Leo Tolstoy 
A Confession 

At the height of his fame Leo Tolstoy experienced a crisis of meaning.  He said that he contemplated suicide and could no longer live unless he could find the meaning of his life. He wrote about the crisis in a short work, “A Confession, ” which was written in 1882 and first published in 1884. Tolstoy was one of the first thinkers to pose the problem of life’s meaning in a modern way.



Leo Tolstoy was a Russian writer widely regarded as one of the greatest novelists in all of literature. His masterpieces ‘
War and Peace’ and ‘
Anna Karenina’ represent some of the best realistic fiction ever penned. He also was known for his literal interpretation of the teachings of Jesus. Tolstoy became a pacifist and Christian anarchist, and his ideas of non-violent resistance influenced Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Near the end of his life, he finally rejected his wealth and privilege and became a wandering ascetic—dying in a train station shortly thereafter.