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  • Published: 1 December 1987
  • ISBN: 9780141903828
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

A Confession and Other Religious Writings




The searingly honest, spiritual autobiography of Rossia's greatest novelist, written during a period of emotional crisis

Describing Tolstoy's crisis of depression and estrangement from the world, A Confession (1879) is an autobiographical work of exceptional emotional honesty. By the time he was fifty, Tolstoy had already written the novels that would assure him of literary immortality; he had a wife, a large estate and numerous children; he was 'a happy man' and in good health - yet life had lost its meaning. In this poignant confessional fragment, he records a period of his life when he began to turn away from fiction and aesthetics, and to search instead for 'a practical religion not promising future bliss, but giving bliss on earth'.

  • Published: 1 December 1987
  • ISBN: 9780141903828
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

Other books in the series

Emma
Persuasion
The Black Tulip
The Lady of the Camellias
Selected Poetry
On Sparta
Man and Superman
Saint Joan
Love
Annals
Military Dispatches

About the author

Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 in the Tula province. He studied at the University of Kazan, then led a life of pleasure until 1851 when he joined an artillery regiment in the Caucasus. He established his reputation as a writer with The Sebastopol Sketches (1855-6). After a period in St Petersburg and abroad, he married, had thirteen children, managed his vast estates in the Volga Steppes and wrote War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877). A Confession (1879-82) marked a spiritual crisis in his life, and in 1901 he was excommuincated by the Russian Holy Synod. He died in 1910, in the course of a dramatic flight from home, at the railway station of Astapovo.

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