Tolstoy's Confession

"A confession has to be a part of your new life." Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1931.

I first read Tolstoy's Confession in 1992. I am confident of this date because I wrote an essay in response to it, so powerful was its effect upon me. I was 32 years of age at the time.

Re-reading Confession today, 20 years later, and then re-reading the essay of 20 years ago, I see my younger self deeply disturbed by Tolstoy's struggle. Having read his major novels (War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and the late masterpiece Hadji Murad), I was unnerved by the vehemence with which the great artist attempted to distance himself from his literary creations.

It is one thing to want greater honesty in one's life and personal relations, or to feel at a loss for meaning and fruitful direction, or to find the dogmas of religious tradition false to history and experience. These aspects of Tolstoy's reflections rang true with me then and ring true today. But to look upon literary achievements as monumental as Tolstoy's own and to count them as so much straw--this, I thought (and continue to think), was too much.

So I focused my essay on the internal artistry of the Confession itself: wishing to show that the old man had not lost his touch--despite himself--and, perhaps, wishing to show that, try as he might, he could never distance himself from his genius.

Of course, he was not so old when he wrote Confession--51, my current age. Re-reading the book now and in light of so many other works that Tolstoy wrote before and after his "spiritual crisis," I take less offense at his self-assessment. I don't agree with it, nor am I altogether convinced that he completely believed it himself; but I see it, instead, as a necessary step for him, as both an artist and a man.

In March 1855, Tolstoy had confided to his diary:

Yesterday a conversation about Divinity and Faith suggested to me a great, a stupendous, idea to the realization of which I feel capable of devoting my life. That idea is the founding of a new religion corresponding to the present development of mankind; the religion of Christ but purged of dogmas and mysticism--a practical religion, not promising future bliss but giving bliss on earth.

Considering the fact that he was in his mid-20's at the time he conceived this audacious plan, it is unlikely that anyone would have faulted him for not carrying through with it--anyone but Tolstoy himself. And yet, for my money, he did carry through with it: year by year and book by book. For it was by and through his literary productions that Tolstoy the artist was able to work through the ideas that make Tolstoy the religious reformer worth taking seriously. And though he denied that he was the founder of any sort of "Tolstoyan" movement or school, he was indeed that for those few of us who understand him as such. Which is to say that, while he may not have intended to found a "school" (it is usually the mediocre who set out with such a goal), he managed to do so regardless.

And, in my view, this is, in fact, a better outcome than what he originally had in mind--the founding of a new religion. Thankfully, Tolstoyanism is not a "new religion"--the world already has enough religions, religions to spare. I would even suggest that it is something better than a new religion: Tolstoyanism is what Cornell West calls a "critical alignment with an enabling tradition." Tolstoy's teachings on religion empower one to "align" oneself in a critical manner with an existing religious tradition and to selectively appropriate (as Sherman Jackson employs this term) those aspects of the "host" tradition that correspond to reason and "further" one's moral and devotional life (see Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund).

I will gladly elaborate on these assertions in future posts. For the time being, however, what is most important to understand is that Tolstoy's Confession represents not a turning away from the artist's self-proclaimed religious mission of 1855 but, rather, the continued prosecution of it (beginning in 1879) in a more direct and intensified vein. His depression would seem to have stemmed from the fact that he felt, after a quarter century, that he had not been as intensely preoccupied as he ought to have been with producing the religious revolution he had envisioned in his 20's. But any such feeling was, in my view, misplaced. He could not have written the great religious critiques of his final three decades had he not spent the previous three decades developing a profound understanding of the human condition--an understanding he developed by means of his novels, short stories, and plays.

Confession was not so much a part of a new life for Tolstoy as it was a continuation of his old life, revised and re-presented, in a new key.