A Confession by Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy (best sales books of all time txt) 📕

own life or life in general.

I wrote: teaching what was for me the only truth, namely, that one should

live so as to have the best for oneself and one’s family.

So I lived; but five years ago something very strange began to happen to me.

At first I experienced moments of perplexity and arrest of life, and though

I did not know what to do or how to live; and I felt lost and became

dejected. But this passed and I went on living as before. Then these moments

of perplexity began to recur oftener and oftener, and always in the same

form. They were always expressed by the questions: What is it for? What does

it lead to?

At first it seemed to me that these were aimless and irrelevant questions. I

thought that it was all well known, and that if I should ever wish to deal

with the solution it would not cost me much effort; just at present I had no

time for it, but when I wanted to I should be able to find the answer. The

questions however began to repeat themselves frequently, and to demand

replies more and more insistently; and like drops of ink always falling on

one place they ran together into one black blot.

Then occurred what happens to everyone sickening with a mortal internal

disease. At first trivial signs of indisposition appear to which the sick

man pays no attention; then these signs reappear more and more often and

merge into one uninterrupted period of suffering. The suffering increases,

and before the sick man can look round, what he took for a mere

indisposition has already become more important to him than anything else in

the world — it is death!

That is what happened to me. I understood that it was no casual

indisposition but something very important, and that if these questions

constantly repeated themselves they would have to be answered. And I tried

to answer them. The questions seemed such stupid, simple, childish ones; but

as soon as I touched them and tried to solve them I at once became

convinced, first, that they are not childish and stupid but the most

important and profound of life’s questions; and secondly that, occupying

myself with my Samara estate, the education of my son, or the writing of a

book, I had to know why I was doing it. As long as I did not know why, I

could do nothing and could not live. Amid the thoughts of estate management

which greatly occupied me at that time, the question would suddenly occur:

“Well, you will have 6,000 desyatinas [6] of land in Samara Government and

300 horses, and what then?” … And I was quite disconcerted and did not

know what to think. Or when considering plans for the education of my

children, I would say to myself: “What for?” Or when considering how the

peasants might become prosperous, I would suddenly say to myself: “But what

does it matter to me?” Or when thinking of the fame my works would bring me,

I would say to myself, “Very well; you will be more famous than Gogol or

Pushkin or Shakespeare or Moliere, or than all the writers in the world —

and what of it?” And I could find no reply at all. The questions would not

wait, they had to be answered at once, and if I did not answer them it was

impossible to live. But there was no answer.

I felt that what I had been standing on had collapsed and that I had nothing

left under my feet. What I had lived on no longer existed, and there was

nothing left.

[3] Russians generally make a distinction between Europeans and

Russians.—A.M.

[4] To keep peace between peasants and owners.—A.M.

[5] A fermented drink prepared from mare’s milk.—A.M.

[6] The desyatina is about 2.75 acres.—A.M.

My life came to a standstill. I could breathe, eat, drink, and sleep, and I

could not help doing these things; but there was no life, for there were no

wishes the fulfillment of which I could consider reasonable. If I desired

anything, I knew in advance that whether I satisfied my desire or not,

nothing would come of it. Had a fairy come and offered to fulfil my desires

I should not have know what to ask. If in moments of intoxication I felt

something which, though not a wish, was a habit left by former wishes, in

sober moments I knew this to be a delusion and that there was really nothing

to wish for. I could not even wish to know the truth, for I guessed of what

it consisted. The truth was that life is meaningless. I had as it were

lived, lived, and walked, walked, till I had come to a precipice and saw

clearly that there was nothing ahead of me but destruction. It was

impossible to stop, impossible to go back, and impossible to close my eyes

or avoid seeing that there was nothing ahead but suffering and real death

— complete annihilation.

It had come to this, that I, a healthy, fortunate man, felt I could no

longer live: some irresistible power impelled me to rid myself one way or

other of life. I cannot say I wished to kill myself. The power which drew me

away from life was stronger, fuller, and more widespread than any mere wish.

It was a force similar to the former striving to live, only in a contrary

direction. All my strength drew me away from life. The thought of

self-destruction now came to me as naturally as thoughts of how to improve

my life had come formerly. and it was seductive that I had to be cunning

with myself lest I should carry it out too hastily. I did not wish to hurry,

because I wanted to use all efforts to disentangle the matter. “If I cannot

unravel matters, there will always be time.” and it was then that I, a man

favoured by fortune, hid a cord from myself lest I should hang myself from

the crosspiece of the partition in my room where I undressed alone every

evening, and I ceased to go out shooting with a gun lest I should be tempted

by so easy a way of ending my life. I did not myself know what I wanted: I

feared life, desired to escape from it, yet still hoped something of it.

And all this befell me at a time when all around me I had what is considered

complete good fortune. I was not yet fifty; I had a good wife who lived me

and whom I loved, good children, and a large estate which without much

effort on my part improved and increased. I was respected by my relations

and acquaintances more than at any previous time. I was praised by others

and without much self-deception could consider that my name was famous. And

far from being insane or mentally diseased, I enjoyed on the contrary a

strength of mind and body such as I have seldom met with among men of my

kind; physically I could keep up with the peasants at mowing, and mentally I

could work for eight and ten hours at a stretch without experiencing any ill

results from such exertion. And in this situation I came to this — that I

could not live, and, fearing death, had to employ cunning with myself to

avoid taking my own life.

My mental condition presented itself to me in this way: my life is a stupid

and spiteful joke someone has played on me. Though I did not acknowledge a

“someone” who created me, yet such a presentation — that someone had played

an evil and stupid joke on my by placing me in the world — was the form of

expression that suggested itself most naturally to me.

Involuntarily it appeared to me that there, somewhere, was someone who

amused himself by watching how I lived for thirty or forty years: learning,

developing, maturing in body and mind, and how, having with matured mental

powers reached the summit of life from which it all lay before me, I stood

on that summit — like an arch-fool — seeing clearly that there is nothing in

life, and that there has been and will be nothing. And he was amused… .

But whether that “someone” laughing at me existed or not, I was none the

better off. I could give no reasonable meaning to any single action or to my

whole life. I was only surprised that I could have avoided understanding

this from the very beginning — it has been so long known to all. Today or

tomorrow sickness and death will come (they had come already) to those I

love or to me; nothing will remain but stench and worms. Sooner or later my

affairs, whatever they may be, will be forgotten, and I shall not exist.

Then why go on making any effort? … How can man fail to see this? And

how go on living? That is what is surprising! One can only live while one is

intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober it is impossible not to see

that it is all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud! That is precisely what it

is: there is nothing either amusing or witty about it, it is simply cruel

and stupid.

There is an Eastern fable, told long ago, of a traveller overtaken on a

plain by an enraged beast. Escaping from the beast he gets into a dry well,

but sees at the bottom of the well a dragon that has opened its jaws to

swallow him. And the unfortunate man, not daring to climb out lest he should

be destroyed by the enraged beast, and not daring to leap to the bottom of

the well lest he should be eaten by the dragon, seizes s twig growing in a

crack in the well and clings to it. His hands are growing weaker and he

feels he will soon have to resign himself to the destruction that awaits him

above or below, but still he clings on. Then he sees that two mice, a black

one and a white one, go regularly round and round the stem of the twig to

which he is clinging and gnaw at it. And soon the twig itself will snap and

he will fall into the dragon’s jaws. The traveller sees this and knows that

he will inevitably perish; but while still hanging he looks around, sees

some drops of honey on the leaves of the twig, reaches them with his tongue

and licks them. So I too clung to the twig of life, knowing that the dragon

of death was inevitably awaiting me, ready to tear me to pieces; and I could

not understand why I had fallen into such torment. I tried to lick the honey

which formerly consoled me, but the honey no longer gave me pleasure, and

the white and black mice of day and night gnawed at the branch by which I

hung. I saw the dragon clearly and the honey no longer tasted sweet. I only

saw the unescapable dragon and the mice, and I could not tear my gaze from

them. and this is not a fable but the real unanswerable truth intelligible

to all.

The deception of the joys of life which formerly allayed my terror of the

dragon now no longer deceived me. No matter how often I may be told, “You

cannot understand the meaning of life so do not think about it, but live,” I

can no longer do it: I have already done it too long. I cannot now help