a discovery made at his school.

 

This discovery was that there is no God and that all we are taught

 

about Him is a mere invention (this was in 1838).  I remember how

 

interested my elder brothers were in this information.  They called

 

me to their council and we all, I remember, became very animated,

 

and accepted it as something very interesting and quite possible.

 

     I remember also that when my elder brother, Dmitriy, who was

 

then at the university, suddenly, in the passionate way natural to

 

him, devoted himself to religion and began to attend all the Church

 

services, to fast and to lead a pure and moral life, we all -- even

 

our elders -- unceasingly held him up to ridicule and for some

 

unknown reason called him "Noah".  I remember that Musin-Pushkin,

 

the then Curator of Kazan University, when inviting us to dance at

 

his home, ironically persuaded my brother (who was declining the

 

invitation) by the argument that even David danced before the Ark.

 

I sympathized with these jokes made by my elders, and drew from

 

them the conclusion that though it is necessary to learn the

 

catechism and go to church, one must not take such things too

 

seriously.  I remember also that I read Voltaire when I was very

 

young, and that his raillery, far from shocking me, amused me very

 

much.

 

     My lapse from faith occurred as is usual among people on our

 

level of education.  In most cases, I think, it happens thus:  a

 

man lives like everybody else, on the basis of principles not

 

merely having nothing in common with religious doctrine, but

 

generally opposed to it; religious doctrine does not play a part in

 

life, in intercourse with others it is never encountered, and in a

 

man's own life he never has to reckon with it.  Religious doctrine

 

is professed far away from life and independently of it.  If it is

 

encountered, it is only as an external phenomenon disconnected from

 

life.

 

     Then as now, it was and is quite impossible to judge by a

 

man's life and conduct whether he is a believer or not.  If there

 

be a difference between a man who publicly professes orthodoxy and

 

one who denies it, the difference is not in favor of the former.

 

Then as now, the public profession and confession of orthodoxy was

 

chiefly met with among people who were dull and cruel and who

 

considered themselves very important.  Ability, honesty,

 

reliability, good-nature and moral conduct, were often met with

 

among unbelievers.

 

     The schools teach the catechism and send the pupils to church,

 

and government officials must produce certificates of having

 

received communion.  But a man of our circle who has finished his

 

education and is not in the government service may even now (and

 

formerly it was still easier for him to do so) live for ten or

 

twenty years without once remembering that he is living among

 

Christians and is himself reckoned a member of the orthodox

 

Christian Church.

 

     So that, now as formerly, religious doctrine, accepted on

 

trust and supported by external pressure, thaws away gradually

 

under the influence of knowledge and experience of life which

 

conflict with it, and a man very often lives on, imagining that he

 

still holds intact the religious doctrine imparted to him in

 

childhood whereas in fact not a trace of it remains.

 

     S., a clever and truthful man, once told me the story of how

 

he ceased to believe.  On a hunting expedition, when he was already

 

twenty-six, he once, at the place where they put up for the night,

 

knelt down in the evening to pray -- a habit retained from

 

childhood.  His elder brother, who was at the hunt with him, was

 

lying on some hay and watching him.  When S. had finished and was

 

settling down for the night, his brother said to him:  "So you

 

still do that?"

 

     They said nothing more to one another.  But from that day S.

 

ceased to say his prayers or go to church.  And now he has not

 

prayed, received communion, or gone to church, for thirty years.

 

And this not because he knows his brother's convictions and has

 

joined him in them, nor because he has decided anything in his own

 

soul, but simply because the word spoken by his brother was like

 

the push of a finger on a wall that was ready to fall by its own

 

weight.  The word only showed that where he thought there was

 

faith, in reality there had long been an empty space, and that

 

therefore the utterance of words and the making of signs of the

 

cross and genuflections while praying were quite senseless actions.

 

Becoming conscious of their senselessness he could not continue

 

them.

 

     So it has been and is, I think, with the great majority of

 

people.  I am speaking of people of our educational level who are

 

sincere with themselves, and not of those who make the profession

 

of faith a means of attaining worldly aims.  (Such people are the

 

most fundamental infidels, for if faith is for them a means of

 

attaining any worldly aims, then certainly it is not faith.)  these

 

people of our education are so placed that the light of knowledge

 

and life has caused an artificial erection to melt away, and they

 

have either already noticed this and swept its place clear, or they

 

have not yet noticed it.

 

     The religious doctrine taught me from childhood disappeared in

 

me as in others, but with this difference, that as from the age of

 

fifteen I began to read philosophical works, my rejection of the

 

doctrine became a conscious one at a very early age.  From the time

 

I was sixteen I ceased to say my prayers and ceased to go to church

 

or to fast of my own volition.  I did not believe what had been

 

taught me in childhood but I believed in something.  What it was I

 

believed in I could not at all have said.  I believed in a God, or

 

rather I did not deny God -- but I could not have said what sort of

 

God.  Neither did I deny Christ and his teaching, but what his

 

teaching consisted in I again could not have said.

 

     Looking back on that time, I now see clearly that my faith --

 

my only real faith -- that which apart from my animal instincts

 

gave impulse to my life -- was a belief in perfecting myself.  But

 

in what this perfecting consisted and what its object was, I could

 

not have said.  I tried to perfect myself mentally -- I studied

 

everything I could, anything life threw in my way; I tried to

 

perfect my will, I drew up rules I tried to follow; I perfected

 

myself physically, cultivating my strength and agility by all sorts

 

of exercises, and accustoming myself to endurance and patience by

 

all kinds of privations.  And all this I considered to be the

 

pursuit of perfection.  the beginning of it all was of course moral

 

perfection, but that was soon replaced by perfection in general:

 

by the desire to be better not in my own eyes or those of God but

 

in the eyes of other people.  And very soon this effort again

 

changed into a desire to be stronger than others:  to be more

 

famous, more important and richer than others.

 

 

 

                               II

 

 

 

     Some day I will narrate the touching and instructive history

 

of my life during those ten years of my youth.  I think very many

 

people have had a like experience.  With all my soul I wished to be

 

good, but I was young, passionate and alone, completely alone when

 

I sought goodness.  Every time I tried to express my most sincere

 

desire, which was to be morally good, I met with contempt and

 

ridicule, but as soon as I yielded to low passions I was praised

 

and encouraged.

 

     Ambition, love of power, covetousness, lasciviousness, pride,

 

anger, and revenge -- were all respected.

 

     Yielding to those passions I became like the grown-up folk and

 

felt that they approved of me.  The kind aunt with whom I lived,

 

herself the purest of beings, always told me that there was nothing

 

she so desired for me as that I should have relations with a

 

married woman:  'Rien ne forme un juene homme, comme une liaison

 

avec une femme comme il faut'.  [Footnote:  Nothing so forms a

 

young man as an intimacy with a woman of good breeding.]  Another

 

happiness she desired for me was that I should become an aide-de-

 

camp, and if possible aide-de-camp to the Emperor.  But the

 

greatest happiness of all would be that I should marry a very rich

 

girl and so become possessed of as many serfs as possible.

 

     I cannot think of those years without horror, loathing and

 

heartache.  I killed men in war and challenged men to duels in

 

order to kill them.  I lost at cards, consumed the labor of the

 

peasants, sentenced them to punishments, lived loosely, and

 

deceived people.  Lying, robbery, adultery of all kinds,

 

drunkenness, violence, murder -- there was no crime I did not

 

commit, and in spite of that people praised my conduct and my

 

contemporaries considered and consider me to be a comparatively

 

moral man.

 

     So I lived for ten years.

 

     During that time I began to write from vanity, covetousness,

 

and pride.  In my writings I did the same as in my life.  to get

 

fame and money, for the sake of which I wrote, it was necessary to

 

hide the good and to display the evil.  and I did so.  How often in

 

my writings I contrived to hide under the guise of indifference, or

 

even of banter, those strivings of mine towards goodness which gave

 

meaning to my life!  And I succeeded in this and was praised.

 

     At twenty-six years of age [Footnote: He was in fact 27 at the

 

time.] I returned to Petersburg after the war, and met the writers.

 

They received me as one of themselves and flattered me.  And before

 

I had time to look round I had adopted the views on life of the set

 

of authors I had come among, and these views completely obliterated

 

all my former strivings to improve -- they furnished a theory which

 

justified the dissoluteness of my life.

 

     The view of life of these people, my comrades in authorship,

 

consisted in this: that life in general goes on developing, and in

 

this development we -- men of thought -- have the chief part; and

 

among men of thought it is we -- artists and poets -- who have the

 

greatest influence.  Our vocation is to teach mankind.  And lest

 

the simple question should suggest itself: What do I know, and what

 

can I teach? it was explained in this theory that this need not be

 

known, and that the artist and poet teach unconsciously.  I was

 

considered an admirable artist and poet, and therefore it was very

 

natural for me to adopt this theory.  I, artist and poet, wrote and

 

taught without myself knowing what.  For this I was paid money; I

 

had excellent food, lodging, women, and society; and I had fame,

 

which showed that what I taught was very good.

 

     this faith in the meaning of poetry and in the development of

 

life was a religion, and I was one of its priests.  To be its

 

priest was very pleasant and profitable.  And I lived a

 

considerable time in this faith without doubting its validity.  But

 

in the second and still more in the third year of this life I began

 

to doubt the infallibility of this religion and to examine it.  My

 

first cause of doubt was that I began to notice that the priests of

 

this religion were not all in accord among themselves.  Some said:

 

We are the best and most useful teachers; we teach what is needed,

 

but the others teach wrongly.  Others said: No! we are the real

 

teachers, and you teach wrongly.  and they disputed, quarrelled,

 

abused, cheated, and tricked one another.  There were also many

 

among us who did not care who was right and who was wrong, but were

 

simply bent on attaining their covetous aims by means of this

 

activity of ours.  All this obliged me to doubt the validity of our

 

creed.

 

     Moreover, having begun to doubt the truth of the authors'

 

creed itself, I also began to observe its priests more attentively,

 

and I became convinced that almost all the priests of that

 

religion, the writers, were immoral, and for the most part men of

 

bad, worthless character, much inferior to those whom I had met in

 

my former dissipated and military life; but they were self-

 

confident and self-satisfied as only those can be who are quite

 

holy or who do not know what holiness is.  These people revolted

 

me, I became revolting to myself, and I realized that that faith

 

was a fraud.

 

     But strange to say, though I understood this fraud and

 

renounced it, yet I did not renounce the rank these people gave me:

 

the rank of artist, poet, and teacher.  I naively imagined that I

 

was a poet and artist and could teach everybody without myself

 

knowing what I was teaching, and I acted accordingly.

 

     From my intimacy with these men I acquired a new vice:

 

abnormally developed pride and an insane assurance that it was my

 

vocation to teach men, without knowing what.

 

     To remember that time, and my own state of mind and that of

 

those men (though there are thousands like them today), is sad and

 

terrible and ludicrous, and arouses exactly the feeling one

 

experiences in a lunatic asylum.

 

     We were all then convinced that it was necessary for us to

 

speak, write, and print as quickly as possible and as much as

 

possible, and that it was all wanted for the good of humanity.  And

 

thousands of us, contradicting and abusing one another, all printed

 

and wrote -- teaching others.  And without noticing that we knew

 

nothing, and that to the simplest of life's questions: What is good

 

and what is evil? we did not know how to reply, we all talked at

 

the same time, not listening to one another, sometimes seconding

 

and praising one another in order to be seconded and praised in

 

turn, sometimes getting angry with one another -- just as in a

 

lunatic asylum.

 

     Thousands of workmen laboured to the extreme limit of their

 

strength day and night, setting the type and printing millions of

 

words which the post carried all over Russia, and we still went on

 

teaching and could in no way find time to teach enough, and were

 

always angry that sufficient attention was not paid us.

 

     It was terribly strange, but is now quite comprehensible.  Our

 

real innermost concern was to get as much money and praise as

 

possible.  To gain that end we could do nothing except write books

 

and papers.  So we did that.  But in order to do such useless work

 

and to feel assured that we were very important people we required

 

a theory justifying our activity.  And so among us this theory was

 

devised:  "All that exists is reasonable.  All that exists

 

develops.  And it all develops by means of Culture.  And Culture is

 

measured by the circulation of books and newspapers.  And we are

 

paid money and are respected because we write books and newspapers,

 

and therefore we are the most useful and the best of men."  This

 

theory would have been all very well if we had been unanimous, but

 

as every thought expressed by one of us was always met by a

 

diametrically opposite thought expressed by another, we ought to

 

have been driven to reflection.  But we ignored this; people paid

 

us money and those on our side praised us, so each of us considered

 

himself justified.

 

     It is now clear to me that this was just as in a lunatic

 

asylum; but then I only dimly suspected this, and like all

 

lunatics, simply called all men lunatics except myself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                               III

 

 

 

     So I lived, abandoning myself to this insanity for another six

 

years, till my marriage.  During that time I went abroad.  Life in

 

Europe and my acquaintance with leading and learned Europeans

 

[Footnote:  Russians generally make a distinction between Europeans

 

and Russians. -- A.M.] confirmed me yet more in the faith of

 

striving after perfection in which I believed, for I found the same

 

faith among them.  That faith took with me the common form it

 

assumes with the majority of educated people of our day.  It was

 

expressed by the word "progress".  It then appeared to me that this

 

word meant something.  I did not as yet understand that, being

 

tormented (like every vital man) by the question how it is best for

 

me to live, in my answer, "Live in conformity with progress", I was

 

like a man in a boat who when carried along by wind and waves

 

should reply to what for him is the chief and only question.

 

"whither to steer", by saying, "We are being carried somewhere".

 

     I did not then notice this.  Only occasionally -- not by

 

reason but by instinct -- I revolted against this superstition so

 

common in our day, by which people hide from themselves their lack

 

of understanding of life....So, for instance, during my stay in

 

Paris, the sight of an execution revealed to me the instability of

 

my superstitious belief in progress.  When I saw the head part from

 

the body and how they thumped separately into the box, I

 

understood, not with my mind but with my whole being, that no

 

theory of the reasonableness of our present progress could justify

 

this deed; and that though everybody from the creation of the world

 

had held it to be necessary, on whatever theory, I knew it to be

 

unnecessary and bad; and therefore the arbiter of what is good and

 

evil is not what people say and do, nor is it progress, but it is

 

my heart and I.  Another instance of a realization that the

 

superstitious belief in progress is insufficient as a guide to

 

life, was my brother's death.  Wise, good, serious, he fell ill

 

while still a young man, suffered for more than a year, and died

 

painfully, not understanding why he had lived and still less why he

 

had to die.  No theories could give me, or him, any reply to these

 

questions during his slow and painful dying.  But these were only

 

rare instances of doubt, and I actually continued to live

 

professing a faith only in progress.  "Everything evolves and I

 

evolve with it:  and why it is that I evolve with all things will

 

be known some day."  So I ought to have formulated my faith at that

 

time.

 

     On returning from abroad I settled in the country and chanced

 

to occupy myself with peasant schools.  This work was particularly