32 pages • 1 hour read
Leo TolstoyA Confession
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1880A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Meaningless Lives of the Affluent; the Meaningful Lives of the Poor
Tolstoy asserts and reasserts a message from the Gospels: It is harder for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven than it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. For Tolstoy, it became necessary to “[renounce] the life of our class and [recognize] that this is not life but only the semblance of life, that the conditions of luxury under which we live make it impossible for us to understand life” (76). He portrays the affluent as parasites while he praises the laboring poor for their simple life and simple faith.
The author builds his case against his class gradually throughout his A Confession. In Chapter 2, Tolstoy explains that as a youth he was ridiculed for his attempts to be morally righteous and praised for indulging “vile passions” (17), suggesting the moral decay of his peers. As a young writer, Tolstoy lived selfishly and sought fame and fortune like his writer friends. He lost his discipline and ceased his efforts at self-improvement after years of pressure from his audience and his friends to hide “under the mask of indifference and even pleasantry those yearnings for something good which gave meaning to my life” (18). Among the members of his class, the current ran toward immoral and selfish living, and it was a struggle to live otherwise.
This line of thought culminates in Tolstoy’s discovery that such people cannot attain a meaningful existence. Affluent people, including affluent religious people, are incapable of discovering the meaning of life because they lead terrible lives. Tolstoy concludes that they “lived only to satisfy their lusts, lived just as badly, if not worse, than those who did not believe” (65). For the author, an affluent priest typically leads the same sort of wicked life as a crime boss.
The laboring poor, by contrast, live simple lives and cling to a simple faith and therefore understand the meaning of life. The education and sinister goals of the elite are a stumbling block to faith. At the end of Chapter 10, Tolstoy finds that “the actions of the laboring people, of those who create life, began to appear to me as the one true way. I realized that the meaning provided by this life was truth, and I embraced it” (68). At this point, Tolstoy has fully committed to abandoning his class. He is unable to dismiss his revelation that the peasants’ willingness to work hard and face their struggles mixed with a faith unfiltered by complex theology allows them to acknowledge the presence of God and live meaningfully.
Reason Solves Every Problem—Except the Meaning of Life
Tolstoy was a powerhouse of rational thinking, a skill he displays in every chapter of A Confession—even when he is explaining why reason is insufficient to understand the meaning of life. The central importance of reason to Tolstoy’s life turns out to be the source of his decades-long misery; in Chapter 4 he writes that life was sucked out of him because “I had no desires whose satisfaction I would have found reasonable” (27-28), meaning that the pleasures of life were required to be reasonably explicable in Tolstoy’s universe. The most remarkable aspect of his narrative is the psychological journey of this hyperrational man who finds a way to reassess everything that is most important to him to save his soul.
Amid his existential suffering, Tolstoy began to suspect that his view of the world might require an overhaul; in his own words, the reason he did not kill himself was that “I had some vague notion that my ideas were all wrong” (52). He summarizes the problem in Chapter 7: reason “is the creator of life,” the “highest thing,” and “the fruit of life,” yet “reason denies that very life” (52-53). Reason, as the most important and powerful thing in the universe, should be equal to any task. It is not until he takes the question of the meaning of life seriously, a question that exhausts all rational explanations, that Tolstoy hesitantly began to weigh other options.
Tolstoy realized that he could no longer dismiss the greatest source of meaning for most people, including many of the great minds of antiquity: faith. Tolstoy found that “rational knowledge denies the meaning of life, but the huge masses of people acknowledge meaning through an irrational knowledge” (57), which is faith. At the conclusion of Chapter 8, Tolstoy finds himself in an impossible situation; if he wanted “to understand the meaning of life I would have to turn away from reason, the very thing for which meaning was necessary” (58). What follows is a chapters-long deprogramming that Tolstoy initiates culminating in a reinvigoration of life based on a simple acknowledgment of God’s existence. Interestingly, the path to this spiritual revelation is dotted with extremely rational theorizing about why reason is unable to discern the meaning of life and why Tolstoy was wrong to expect reason to accomplish this task in the first place.
No Permanent Solution to Despair
Tolstoy’s A Confession is an emotional rollercoaster. Part of the narrative’s authenticity emerges from the author’s honest depiction of his mental health, including peaks and valleys of optimism and despair following each new development or revelation. The lack of any permanent solution to the struggles of life in this text reflects actual lived experience better than traditional happy ending narratives.
Tolstoy spends the first few chapters discussing the vanity of his youthful beliefs, including belief in progress and belief in salvation through family life until he comes to his first major spiritual malaise. The author spent 15 years writing and living an unfulfilled life until he finally came face-to-face with what he considered the truth at that time: “The truth was that life is meaningless” (27). This realization set off a turmoil of despair, confusion, and a momentary reprieve that turned out to be false hope. Tolstoy was unable to think himself out of the abyss of meaninglessness, and the real-life consequences of this metaphysical dilemma were severe.
The author was haunted by his reason, which dictated that suicide is the most honorable action for anybody who comes to realize the meaninglessness of life. He was unable to escape his depression using reason, although he did reach impressive heights of rational thinking during his search for answers. These sections, in which Tolstoy describes the inability to commit suicide as a form of “weakness” (51), can be difficult to read, and they illustrate the author’s turbulent state of mind.
Once Tolstoy discovered faith as a route of escape from meaninglessness, his despair began to lift, but it never quite disappeared. This phase of the journey is marked by dazzling heights of clarity followed by stumbles back into new worries when new insights arise. For instance, his initial high of considering faith as a solution to the deep questions of life was dashed by his inability to accept the faith of the Orthodox believers of his class, because “the more they laid their teachings before me […] the more clearly I could see their error, until I lost all hope of discovering in their faith any explanation of the meaning of life” (64-65). Tolstoy was unburdened once again when he abandoned his class and found solace in the faith of laboring Russians, but once again faced setbacks when he perceived the difficulty of acknowledging God’s presence instead of lingering over the question of one’s relationship to the divine. These highs and lows mark Tolstoy’s entire narrative and are key to the emotional authenticity of this document.
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