At the age of 51, even after the publication of his most seminal novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) still considered his life a meaningless failure. Here was one of the most celebrated novelists in history, who had ascended to literary and artistic heights few others have attained, and yet a crisis of meaning plagued him. His inner anguish drove him into a sparring match with faith and doubt and reason, and to question what relationship—if any—exists between people and God. In his Confession, Tolstoy describes his upbringing, his spiral into nihilism and despair, and the epiphanies that brought him back from the abyss.

Leo Tolstoy grew up in the Orthodox Church, but like many in Russia, became disenchanted and cynical toward his faith. As a boy, he knew the catechisms and went through the motions of ritual, but as a teenager, saw the rites and doctrines as empty. By 16, he had stopped praying and was agnostic about God's existence.

This was the trend he observed around him: Religion as practiced and taught intersected very little with “real life,” making society’s wisdom seem more compelling and helpful for navigating life’s challenges and vicissitudes. As a result, religious practices ended up becoming a useless shell or exoskeleton to be shed. Tolstoy describes his faith and that of his friends as a precarious, crumbling wall toppled by the slightest push of a finger.

Tolstoy remembers a deep desire to be good when he was a boy. But how could he hold to any kind of faith when just about everyone around him ridiculed his vulnerability and yearning to be good, and celebrated the moments when he indulged vengeful and lustful impulses?

By abandoning the strictures and structures of childhood, he knew he was embracing  other beliefs, though he had no words for what those beliefs might be. Looking back, he had an implicit “faith in perfection.” Without knowing what was driving him, Tolstoy obsessively chased perfection in everything from academics to athletics. He was determined to be the smartest, the fastest, the strongest, the wealthiest—and much less to see himself as better than others—or even for God to see him that way. It was more about seeing himself through the eyes of other people and liking what they saw.

Tolstoy describes his youth as wild, and his impulsiveness and waywardness was far more likely to be praised than his desire to do good. One aunt whom he lived with and admired was constantly encouraging him, in the interest of his development, to have an affair with a married woman at some point in his life. Such was the advice of his elders and the influences in the military where he served and killed. He killed men on the battlefield and in duels; he lost his money to women and at the gambling tables. According to Tolstoy, he left no crime uncommitted.

After the Crimean War (1853-1856), a 26-year-old Tolstoy moved to St. Petersburg, where he joined the city’s literary circles. Jealous, backbiting, and factious, this priesthood of writers and artists considered themselves society’s shapers, and as such, congratulated themselves on their most important occupation of instructing the masses.

Tolstoy points out the many ironies that progressively dawned on him while moving among St. Petersburg’s literati. For example, the peasants who read these artists’ magazine articles worked their fingers to the bone every day, using their reserves to learn what life is all about from poets who spent their days at cafes and their nights at parties. Who understood life better, really? Moreover, how could these thinkers and self-christened teachers instruct others about morality, when they practiced so little of it themselves? In Tolstoy’s estimation, there was greater moral fiber in his wild military days than among his fellow poets and artists. To further amplify the dissonance, there were schisms among the cultural priesthood, and the advice they doled out to the masses was as variegated as the writers themselves. There was no central cohesion to the intelligentsia’s faith—other than the conviction that their clique knew best and rival cliques did not.

These were nothing more than vague intimations at the time, but Tolstoy ignored them all because he loved the pay and the praise he received for his writings. In such an environment, Tolstoy was the classic madhouse resident—convinced that only he was truly sane. Still, he continued in the madness, teaching the masses what he didn’t really know himself, like the rest of the madhouse.

Tolstoy continued to write alongside and schmooze with the educated elites for six years. His boyhood faith in Orthodox Christianity gave way to a faith in individual perfection, which in turn gave way to a more general faith in human progress—very much the zeitgeist among the educated with whom Tolstoy mingled. As he traveled to Europe, he found the same sentiments in social circles—although no one seemed to know or care where the currents of ideas were carrying them.

Two moments stand out that shook his faith in progress: witnessing an execution in Paris and watching his brother slowly succumb to an illness and die. No clever theory could explain away the evil of one man chopping off another’s head, and no well-crafted defense could justify his brother dying so young or so painfully. Beyond those brief, sobering moments, the narrative of progress persisted.

Tired of the supercilious and hypocritical elite, Tolstoy stepped away from writing for magazines and newspapers and began focusing on educating peasants. Even though he had distanced himself from the educated, he didn’t distance himself from their narrative of progress. He came to the poor in the name of progress, but he knew deep down that he was in no position to teach what mattered most when he didn’t know himself.

Teaching the poor and uneducated left him disillusioned, too, and he managed to postpone the nagging questions of meaning by marrying and having a family. Then his hunt for perfection simply took the form of care for his family, and this was a wonderful distraction. But the questions of “Why?” and “What next?” continued to knock at the door of his soul. As the knocking grew louder and more insistent, so did Tolstoy’s dread, because he had no answer. He had a large estate, thousands of acres of land, 300 horses, and fame enough to rival Gogol and Shakespeare, but so what?

Tolstoy’s life ground to a halt as he realized that he had no answer to the meaning of life. The women, gambling, the endless drinking, writing, critical acclaim, wealth, and luxury were all just distractions from the basic fact of death—and from the equally dreadful fact that he had no answer to hold up against death’s inevitability.

He no longer desired anything, because he sensed futility lurking behind everything he attempted or hoped for. He compared his life to the traveler in an Eastern tale being chased by a wild animal. The man leaps into a dry well to avoid being devoured, only to discover that there is a dragon waiting at the bottom of the well. So he grabs hold of a branch from a bush growing out of a crack in the well’s wall. As his arms get tired from grasping the branch, he notices two mice gnawing at it. But then he notices something else—drops of honey on the leaves. He greedily laps up the saccharine sweetness and forgets about his plight.

Tolstoy considered his writing and his family the biggest drops of honey in his life, but despaired of the fact these distractions had lost their sweetness. They no longer distracted him from death’s immanence or life’s meaninglessness. Why should he continue to write? What was the point of loving his wife? Of caring for his children?

These realizations pulled Tolstoy into a downward spiral of despair. He thought of his death often. Why not just let go of the branch he’d been clinging to and drop into the dragon’s jaws—just to get it over with? He stopped bringing his gun on hunting trips, and he removed all rope from his bedroom so that he wouldn’t hang himself from the rafters.

Tolstoy circled the drain for a while as he came to grips with the meaninglessness of life. But then he wondered, “Am I missing something?” So he scoured every field of knowledge he could, read everything he could get his hands on, and reached out to friends and colleagues who were experts in a variety of disciplines. “How should I live? And what does it matter?”

His pursuit of meaning through knowledge left him unsatisfied. He realized that knowledge tended to gravitate toward one of two poles: empirical science at one end—the extreme of which is mathematics—and speculative philosophy at the other end—the extreme of which is metaphysics. The speculative philosophy side asked the same questions Tolstoy was inquiring about, questions of meaning and how to live well, but never seemed to arrive at any definitive conclusion on the matter. In the scientific, mathematical hemisphere, the question never came up at all. The more precise the answers, the more obtuse and irrelevant to life they became.

The ancients also left Tolstoy with little hope. Solomon looked at human striving and called it “vanity” and “folly.” The Buddha said that living life is not really possible with death and old age looming ahead of us, and that we must free ourselves from the illusion of life. Socrates saw death as a blessing we are constantly preparing for.

Maybe it was better to shed the mortal coil and be done with it, but Tolstoy still wondered if he had missed something. He began observing people more closely, wondering how they dealt with life’s emptiness. He found that people often adopted one of four strategies. Some chose ignorance—distracting themselves from the evil of life and inevitability of death. Others chose epicureanism—acknowledging that life is short and meaningless, so we might as well grab what pleasure we can. Others picked the path of strength and energy—these are often the strongest and most logical among us, who face the cosmic joke that is life and say “no more,” and find a way to end their lives. Still others opt for weakness—understanding life’s absurdity, but never finding the courage to end their lives. This group passively drifts and limps through life, almost as if they hope something will happen to them to change their fate.

Even still, Tolstoy wondered if he was missing something. After all, humanity had persisted as long as it had without people killing themselves en masse. Tolstoy realized it would be absurd for him to believe himself the culmination of all human history. It would be even more absurd to consider himself the man who could stand on the shoulders of previous generations and denounce his efforts and the efforts of all those who preceded him as meaningless.

Tolstoy ultimately found that his formulations about life and how people coped with it were derived mostly from his own social class. The poor seemed to live lives full of meaning and were not torn apart by the same logical quandaries that goaded him toward suicide. Most did not resort to ignorance, epicureanism, suicide, or aimlessly drifting through life. This was the educated person’s dilemma. What did the poor have? There was something that held the lives of commoners together that rationality could not touch or rip apart.

Tolstoy realized that the missing ingredient was faith—a reality that rationality couldn’t touch. The profoundest answers to life were coming from a position of faith—not rationality. For Tolstoy, using rationality to give life meaning was not that different from children playing with a pocket watch. They take out cogs and springs to examine them, but then are shocked to see that the watch has stopped working.

Tolstoy threw himself at the question of faith with characteristic intensity. He explored “Mohammedanism” (i.e., Islam), Buddhism, and especially Christianity. But his disappointment and hopelessness returned as he realized that the religious people he questioned about faith provided answers so precise that they ceased to be compelling, and more than that, these religious devotees failed to live up to the principles they explained to him. They weren’t that different from him. They were full of lust and greed too. And, whatever fine words came out of their mouths, the meaning of life they claimed to find in faith had failed to dispel fear of death or suffering. If this is what faith was, he didn’t want it. 

Eventually Tolstoy realized he’d been questioning the wrong people: Once again, he’d begun his exploration of faith with his own social milieu—the educated. Once he began spending time with the religious among the poor, the uneducated, monks, pilgrims, and Raskolniks (i.e., dissenters of the Orthodox Church), he realized that there were superstitions woven into the truths of Christianity, but that these people completely bought into their faith. Their lives were not possible without it.

Tolstoy came to love and admire these people. They worked in peace, they took pain and adversity in stride, and they knew the meaning of life—even if only implicitly. For two years, Tolstoy began to work among the peasants as one of them and he was shocked to see the transformation that took place. He realized that meaning in life was not to be found among the wealthy and learned with all their superfluities and affectations, but among those who created life and made it possible for their families, communities, and the wealthy who also depended upon them.

“What is my life?” During his seasons of intense despair, Tolstoy’s answer to this question was, “An evil.” Looking back on those dark seasons, he now sees that he was absolutely right. His life was an evil, frittered away on lusts and the hunt for accolades. The problem was that he extrapolated that sentiment onto the entire universe: Not only was his life an evil, but so was life everywhere. Before awakening to his need for faith, he considered his existence to be parasitic. Not only had he failed to live life for the benefit of others, but he had failed even to live life for himself.

Tolstoy found that life was not in the removed pondering but in carrying out what was given a man to do. He realized that the anguish inside himself was, at bottom, a search for God. It was not a quest born of reason, but of emotion—emotional pain. Even though he had read Immanuel Kant and other philosophers and accepted their conclusions that there is no way to prove God’s existence logically, he hoped that God was real and relational.

He felt like a bird who had fallen from his nest. Even though he felt abandoned and alone on the cold ground, he sensed that he came from love, that someone who cared for him had given birth to him. This quest for God had Tolstoy continually vacillating between hope and despair. He concluded through these cycles that he only felt alive and himself when he believed in God, whereas he felt dead inside whenever he abandoned belief in God. To know God and to live end up being the same thing. It seemed life and meaning were impossible without God.

And so, Tolstoy returned to the faith of his childhood, though he came to it not as inherited, but as a necessity to be connected to faith. He kept his skepticism about miracles and his dislike for the schisms between Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants to himself, choosing to believe his need for faith and meaning in his life were far more important than his need to argue and pull the proverbial watch apart again.

One of the pivotal moments that drove him from the Church again was when he decided to take the Eucharist for the first time in decades. The idea that the elements of bread and wine became the literal body and blood of Jesus was too much to swallow. His distaste for some of the doctrines and hypocrisy of the churchgoers forced him to leave the Orthodox Church.

Tolstoy retained his belief in God, even though he was at times horrified by many Christians’ attitudes. Still, he knew that it was facile and arrogant to say it was all a lie. Even though lies got pulled into the mix, he saw tremendous truth to it as a whole.