A Confession

A Confession is a short philosophical and autobiographical work by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, written in Russian between 1879 and 1880 and first published, in censored form after the Russian Orthodox Church suppressed its original journal appearance, in 1882; a fuller edition followed from Geneva in 1884, and the work was not permitted to circulate openly inside Russia until 1906. In it Tolstoy describes the spiritual crisis he experienced in his early fifties, a period in which his worldly success as a celebrated novelist and landowner left him gripped by despair and unable to find meaning in life, and he traces his search through science, philosophy and the example of ordinary religious believers toward a renewed, unorthodox Christian faith. Tolstoy originally conceived the piece as an introduction to a larger planned four-part study of religious belief, but it came to circulate independently as a self-contained work and is now read as the founding statement of the moral and religious concerns that dominated the second half of his career. It is a distinct work from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's autobiographical Confessions, sharing only a similar generic title.