In the Library
A Confession
Leo Tolstoy, 1882
- Form
- Form Philosophy
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 2 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Aylmer Maude
- Chapters
- Chapters 17
- Length
- Length 26k words
£1.99
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Religious doctrine is professed far away from life and independently of it.
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If you like this, try
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Leo Tolstoy
The novel he wrote out of the same crisis, where a dying magistrate asks the identical question and is given no comfort at all until the last hours.
£1.99
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Written a year earlier by the man who put the same doubt into a novel instead, and gave it to a character who cannot be argued down.
£1.99
About the book
He had written War and Peace. He had land, nine children, a wife who copied out his manuscripts, and a fame that reached every capital in Europe. And he began hiding the rope in his room, because he was afraid of what he would do with it, and he stopped going shooting in case he used the gun. That is where this short, plain book starts: a man of fifty at the summit of everything, unable to answer the question of why he should get up in the morning. Tolstoy does not dress it. He goes at his own life the way a prosecutor goes at a defendant, refuses every comfort philosophy offers him, and finds his answer in the last place a count would look, among peasants who work and suffer and die without once asking what any of it is for. Nothing else he wrote is this naked.