A Confession

Leo Tolstoy wrote this short meditation on sadness and the meaning of life when he was middle aged. He had already completed his masterworks, Anna Karenina and War and Peace, reared fourteen children, and gained fame and acclaim in Russia as a man of letters. But despite having attained that success, he still found himself unhappy and always returning to the disturbing idea that all achievement is meaningless. Unflinching in its honesty, A Confession remains one of literature's most compelling accounts of an existential crisis, one that speaks directly to anyone who has questioned the point of their own achievements. Its raw candor and enduring relevance make it as gripping today as when Tolstoy first set his doubts to paper. A Confession is his attempt to put these thoughts in words as he teetered on the brink of suicide. It forms the first in a four-volume series that included A Criticism of Dogmatic Theology, The Gospel in Brief, and What I Believe (also known as My Religion or My Faith). The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)